For the last decade, the industry has been in thrall to performance. Every dollar had to be attributed. Every campaign had to have a ROAS. Every creative was optimised for click-through rate. The result is predictable: brands that look identical, sound identical, and compete on nothing but price and urgency.
The performance trap
Performance marketing is not bad. The problem is what happens when it is the only marketing. Performance optimises for users who are already ready to buy. It tells you nothing about the 95% who will consider you in the future — and does nothing to create them.
Les Binet and Peter Field's work on the 60/40 rule — roughly 60% brand, 40% performance — has been circulating for years. What is changing is that the penalty for ignoring it is now visible at scale. Brands that pulled hard into pure performance from 2019 onwards are now hitting ceilings on efficient spend, watching new customer acquisition costs climb every quarter, and wondering why their "funnel" has thinned.
Three things making the shift unavoidable
The rebound is not nostalgia — it is structural:
First, signal loss. iOS 14, cookie deprecation, and increasingly skeptical consumers have made fine-grained tracking less precise. The entire edifice of hyper-targeted, hyper-measured performance assumed infrastructure that is eroding.
Second, AI-generated creative sameness. When every brand can produce "optimised" creative at zero marginal cost, none of it stands out. Differentiation requires something that cannot be prompted — a point of view, a visual system, a voice that took years to earn.
Third, a cohort of founders and CMOs who grew up in performance are now senior enough to see its limits. The conversation at growth conferences in 2025 looked different from 2020. People are asking about brand again, and not sheepishly.
What "brand" means in 2026
The brand work we are doing for clients now does not look like 2005 brand work. It is not brochure-ware and it is not 60-second TV spots (or rather, not only). It is:
- Distinctive assets — colour, typography, audio, character — used ruthlessly across every touchpoint for years. The kind of consistency that makes your ad recognisable without the logo.
- Point-of-view content that takes actual positions, angers some people, and earns trust with the right ones. Not thought leadership lite.
- Media placements that reward context — podcasts, newsletters, print — where attention is higher and the creative can be longer.
The budget conversation
The practical challenge is convincing a board that hired you for ROAS to approve spend that will not show up in a dashboard for 18 months. The honest answer is: you accept that some of your best marketing is not directly measurable, and you judge it by the direction of your unaided brand awareness, organic search volume for your brand term, and cost-per-acquisition trend at constant quality.
If those are moving in the right direction, something is working. If they are stagnant, no amount of performance optimisation will save you.
Performance is a tactic. Brand is the reason performance works. We are remembering that again.