Share of model, a new marketing measure for the GenAI era, could become the latest in the canon of marketing’s ‘share ofs’, which appear to go hand in hand with each successive new era of marketing and the new technologies that enable them.
It looks like we could be at the start of a new era in communication. We’ve had the print and the electronic eras, and the tectonic plates are now shifting from the digital to the GenAI era.
Within marketing specifically, all kinds of new things will emerge to take advantage of the new technology. New roles, new skills, new brands, new objectives, new tactics, new agencies, new creative forms, new production techniques, new research methods. And new metrics to help us track success.
But it’s always important to think about what’s not new and what’s not changing too. Too much of what’s new in marketing gets built by people with no real understanding of the fundamentals and what’s proven to work. Which is why, whenever thinking about what’s coming, my instinct is to try to connect it to what’s gone before.
So when a colleague at Jellyfish, Jack Smyth, started talking about ‘share of model’ early this year as a way of measuring a brand’s presence within AI data sets, I had a few basic thoughts in quick succession. First, that sounds genuinely new. Second, it feels reassuringly familiar. Third, I wonder if, as with share of voice and share of search, it relates to share of market. (And fourth, ‘why the hell didn’t I think of that?’.)
With most apparently new ideas, they’re never 100% new but are always combinations and evolutions of previous ideas. In fact, for new ideas to gain traction, they usually need to be both original and also familiar. The novelty helps them get attention and the familiarity helps make them easy to adopt.
Jellyfish has built a platform to help monitor share of model (you can get a flavour of it here), and is working with a number of major brands to make it work in practice as a marketing and brand insight tool.
But before looking at what share of model is and what it could become, here’s a brief look at its ‘share of’ forebears, the giants whose shoulders it’s standing on.
Share of market: The ‘share of’ metric to rule them all
Share of market (or market share) is the Patient Zero of all the ‘share of’ metrics. It really caught on from the 1950s onwards with the explosion of mass production and mass consumerism, as global markets grew, competition intensified and assessing a company’s market position relative to competitors became a priority.
Businesses had previously relied on anecdotal evidence and intuition to gauge their market positions, but from the 50s companies began collecting data more systematically and on a bigger scale, conducting surveys, tracking sales and using more sophisticated statistical methods. The simultaneous rise of early computers enabled all this.
Source: Google NGram showing the rise in mentions in publications of ‘share of market’ and ‘market share’ from the 50s
Market share had its big moment around 1974-75 when the Harvard Business Review published an article about the positive correlation between market share and ROI, saying that businesses with higher market share tend to have higher profit margins, with economies of scale, market power and quality of management amongst the major factors driving this.
While market share growth remains a primary goal for most brands, over the last 20 years the spotlight (at least in marketing) feels like it’s shifted somewhat to metrics that are more in marketing’s increasingly narrow control, are easier to monitor and move more quickly. Today’s marketers are addicted to the instant gratification of metrics that see bigger, faster shifts. Market share is perhaps more suited to stable and mature categories, and a little hard to keep track of in dynamic and emerging categories, which may mean it’s become less of a North Star for some, however wrong that might be.
Share of voice: The ‘share of’ metric for the mass media age
Marketing’s next big ‘share of’ metric, share of voice (SOV), is essentially the concept of market share applied to media spend, and was especially useful in the pre-digital mass media. Les Binet, adam&eveDDB’s head of effectiveness, directed me to the fact that Unilever had pioneered the use of SOV as far back as the 1960s, although the company kept quiet about this at the time.
Source: Google NGram showing the rise in mentions in publications of ‘share of voice’ from the 50s
James Peckham at Nielsen brought all this out into the open in the early 70s, and then John Philip Jones made it famous with a big, multimarket study in the late 80s and early 90s. The key insight in all this work was that brands investing more in media than their market share implied were much more likely to grow their market share over the longer term.
Binet and Peter Field built on Jones’s findings, featuring it in 2007’s ‘Marketing in the era of accountability’ and later work. Binet told me he first explored using SOV for Volkswagen as early as 1993 and coined the term ‘excess share of voice’ or ESOV then, ESOV being the difference between a brand’s share of voice and its share of market. This concept was known to Unilever as ‘dynamic difference’, although Binet wasn’t aware of that work at the time. Binet and Field’s work established SOV as a core planning principle, especially useful for budget setting.
Source: Binet and Field, Media in focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era, IPA
But SOVs pre-digital roots are now showing and it’s getting harder to calculate due to a lack of comprehensive and reliable data on brands’ digital media spend relative to competitors. Some even think the link between SOV and market share has now broken. It seems unlikely that the fundamental principle no longer holds true, but it does point to the need to think about effective share of voice, not just share of voice, when planning media.
