The growing importance of brand performance

Two functions meet in the infinite. One says: "Hey, get out of the way, otherwise I'll divert you". Says the other, "Hahaha, go ahead, I'm the e-function!" Whether you are smiling tiredly at this point, lying on the floor laughing, or blinking in confusion is not even open to conjecture. Ideally, you read this text regardless of your basic understanding of mathematics, and very likely it will find its way into your news feed regardless. The essential point is that every joke, in the end, also lives on its context: your prior knowledge, your current situation, your basic interest in age-old math jokes - as that has an impact on whether and how this classic works for you.

But what is true for jokes is no less true for far more modern, original, unique creations. Emotional campaigns live on their connectivity; humorous campaigns live on their fallenness. Both thrive on reaching the right people at the right moment. The tool for this: Brand Performance, which after a long existence as a pure reach extension tool should now be an integral part of every campaign. Performance is a conceptual element, targeting is part of creation.

Classic KPIs are losing their significance

With the differentiation of social media advertising a few years ago, the importance of social ads, targeting and performance boost also grew for creation and editorial. Today, this development continues across all channels and formats: performance marketing is in a state of continuous change. The creative part is still growing, but at the same time the discipline is gaining in complexity and strategic importance for brands. The central guideline, however, is now added value. Long valid KPIs such as pure reach, impressions, CTR and even sales have lost their significance. While they help to classify the pure performance of a campaign, they hardly allow any conclusions to be drawn about brand impact and brand development.

Today, brands are increasingly relying on the Net Promoter Score as a key indicator of success. Here it is quite simple: If a brand convinces its target group and they then advertise the brand, then you have achieved the most important thing. How well this works can be found out, for example, via brand lift studies, such as those offered by most social platforms and advertising networks. Marketers and agencies don't always knock down open doors with this: The fear of possible negative results and the subsequent strategic questions and conflicting goals is occasionally great. But given the budgets used - brand lift studies deliver meaningful results starting at around 25,000 Swiss francs - questions of target effectiveness and strategic approach are of course essential.

Relevance-optimized playout is the new organic reach

In the media environment, organic reach for brand content is usually a nice, but now rather mildly nostalgic dream. The strategic-creative significance of brand performance becomes particularly clear here when viewed in the interplay of disciplines: Strategy defines the parameters for the brand message, creation shapes it and optimizes it for the defined target groups, and performance ensures that it reaches the right users at the right moment and in the right dose. Performance becomes the decisive lever that generates relevance, defines brands - and guides the other disciplines through expertise. Where strategy thinks more on a meta-level, performance can provide numbers-driven analysis. Where creative develops good stories and ideas, performance not only has the effective formats at hand, but can also inspire and - in the course of the campaign - optimize with its knowledge of trends and new formats.

And not only that: Performance refines the performance of the creation through its own creativity in terms of effective targeting and the precise control according to time, place, channel and end device. In the daily competition for the strictly limited attention of users, no campaign should afford to find the quality of the contact unimportant. Precise targeting ensures that bold creative reaches the right prospects. In this way, they achieve not only a broad echo, but also a measurable positive brand impact.

Holistic interaction instead of pork belly by algorithm

The growing possibilities of automatic, algorithm-driven playout today allow very fine targeting according to all relevant (i.e.: all) factors. Nevertheless, it is still advisable to use the human mind as the supreme campaign manager. On the one hand, successful campaigns can only be followed up by those who understand and can replicate the factors of success. For another, some algorithms today still advertise like it's 2011: optimization for reach, impressions, pork belly - but algorithm or not, it's ultimately a briefing problem. So now, even at first glance, novel addressable TV campaigns from brands and agencies rely on contact maximization. But when viewers are served the same content multiple times an evening, even the best creative idea and the most precise targeting are perceived as nothing more than spam - perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a brand, with measurable consequences: Decreasing sales, increasing advertising costs, annoyed "Not again" comments in the channels, freshly installed adblockers.

Brand development is not a question of an evening program. It is not even a question of a campaign flight. Sustainable brand development is ideally realized over a period of one to two years. However, the reach required for this can no longer be an arbitrary reach. It comes about through the conscious and limited use of automated targeting and the interplay of disciplines. However, this can only be realized if the strategic-creative power of the discipline, which is often taken for granted as a process, is taken seriously in its importance and consciously used.