For more than a decade, performance marketing has operated with surgical precision. Every click is tracked, every conversion tied to ROI. Branding, by contrast, is still built on delayed surveys, siloed studies and proxy metrics that reveal little about what truly drives outcomes.
That gap is no longer defensible.
Marketers today face more complexity than ever: fragmented audiences, shrinking budgets and boardrooms demanding proof of brand ROI. Yet brand measurement frameworks remain stuck in an old paradigm – too slow, too static and too detached from activation.
Consider brand lift studies. They have brought accountability into branding, and that is a step forward. But in practice, they appear in fewer than 5% of campaign briefings. Too often they are treated as a one-off exercise rather than a consistent source of intelligence. Results usually arrive only once a campaign has ended, sometimes weeks later. By then, the chance to act has passed.
The problem is not that brand lift lacks value. The problem is that it is underused and disconnected. On its own, it cannot deliver the speed and consistency modern marketers need.
Brand lift should evolve from being a retrospective report into a living feedback loop. It should fuel predictive models, enrich attention data and inform optimisation while campaigns are still live. Without that shift, it risks remaining proof in hindsight rather than guidance in the moment.
Branding must rise to the same standard of accountability that performance marketing has enjoyed for years. That requires:
At WallyMatters, we believe the new operating model for branding is defined by brand intelligence. Our platform integrates predictive modelling, cross-channel activation and real-time validation into a single, unified system. It allows marketers not just to measure outcomes, but to steer them — impression by impression.
This is not about turning brand marketing into performance. It is about modernising branding itself: measurable, accountable and strategically defensible.
Boards have made the mandate clear: brand investments must prove their worth. The winners will be those who move beyond lagging indicators to real-time intelligence, turning branding into a discipline as rigorous as performance.
The question is: how ready are we as an industry to embrace this shift?
If the answer is no, then it’s time we start a conversation.
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