Share of search: The ‘share of’ metric for the digital age
Share of search measures the proportion of online searches for a brand compared to the total searches in its category. It was popularised by Binet and James Hankins from around 2020, although people in the performance marketing and SEO worlds claim they’d been using a version of it for some time as part of their toolkit, they just hadn’t been shouting about it. Google and Kantar have shown that share of search is a proxy for a brand’s mental availability, and Binet and Hankins’ work with the IPA showed that in many categories it’s a leading indicator of market share.
Based on freely available Google Trends search data, it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to measure compared to traditional market research methods, and because various platforms and tools exist to monitor it, it has become standard for many brands to track.
All of which feels like a natural progression to the new kid on the block.
Share of model: The ‘share of’ metric for the GenAI age?
As with the earlier ‘share of’ metrics, the development of each being intrinsically linked to the emergent or dominant marketing technology of the day, share of model has arrived hand in hand with a new era in marketing and a newly available data source.
What the AI large language models (LLMs) ‘know’ in relation to brands is essentially the sum total of everything in their datasets about a brand, its touchpoints, its communications and, increasingly, the new content each model can find on what consumers think, feel and do in relation to it. All in one place, and all for free, or at least without the need for costly surveys and panels.
Marketing Week’s Mark Ritson noted the power of synthetic data for market research last year, after the publication in October 2022 of academic research suggesting LLMs could generate perceptual maps and brand attributes closely resembling human-generated data.
Plainly, any vast repository of data on a brand that’s essentially free will be interesting to marketers, and so the race has been on to find robust, stable, replicable ways of organising what LLMs know about brands that can be of use to marketers.
Enter share of model – defined here as the number of mentions of a brand by one or multiple LLMs, as a proportion of total mentions of brands in the same category. It essentially gives a picture of a brand’s overall ‘visibility’ to AI models and so to marketers. Tracking a brand’s mention rate as it shifts over time in relation to key competitors can make this practical and actionable.
But it’s not just about visibility, it can also be about brand positioning. At its simplest, brand positioning is about improving positive brand associations, reducing negative associations and distinguishing a brand on key associations where there’s an opportunity for relative differentiation.
Share of model could also help here. LLMs can generate clusters of positive and negative associations with brands and categories, and so we can use them to compare a brand with its competitors on those associations and track them over time. So the models can be a great source of brand positioning insight, as an input to help identify positive brand associations to build, negative associations to reduce and relative differences to further distinguish a brand, and as an output to track progress towards an ideal positioning.
So what next for share of model?
It’s too early to say if share of model will prove to have the universal utility that has been the key to the success of its ‘share of’ predecessors, and there’s a lot of work to do if it’s to become anywhere near as widely known and used.
Firstly, as with SOV, ESOV and share of search, establishing if there’s a relationship with share of market feels important. Do improvements in share of model reflect or even predict market share gains? Can changes in the communications approach impact share of model and share of specific brand associations? Can the insight generated help us produce new, more relevant creative content? How do we ensure creative gets the attention of its human audience in order to influence brand growth directly? How do we ensure content reaches its new ‘audience’ – the models – in order to influence it indirectly? All are questions we’re exploring at Jellyfish.
No doubt some brands and marketers will use this as a reason to open the floodgates to huge quantities of poor AI content of all kinds to try and ‘game’ the models, as in the early days of search engine marketing. Any new metric is likely to lead to some unintended consequences. Let’s do everything we can to avoid that.
Let’s hope people use this to help create better, longer-lasting, strategic communications with a higher goal – to drive share of market – not just to get a short-term boost for their share-of-model measure.
This is a version of a pair of articles that were first published in Marketing Week in June and July 2023 that started life as a talk for the IPA & WARC at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, ‘The 3rd Age of Effectiveness’.
Part 1 – brand building
There are still people in adland who would love to turn back time to a pre-digital age. Who make bold claims like ‘digital can’t build brands’, or ‘no brand has ever been built solely with social media’.
Of course, no brand is ever built solely with advertising of any kind, it’s just one of many levers to be used in combination. And advertising is only ever a weak, not a strong force anyway. You don’t have to believe online advertising can build brands alone – just that it can make a meaningful contribution.
There’s also a less extreme feeling, a lingering doubt, that I think may be shared by a bigger chunk of adland, that the platforms dominating global advertising today aren’t yet, and perhaps never will be, as good as the previously dominant channels at helping build our brands.
