EVP Strategy at WPP Media: Why brand marketing needs a rebrand

So you've recently written an article that we thought was really interesting.

Thank you.

Yeah, pleasure.

And I think that it points a lot to the role that more performance-led, sort of bottom-of-funnel marketing is sort of having in today's society.

Yeah.

And I think that we've seen quite a seismic change over the last decade or so, with people sort of being very wedded to short-termist marketing strategies, a real bias, I think, towards things like click-through rates.

And so I wondered really what your point of view on that is and sort of how you've seen things evolve during your time in marketing.

And I had noticed a significant difference in that sort of 10 years I was away from agencies to coming back.

That sort of lower funnel focus really is quite striking.

I think there's a few reasons for it.

And I do understand all of the reasons.

You know, quarterly reporting, annual planning, genuinely people are sort of incentivized on an annual basis.

It makes it really hard to kind of see beyond the immediate short term.

And sort of lower funnel performance media, you know, tends to sort of go green.

When you add in, you know, economic instability and just... world volatility which we've had pretty much seemingly now forever and we're sort of getting used to that that short-term bias you speak of naturally sinks in but i think it comes at a cost and we're basically mistaking what is effective with what is efficient so for you know each quarter it's very easy to optimize for efficiency and lower funnel metrics and it's very attractive to get a dashboard that goes green and shows that what you're doing is having this this you know some impact on whatever the dashboard is measuring.

But I think it's a really important distinction.

I remember Rory Sutherland once saying that actually the biggest trick, or for a better word, that the big platforms play is convincing us, their genius is convincing marketers and media people that the thing that they deliver and measure are the most important things in marketing rather than things like having a differentiated brand and emotion and everything else that goes with it.

And I think I reflect on that comment.

You can see it playing out in the data because there's been a significant decline in brand differentiation over the last 15 years.

And it's seismic at the same time as all of our money is going more and more into digital platforms.

So this short-term investment really is coming at a cost in terms of brand building.

I completely agree.

And I think, you know, in a channel out of home, we know that it does that brand building activity so much.

So we've definitely sort of seen and felt, I think, that shift.