Advertisers, and the marketing campaigns they execute, are often categorised as either branding or performance, with completely different strategies and objectives. Giles Goodwin (pictured below), CEO, Flite, speaks to ExchangeWire about how marketing shouldn't be viewed so parochially as branding or performance; but, instead, that we have the capabilities to be able to achieve both.

As programmatic media buying has made the concept of serving the 'right ad, to the right person, at the right time' more possible than ever, creative has been slow to catch up. That leaves most marketers with two options: a high-performance campaign with measurable results, or a beautiful piece of creative content aiming to bolster brand affinity. But it’s 2016, and the digital ecosystem has evolved to the point that we should be asking: “Why can’t we have both?”

As it stands today, performance marketing is all about ROI. Marketers pay to serve the right ad at the right time, hoping for clicks that send customers through to a website, which hopefully pushes them straight on through the conversion funnel.

Brand marketing, however, is where most of us get really creative. Those are the campaigns that let us tell the story of who we are and offer the chance to build long-term communication with consumers. Unfortunately, there’s rarely good linkage between branding and performance. Many marketers put their best creative out into the world and try to figure out how to measure success rates after the fact.

A lot of large marketers, who to this day still run separate branding and performance campaigns, may disagree; but branding and performance do not have to be two separate tracks. In fact, in the very near future, they won’t be. As Facebook’s Mark D’Arcy says: “Tomorrow’s best brand marketers are doing performance today.”

User-friendly performance, ROI-focused branding

Facebook are practicing what they preach. They’ve taken targeting cues from Google AdWords’ performance-based marketing and turned them into actionable components for branded campaigns; which generate the clicks and engagement of performance-based marketing, while retaining the unique communication-driven qualities of its branded counterpart.

For example, AdWords ads are targeted based on keywords people type into search, which allows for hyper-targeted ads based on customer preferences. But Facebook has taken the process a step further by coupling lookalike targeting and dynamic segmentation, allowing advertisers to change the copy and image depending on the user. In the words of one content marketer: “[Facebook Ads are] like running a TV ad for men’s body wash and making sure 100% of your TV audience is male. Or an ad for diapers and making sure 100% of your TV audience is made up of parents with babies aged 0-3.”

Creative management platforms, or CMPs, offer similar dynamic segmentation by using programmatic technology to test thousands of variations on an ad in minutes, so that branded campaigns can be measured and tweaked in the same ways as performance campaigns. Marketers are not only able to show a diaper spot to parents with babies aged 0-3; they’re able to know almost instantaneously whether or not that story resonated with those parents and tweak the actual creative accordingly.

A blended approach

So, why isn’t everyone using platforms that combine performance-based targeting with beautiful, personalised creative for results that can be measured in seconds? Because we’re still stuck in the mindset that performance and branding are two different teams. Branding usually relies on the creative agency to tell the story; performance tends to be run close to the brand by a separate group of marketers who care less about the user experience and more about ROI.

Often these two groups don’t recognise how much they have to learn from each other. For instance, I recently met with the performance team at a well-known music-streaming site, and showed them some ads. But before we could get too far, they stopped us. “You know we’re a performance team, right?”, they asked.

I assured them that I knew that – but that the UX-friendly platform that I was about to demonstrate had some measurement features that would be of interest to them, too.

We need to stop observing this artificial division. There’s nothing consumers hate more than irrelevant ads, or creepily targeted ones. In the brave new world of digital advertising, CMOs are going to have to stop thinking of branding versus performance, and instead combine the two into a data- and measurement-driven, but user-friendly, whole. It’s the only way for digital advertising to thrive.