But beware golden ages, they’re always fantasies. Nostalgia’s an elephant trap for marketers – it won’t build our brands any more than neophilia will. We should prioritise the use of the tools that work today, not ones that worked much better yesterday or those that will only start working tomorrow.
Full disclosure. This is a personal perspective and one that’s bound to be influenced by what I’m learning in my role as VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish, a connected media, creative, data and tech company that builds brands by finding smart ways to combine these elements.
Before I come onto some of the evidence for brand building being perfectly and increasingly possible using the platforms we have today, I want to touch on ‘why now?’. Why are we at an inflection point where the technology is maturing and increasingly being used for brand building alongside its longstanding role assisting short-term sales?
Battle of the platforms
A fundamental factor is good old-fashioned market forces and the ongoing battle for market share of global ad spend by the platforms. Google and Meta built an unprecedented share of global advertising spend over the last two decades, initially from dominating companies’ lower-funnel budgets and by making direct response advertising vastly more accessible to millions of small companies than it had ever been before.
Source: Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab, US data, 2022
That level of growth could never continue, and they’re now being squeezed by both the newer social platforms and the huge growth of retail ad networks. So they’re now looking to both defend their existing massive shares of lower funnel budgets and also grow their share of upper funnel budgets. Everyone’s looking to match TikTok’s success in short form video. They’re all increasingly pushing their platforms’ brand-building capabilities to grow their share of that piece of the pie.
The rise of video
The rise of the smartphone fuelled the explosion in digital video that’s enabling all this. Video now accounts for the vast majority of global internet traffic, around 80% by some estimates.
And where there’s video there’s brand building. Video is to brand building what water is to life on earth. More video content means more attention, more emotional impact, and sometimes a more personal and attentive viewing experience than on bigger, more public screens. All of which means more of the long-term brand memory encoding that’s needed to contribute to sales tomorrow, not just sales today. AKA brand building.
Google’s main weapon against TV is naturally YouTube. More YouTube content is being watched on the main large screen in a household than ever (around 33% of YouTube viewing in the UK happens on TVs, according to BARB, and 45% in the US, according to YouTube data).
YouTube videos are being made with ever-higher production values, so it’s great content to put ads in and around. It’s probably the most powerful of the digital platforms for brand-building still, given the number of seconds of attention its ads command. But TikTok’s closing in, and is also helping to accelerate the growth in the video-creator economy.
Meta had to play catch-up when it came to video, with video still responsible for only around 15% of all content viewed on Facebook at the time of writing. I suspect the proportion of time spent on a given platform watching video content is probably a crude measure of its potential as a brand-building channel.
In the case of Google, innovation is making its traditional search business more upper-funnel friendly. Google’s Performance Max product generates AI-assisted video and other brand assets that are more polished and consistent with a brand’s visual identity and tone of voice than ever. Improvements in the impact of brand-building advertising can happen through better integration through the funnel, not just by creating more impact at the top.
And, just as the first platforms made direct-response advertising more accessible to millions of small businesses, some of the tools of brand-building advertising are now increasingly available to businesses of all sizes. My teenage son’s first Saturday job involved making TikToks for the local trainer store, which regularly got hundreds of thousands of views and occasionally millions, and built up a followership amongst most of the sneakerheads in the area. A role for video advertising previously completely off limits to a tiny local store.
A brand-building counter-revolution
All this is being underpinned by a greater understanding than ever of how brand-building really works. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that several of the most important books on brand growth (including Binet & Field’s seminal ‘The Long and the Short of It’) were published during advertising’s digital revolution. I suspect the rise of the digital platforms inspired an intellectual fightback by the established marketing world in defence of what works to build brands over the long term, against a new world that was putting short-term digital tactics first.
Changes to privacy laws and Apple’s subsequent updates to its operating system also led to a renewed interest in brand building.
Privacy regulations affected the ability of adtech to capture data on users and use cookies to track them across the internet and apps. Some of the links in the chain that allowed a clear sight of the ads an individual is served and the things they buy broke. This made brand advertising, which rarely demands that level of granular understanding of its impact on an individual, relatively more attractive than previously, including to businesses who wouldn’t have considered doing something so ‘unaccountable’ before.
This led to the digital measurement world looking less to attribution and more to measurement techniques such as econometrics and geo-experiments – both better able to capture the impact of brand activity.
