Advertising Week Briefing: Brand storytelling versus performance debate takes center stage at AWNY

The debate of brand versus performance dates back to even before the advent of Advertising Week, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, according to Advertising Week co-founder and CEO Lance Pillersdorf. It’s a timely topic at this year’s event given a hodgepodge of new media channels, like streaming ads, and economic headwinds constricting marketing budgets and shifts in technology, like generative AI, which has promised to spur creativity more quickly than ever, according to marketers and agency executives.

“This is something of art versus science that has been around as long as there’s been creative, then [with] media platforms to place that creativity on,” Pillersdoff said from this year’s symposium near Penn Station in Manhattan. “It’s a conversation that has evolved over time with technology shifts.” 

Theoretically, there should always be a balance between brand storytelling and performance goals. (It helps that shoppers are aware of the brand before making a purchase.) But over the last few years, the pendulum has swung in one direction in which marketers became overly reliant on short-term, performance-driving marketing tactics.

The conundrum it created is “inconsistent messaging across touch points, incredibly fragmented campaigns that lack synergy, and wasted resources that duplicate efforts and create inefficiencies,” said Eddie Gonzalez, chief strategy officer at Razorfish marketing agency, in an email to Digiday.

That said, there’s been a marketing push as of late to do more brand-building and storytelling. Since January, agencies say they’re seeing an uptick in requests for proposals that include brand-building elements. So it makes sense that panels like “Brand as ‘Multiplier’ — Why We Need to Rethink Brand vs Performance” and “Bridging the Gap: Performance Marketing Meets Brand Building” were featured in Monday’s Advertising Week lineup.

“Lack of investment in brand advertising pushes a brand to the left inadvertently,” said Ken Favaro
chief strategy officer at BERA Brand Management, a brand tech platform; Favaro spoke at the “Brand as ‘Multiplier’ – Why We Need to Rethink Brand vs Performance” panel on Monday. “So you have to put more investment into performance advertising just to produce the same results, which means you’re investing less in brand advertising, shifting your brand even further to the left, and around, and around you go.”

As the 2025 planning cycle gets underway, marketers expect that conversation to continue, where they’re encouraging clients to divvy up dollars between brand and performance to work together as opposed to being two separate focuses, according to Cody Mohon, associate media director at GS&F ad agency. 

“This allows for budget efficiencies and optimizations that build upon each other for a stronger outcome across the board,” Mohon said. 

Elsewhere from Advertising Week:

OMG’s AI Buying Agent standardization initiative aims to ensure advertisers’ interests are kept in mind when platforms create their automated ad product algorithms.

Coming up:

8 a.m. Why It’s Hard to Meet Customer Needs — and How to Succeed at Penn 1 Social Stair

9:40 a.m. AI in Action: A New Era of Advertising Effectiveness at the Innovation Stage

10:10 a.m. From Clicks to Conversations: How to Build Connections and Engage Your Audience at the Insights Stage

11:30 a.m. Fandoms, Tropes and Reaching Gen Z Through Storytelling at the Insights Stage

12:45 a.m. Owning the Game: Scoring Big in Women’s Sports at the Creativity Stage

3:30 p.m. House of Data: Advanced Advertising in a Fragmented Media Ecosystem at the Media Stage