Writing
The case for brand equity, from inside performance.
Essays on brand equity, argued by someone who harvested demand for a living. New here? Start with the series.
Start here · The Brand Trilemma, a series in three parts
Performance harvests demand. It doesn't create it.
Why the most efficient account in the category can still be growing on demand it never created, and what performance structurally cannot do.
Your CAC keeps rising because your brand is weak
Rising acquisition costs are usually a brand problem, not a media one. The brand case, made in performance's own terms.
Positioning is a bet, not a slogan
Most brands describe themselves instead of taking a position. A real position is a bet you can lose.
All writing
Attribution is a ludic fallacy
There is a slide in most media reviews that splits every sale across channels, down to the decimal. It looks like measurement. It is a set of casino odds pinned onto a market that has none.
What a 70/30 split costs in 18 months of CPC inflation
The 70/30 activation-to-brand split is the number nobody argues for and almost everybody lands on. Here is what it does to your cost per click over eighteen months, laid out so you can run it on your own account.
The graveyard of performance-only brands
Somewhere there is a conference talk called 'We cut our brand budget 40% and grew'. There is no talk called 'We cut our brand budget 40% and slowly died', because that brand is not at the conference. It is in the graveyard.
The dashboard is all there is
Everyone in the Monday budget meeting looks at the same dashboard. The dashboard has activation metrics on it. It does not have equity. So the meeting is about activation.
Your CAC keeps rising because your brand is weak
Every performance team blames the auction when CAC climbs. I did too, for years. The auction was just quoting me the price of a brand we had stopped building.
Positioning is a bet, not a slogan
The positioning workshop ends with a line nobody in the room could disagree with. That is the problem. A position you cannot lose isn't a position.
Performance harvests demand. It doesn't create it.
The best performance campaign I ever ran hit every target and taught me nothing I wanted to know. Performance is a harvesting machine, and harvesting isn't farming.
The Brand Trilemma
Every pound and every hour a brand spends lands somewhere on a triangle: Equity, Activation, Identity. Plot yourself honestly and you will usually find you have been underfunding the corner that compounds.