The performance plateau
Increasing numbers of brands, having once had a more performance-driven approach, have also got to a point where their lower-funnel activity reaches saturation, they reach a performance plateau, and they then try a more balanced full-funnel strategy. I’ve written about this previously so won’t go over that here – but the sheer number of brands experiencing this feels like it must be a factor in why more and more brands are turning to digital for brand building, not just performance.
Econometrician Grace Kite and the Advertising Research Community (ARC) produce meta-analyses of the econometric modelling of the impact of media on everyday brands and campaigns, not just effectiveness awards winners (which are the basis of Binet and Field’s research). This work has been helpful in understanding the optimum balance between online and offline ad spend. ARC’s conclusion in 2021 was that on average the optimum percentage to spend online was 40% to 50%
Various recent studies, including by ARC, have shown how many of the digital channels are equally capable of producing both short and long term effects, vital evidence to help end the view that digital advertising is just for triggering an immediate response.
According to econometrics company Analytics Partners, most digital channels are capable of contributing to the long as well as the short term. The importance of video for brand building is also evident in their analysis, the lasting impact of video channels typically being twice as long as non-video channels.
Brands built in digital
So what brands can we point to that have been built partly or solely using today’s platforms?
You have to be wary of placing too much emphasis on individual case studies, but Gymshark is a brand being ‘built in social’ with considerable creativity and marketing nous. Gymshark achieved profitability and unicorn status in a decade, and got there partly by growing a cult-like following in social media fuelled by influencer marketing. Too much has probably been written about Liquid Death already, but that brand’s mix of highly distinctive branding, impactful social-first communication, experiential and smart approach to distribution has proven to be a winning formula.
If we need more examples, there’s a fascinating and highly successful cohort of global SaaS brands such as Fiverr, Monday and Wix, which are often big YouTube advertisers, many of which continue to see success.
Are there bigger, more valuable brands and businesses out there that are less purely reliant on social or digital advertising? Yes. But it’s hard to imagine any of the world’s biggest brands not seeing digital advertising as an important part of their brand-building mix today, as well as of their sales activation mix.
Continued importance of brand equity
A discussion with Ipsos on the topic of ‘brand building in digital’ led to this question: given the massive shift in ad spend towards digital channels, if digital advertising were only about driving short-term sales, shouldn’t we have seen a big downward shift in the importance of brand equity as a driver of purchase decisions?
Well no, as it turns out. There’s actually been no decline in the importance of brand equity in the purchase decisions people make according to Ipsos’ ‘Brand Value Creator’, which suggests that “strength in the mind remains as important as ever as a driver of purchase decisions” – staying at the same level across its entire global database over the 2018-21 period as during 2013-15.
Ipsos data also suggests that ‘ease of buying’ as a factor in purchase decisions has grown over the same period, especially in online services categories, suggesting that whilst brands are still being built in the digital age, digital channels may also be creating greater opportunities to close the sale. Digital has been additive for marketing, not subtractive.
What marketers think
But what about the clients’ view of all this? What do marketers believe about brand-building in digital? Do they think digital has a lot of ground to catch up before it’s seen to be as useful as ‘traditional’ channels for brand building?
Actually Marketing Week’s ‘Language of Effectiveness’ survey of over 1,300 marketers suggests digital is far more mature for brand-building than others may believe. In fact a huge number, 86.7%, believe digital media is effective at brand-building, which is more than the 80.1% who believe offline media is effective at building brands.
So marketers are far more optimistic than any remaining adland sceptics, and their perspective is much more in line with the econometrics data.
All of which suggests brand building is absolutely possible in today’s platforms, and that many brands are achieving it already.
The nostalgics may have had a point – maybe we just weren’t very good at using digital to build brands initially. But over time we’re learning how to use the new tools and are getting better at it.
But could we get even better? Almost certainly, especially when it comes to creativity. And we’ll look at that more closely now.
Part 2 – Creativity
Major issues do still exist in terms of creativity in digital advertising, including short-termism, a legacy from when its principal or even sole role was the narrow targeting of hot in-market prospects. That meant brands missing out on driving more sustainable long-term growth by reaching new audiences, and left many brands on the performance plateau. It meant too many ads that are ignorable or even irritating to everyone apart from those ready to buy right now.
Brand building relies on reaching people who are not currently in the market and so requires a different creative approach. As they’re mostly not interested in you, you have to try much harder to get their attention and make a lasting impression, so that when the time comes, the little seeds you’ve sown in their synapses have a chance of doing their work.
And this leads us to the biggest issue we face if we’re going to get better at using the platforms to their full potential to help build our brands.
The attention problem
Karen Nelson-Field’s work on attention gave us the alarming headline that 85% of 130,000 digital ad views she researched didn’t achieve the 2.5 seconds or more of active attention necessary to impact longer-lasting brand memories and build mental availability.
Impact of attention time on mental availability (MA). Source: Amplified Intelligence
The theory is that ads under this threshold can basically only drive a click. Ads over it are able to influence future sales too. This is the essential difference between brand-building ads and direct-response ads. Karen Nelson-Field’s work suggests the more seconds of active attention an ad receives, the more days it can stay in the memory, and the longer it can work.
Another important finding from Nelson-Field is that a given platform has a set range or limit on the amount of attention people will pay to ads there – it’s the platform and format, not the creative, that makes the major contribution to the total number of attention seconds it will receive. Optimising your media plan for attention is becoming increasingly common.
But whilst platform and format choice determines the broad range of attention your ads can receive, it’s creativity that helps get you to the top of that range. “Attention elasticity forms the opportunity for ad creative,” says Nelson-Field. So good ads can get you somewhat more attention than bad ads on a given platform, albeit this will likely still be limited.
This is a challenging finding if, like me, you’d love to believe that the sheer force of human creativity can break through any boundaries and get everyone to watch every last second of everything you and the team have laboured over. The idealist in me still believes the finding must be wrong and wants every campaign to be an outlier; the realist in me has to admit this is extremely unlikely.
Whilst getting enough attention is a major challenge in digital advertising, it’s not a new one.
Ads of all kinds have always had surprisingly large drop-offs in attention. Data from measurement companies such as Lumen shows, for example, that magazine ads can have attention curves close to a YouTube non-skippable ad, and newspaper ads can have a steep retention curve akin to an in-feed Facebook ad. The difference is that we now have the data and are more aware of the drop-offs in digital ads than we’ve ever been before.
And it’s not a new issue for creative people to be wrestling with either. You can see it in the famous quotes of many of the ad legends of the 60s:
Bill Bernbach: “If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.”
Mary Wells Lawrence: “People are very sophisticated about advertising now. You have to entertain them. You have to present a product honestly and with a tremendous amount of pizazz and flair. But you can’t run the same ad over and over again. You have to change your approach constantly to keep on getting their attention.”
John O’Toole: “[We’re] an uninvited guest in the living room of a prospect with the magical power to make you disappear instantly.”
O’Toole was talking about people flipping TV channels here, but could just as easily have been talking about ad skippability or scrollability today.
The issue of how to get and keep attention is one ad creators have always had. It’s not caused by ‘digital’ or by specific platforms, it’s caused by people not being as interested in ads as the stuff they’re actually there to see. And the solution is both simple and hard: creativity.
Platform best practices
But before applying that creativity you need to understand the dynamics of the platform you’re creating for. Why people are there, what they’re there to see, the ‘grammar’ of the stuff they like there. Only really knowing how things work on a platform, and knowing what the algorithms favour, can help you get more attention there and help you flatten the curve.
Adopting platform best practices prevents attention dropping off
And this takes time to learn. We’ve had 70 years to learn how to make TV ads, but only four or so years to make TikToks. Of course we’ve not perfected this yet and of course we’re only going to get better at it.
All the research evidence says you need to learn the ‘rules’ of each platform and create bespoke ads for them to be able to maximise attention on them. Kantar found that campaigns with ads tailored to specific digital channels have 13% greater impact on brand equity overall versus using the same ads on each platform.
Similarly, Ipsos found that the same creative often doesn’t perform well across formats. In their research, strong performing TV commercials didn’t translate well into skippable and in-feed environments, and ads developed for skippable formats performed pretty well in-feed but badly in TV.
A common finding from these studies is that you have to apply a platform’s ‘best practice’. This often includes the story structures that work best to get and keep attention. YouTube’s advice is to use ‘emerging story arcs’ not ‘traditional story arcs’. YouTube ads using new story arcs get four times the average watch time before being skipped – 20 seconds compared to five – and ads with traditional arcs are twice as likely to be bottom performers. This is similar to TikTok’s advice, which says you should start with a bang to hook people’s attention, not the ‘slow build’ of a TV commercial.
In an analysis by Kantar of 11,000 ads, applying YouTube’s best practice principles (attention, branding, connection, direction) was found to contribute +17% in long-term brand contribution. Similarly, bespoke Snap ads get 1.4 times the attention of ads repurposed from other platforms and bespoke TikTok ads get three seconds more watch time and 25% more completed views.
So definitely don’t just put your TV ad on the platforms. And don’t put your Facebook or YouTube ads on TV. But also, you can’t just put ads for one digital platform onto another one, and expect them to work as well as something bespoke.
One of my favourite findings comes from Ipsos: “Challenge category conventions. Taking an unconventional creative approach produces 40% longer viewing time on average for skippable ads.”
It’s exactly the same principle they’ve been teaching from day one at creative agencies for decades: it’s pure ‘when the world zigs, zag’.
Emotional impact
Another principle that’s coming out of recent studies, but isn’t always mentioned in the basic platform best practice, is the importance of emotion in driving brand impact.
System1’s studies of ads on Meta and Pinterest show ads that create a strong emotional response are much more likely to also drive brand awareness or brand lift. High-emotion ads on Pinterest drove six times as much brand lift as low-emotion ads for example.
When you look across these principles, they’re actually principles that Bernbach, Ogilvy and Wells Lawrence would recognise.
You need to know what works on a given platform, make ads bespoke for them following their technical advice, and ensure they deliver the holy trinity of attention, branding and communication. But as well as A, B and C, you also need D and E: difference and Emotion. So:
Get attention fast
Integrate brand/product
Use stories to communicate (and use new arcs)
Difference works best
Evoke intense emotion
None of these principles is ground-breaking, in fact they should be meat and drink to all creative advertising people.
And brands are learning. We’ve had years of people in the industry complaining that digital ads aren’t different, funny or surprising, but I’m seeing more evidence in my feeds of agencies and brands getting it right.
Tesco are clearly having fun and some success experimenting with TikTok, including with their #VoiceOfTheCheckout campaign.
Hilton Hotels’ 10-minute TikTok was genuinely great craft: a funny script that played with the grammar of the platform and a great performance from Paris. I doubt many people watched all 10 minutes, but then that’s not necessary for it to do its job.
Screenshot: Hilton’s 10-minute TikTok ad
And on top of this advice for paid ads, we now also have another really useful tactic. There’s a huge and growing army of creators who live or die by knowing what works best for their channels and their personal brands to retain viewer attention. And creator-led advertising is growing fast, reaching around $16bn in value globally last year.
Creators earn more attention
The best creators know how to make attention-grabbing thumbnails and opening shots; to deliver the promise of a video straight away; that music creates a feeling; that you need repeated emotional highs to keep people watching.
And when applied to brand creativity, their work can sometimes work even better than the professionals’. Platform-native creative made by creators on TikTok consistently outperforms repurposed or adapted ads in driving brand recall there, according to TikTok’s marketing science team. Influencer marketing can be easy to dismiss as hot people holding things. But when it’s creative people making things it becomes an entirely different proposition and much harder to dismiss.
Maybelline’s mascara TikTok was a joyfully silly PR stunt, with the quirky ‘is it real or fake’ intrigue of the Jacquemus handbags video from earlier in the year. You can argue about what it’s actually ‘saying’ about Maybelline. But if its job was to get attention for the brand in a distinctive way, it looks like a big success.
Screenshot: Maybelline’s computer-generated mascara video on TikTok
So this is the second creative opportunity: to break the attention curve and not just flatten it, with native content made by creators that can earn even more attention.
Which gives us two tactics: paid ads that are highly tailored to the platforms, and creator-made videos that are totally native to them.
All this has implications for budgets and consistency. You don’t want to stretch your communication too thinly across too many platforms, or end up doing one-off campaigns that don’t add up to a greater whole. You need to be as focused in your brand strategy as ever. You may have to use fewer platforms, but select them more deliberately. Some of these are media strategy questions, but plainly have an implication for creative: another argument for planning media and creative more closely together than has become the norm.
And once we’ve mastered the current crop of platforms, new ones will of course come along for us to get to grips with. And so the cycle continues.
This article was first published in July 2020. It seemed to strike a chord, and people on the frontlines of modern marketing tell me it’s been helpful. It remains my most read article. I especially love it when it gets shared by people who weren’t previously familiar with the work of the big names in marketing effectiveness from the UK/Aus/NZ, especially US performance marketing people. So if you know marketers struggling with the limitations of short term tactics, with brands that are stuck on the performance plateau, or with leaderships who ‘don’t get brand’, who might benefit from reading this, please do pass it on.
I was inspired to publish this slightly updated version, after the marketing author and illustrator Dan White sent me a brilliant new set of illustrations he’d done of all the charts in the original.
Short-termism and long-termism are both just wrong-termism. So let’s end the false choice between long and short-term marketing tactics, maximise the compound effects of getting them working together in harmony, and close the value-destroying divide between ‘brand’ and ‘performance’ marketing, which limits marketing effectiveness and growth.
Long term ‘VS’ short term is probably the most commonly cited false choice in marketing.
And that’s saying something, as we love false dichotomies in this industry: brand vs performance, emotional vs rational, creativity vs technology, intuition vs data, art vs science, to name just a few that we constantly debate.
And of course the answer to most of these is ‘&’ not ‘or’.
It may seem a little unnecessary for yet more to be written about the long and short-term in marketing given two industry legends have literally already written the book on it [i]. But whilst the theory says we should all try to achieve a balanced approach in order to maximise both saleability and sales simultaneously, there’s still a massive gulf between the theory and actual practice, which is too often divided between practitioners of brand and performance marketing.
And it’s even quite common for people to overlook the central importance of the theme of balance in Binet & Field’s most important work, and to think of them as ‘the high priests of the long term’.
SHORT-TERMISM
Short-termism rightly gets a lot of criticism, and there have been plenty of brilliant critiques of it by other people, so I won’t do that here [ii].
There are irresistible pressures pulling marketers towards the short term [iii]. And there’s also a huge asymmetry in terms of accessibility to performance channels vs brand-building channels. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other platforms have given millions of businesses of every size and type, easy, self-service access to a giant direct response advertising eco-system. And this universal accessibility is also ensuring there’s a ready and growing supply of ‘performance’ marketing specialists and a dwindling supply of ‘brand’ marketing specialists – a factor that further exacerbates the divide.
LONG-TERMISM
Too many people though, especially on the ‘brand’ side of the divide, also wrongly assume that because short-termism’s a bad thing, long-termism must therefore be a good thing, despite the potential for it to be just as damaging in different ways.
There’s always been a lot of magical thinking about the long term in advertising. That you can just do something big and expensive as a one-off, then close your eyes and cross your fingers and hope no one commercially-oriented asks any awkward questions for six to twelve months, until future sales start magically happening.
But communications that are successful over the long term don’t work by activating some kind of ‘sleeper cell’ in buyers’ minds which suddenly bursts into frenzied commercial action after many months of lying completely dormant – communications need to achieve some level of short-term sales success as well as improving a brand’s mental availability if they’re also going to achieve long-term growth.
And whilst short-termism may give people a bad name within certain corners of the marketing world, it may actually be long-termism that gives some marketers a bad name within their organisations and amongst the rest of the business community, perhaps because some marketers appear to act like selling’s a dirty word to them (for example by getting evangelical about certain marketing approaches that appear purposefully designed not to sell stuff).
WRONG-TERMISM
And whilst they’re quite different, it’s possible to simultaneously see short-termism and long-termism as equally bad practice – wrong-termism, if you will.
Wrong-termists get it wrong in two different ways: short-termists restrict the long-term growth their marketing can achieve, and long-termists restrict its short-term sales impact.
THE LONG THROUGH THE SHORT OF IT
Marketers have never been under more pressure to make every marketing $ work as hard as it possibly can. We’ve never been more aware that without short-term success there may not even be a long-term for some of our brands. And the best way of securing both will be to embrace the fertile middle-ground that lies in combining the power of short and long-term effects.
Long-term growth always has its roots in the short term. The two are connected, influence each other, and if you get the two working perfectly in harmony together, you’ll achieve the strongest, most sustainable growth possible.
But we so often miss out on maximising growth in this way because of our binary belief systems, the organisational silos we inhabit, the different job titles we have, the different channels and formats we tend to use and the different metrics we try to optimise.
It’s important to say that long-term growth isn’t just achieved by adding up a series of short-term effects. It’s more complicated than simply being additive: it’s a multiplicative, compound effect, which starts slowly but strengthens over time.
And whilst all long-term growth actually has roots in the short term, only some kinds of short-term activity also lead to long-term results.
So the roots of long-term growth are there in the present if you do the right kind of marketing communications.
The two are always happening simultaneously, to some degree, in the same marketing campaign and in everything a brand communicates about itself. Les Binet’s chart below shows two kinds of sales impacts from a single exposure to a single execution. A short-term sales spike and a longer-term tail.
The two lines are interrelated. If you try to push the red spike higher, you’ll reduce the length of the black tail (e.g. a promotion or offer would push the red spike higher but massively reduce the black tail). Which means to achieve equilibrium you’ll need a balance across a campaign and across your entire marketing plan (although not necessarily within an individual execution).
It’s practically the law that any discussion of the long and short-term in marketing must include Binet & Field’s classic ‘steps’ chart illustrating the two different ways in which communications can drive sales – through short-term sales activation and long-term brand-building, so here it is:
And what follows are some illustrations by Les Binet that build on this, but this time rather than separating the short and long-term effects, they show the combined effects of doing ‘brand building’ and ‘sales activation’ together in different combinations. They’re just theoretical, they knowingly exaggerate the effects for clarity, and there will of course be real world exceptions.
Scenario 1 is what could happen if a brand that had been heavily biased towards sales activation shifts its balance in favour of brand-building activity (Binet & Field suggest a balance of 60:40 is a good rule of thumb – not a fixed ratio but a good place to aim at if you’ve got no data yet on what works best for your brand). It could see lower initial short-term sales peaks, but base sales would begin to rise and the short-term sales peaks could start rising too as the strengthening brand helps improve the impact of sales activation.
Scenario 2 shows what could happen if that brand switched back to being heavily biased towards sales activation from a more balanced plan. Short-term sales peaks could get lower and base sales could drop over time. It’s a cautionary tale that you may have witnessed, for example with the arrival of a new CEO or CMO who ‘doesn’t believe in doing brand marketing’.
But charts like these don’t always totally reflect the real world options available to modern marketers, for example where performance activity is usually ‘always on’ rather than pulsed, and where the idea of scaling it back dramatically or even switching it off could feel like instant career suicide.
So below is an illustration by econometrician Grace Kite and me building on the classic ‘steps’ chart from the perspective of a common real world scenario, that of a digital-first brand whose initial strong growth from always on performance activity has levelled off, after which point brand-building activity is successfully deployed in order to take growth to the next level. It’s based on the econometric modelling Grace has done for a wide range of brands facing similar challenges.
It shows growth initially being driven by always on activity in performance channels, and the impact of that activity reaching a plateau which often happens when saturation point is reached. Then it shows the impact of a successful decision to layer in ‘brand-building’ activity. Note that this brand activity both delivers its own short and longer-term sales impacts, as well as improving the sales generated by performance channels. It also shows the compound effects of all this marketing activity working together and becoming stronger over time as the brand-building activity is further optimised.
‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’ of course, but hopefully this shows performance-first brands the growth potential of adopting a more balanced approach that includes layering in brand-building activity, and gives brands like these a little more confidence when taking the big step into doing ‘brand-building’ communication.
A PROMISING METRIC FOR MEASURING THE LONG THROUGH THE SHORT?
The long-term growth potential of campaigns should be measurable in the short-term, even if you’re not currently set up to monitor it. So you may need to start thinking about boosting your existing measurement (which would ideally already include a balanced scorecard of long and short-term metrics), with new kinds of short-term measures that can also predict long-term performance.
One metric that’s proving useful for this is share of search. Millward Brown (now Kantar) have seen that search volumes can strongly reflect how salient or famous a brand is [iv]. Google believe share of search reflects brand health and market share for brands in some categories [v].
Les Binet and James Hankins have done some great work looking at whether a brand’s share of google search can predict its market share, and have found this to be true in a wide range of categories.
Since the original version of this article was first published in 2020, share of search has become more widely known and monitoring it has become reasonably common.
I especially like it as it’s a rare example of a metric that crosses the brand / performance divide and so can connect marketers across it. Brand people instinctively know that brand search behaviour will be reflective of a brand’s fame and mental availability, and know that investing in high reach communication can be an effective way to improve it. And performance marketers of course know brand search is a hugely important source of traffic and conversion.
I believe it’s never been more important that we close the artificial divide between brand and performance marketing, and to do what’s most effective for our brands collectively.
For some brands, overcoming the barriers to this will be a big task, but if anything here helps a single team start to do this in their business that’s a win.
Brands should be aiming to create long-term communications engineered for immediate success. Advertising that, in the words of the great Jeremy Bullmore, sells ‘both immediately and forever’ [vi].
If you know marketers struggling with the limitations of short term tactics, with brands that are stuck on the performance plateau, or with leaderships who ‘don’t get brand’, who might benefit from reading this, please do pass it on.
Or drop me a line, as Jellyfish, part of The Brandtech Group, is uniquely set up to bridge a range of common divides across marketing – whether that’s brand & performance, media & content, data & creativity, and marketing’s latest false dichotomy, GenAI & humanity.
And it’s not a new issue for creative people to be wrestling with either. You can see it in the famous quotes of many of the ad legends of the 60s:
Tom Roach 