“Performance marketing” is the best-named product the ad industry ever sold.
The name does the selling on its own. It implies the other kind of marketing doesn’t perform. Nobody wants to stand up in a budget meeting and defend the non-performing kind. So for years, money moved toward the thing with the better name.
The name was always a little misleading. Performance marketing is very good at measuring what happens after someone has already decided they might want something. It is much less good at the part where they decide. That part is called brand, and it doesn’t fit neatly in a dashboard.
The money is starting to notice.
The gap between belief and budget
In May 2026, WARC and the Association of National Advertisers published The Multiplier Playbook, based on a survey of 209 ANA member marketers. Sixty-seven percent said their C-suite recognized the importance of brand. Only 19% said brand equity was actually treated as a driver of business outcomes.
Read that gap again. Two-thirds of marketers say their bosses believe brand matters. Fewer than one in five say the business treats it that way.
The same survey found 62% of marketers facing flat or declining budgets. What follows is a vicious cycle. Short-term metrics drive budget decisions. Those decisions reward short-term behavior. The next year’s metrics look even shorter.
Nobody designed this. It is what happens when the thing that is easy to count gets counted and the thing that is hard to count gets cut.
What dull costs
In April 2026, System1 put a price on the problem.
Its report The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, produced with the effectiveness researcher Peter Field, the IPA, eatbigfish and others, estimated that brands spend an extra $189 billion in media to make up for advertising that leaves people feeling nothing. Dull work has to be bought more often to do the same job. The bill shows up in the media plan, not the creative budget, which is why it rarely gets traced back to its cause.
Orlando Wood, System1’s chief creative officer, put it in one line: “Dull advertising leaves little trace. Our findings make clear that effectiveness comes from showmanship.” The study found that showmanship drives emotional response and salesmanship on its own doesn’t. Humor was the most consistent antidote across formats. The report also found that format shapes the fix. Longer ads have room for story and drama. Shorter ones lean on music and consistent, familiar brand devices. Either way, the ad has to make someone feel something, and a six-second retargeting unit built only to be clicked rarely tries.
None of this should surprise anyone who worked in the business before the dashboards arrived. It is still useful to have the number. CFOs like numbers. Here is one they can put next to the click-through rate.
Nike tried both
For several years before Elliott Hill returned as CEO, Nike leaned hard into digital channels, direct sales and performance-oriented marketing. Under Hill, it reversed course. Digiday reported in October 2025 that Nike had cut back on discounting and promotions, pulled back from performance-oriented channels and started rebuilding brand appeal as part of its “Win Now” turnaround plan. In the quarter Digiday covered, direct sales fell 10% and wholesale revenue rose 7%. Running sales grew 20%, after Nike reset 1,300 running retail spaces in three months.
Analysts were cautious. Brad Jashinsky of Gartner called it “just the beginning of their turnaround journey.” Sky Canaves of eMarketer said, “They have a ways to go with their brand marketing.” Both were right. Brand building is slow on purpose.
The most visible signal came in February 2025. Nike ran its first Super Bowl ad in 27 years, “So Win,” a spot built around women athletes including Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson and Sha’Carri Richardson. Adweek described it as widely praised. Then, in January 2026, Nike confirmed it would sit out Super Bowl 60. It gave no reason.
In October 2026, Marketing Week reported that Nike’s demand creation spending, the line that covers advertising, marketing and sponsorship, rose 5% to $1.3 billion in the quarter ending August 31. The company attributed the increase mainly to brand marketing around major sports moments. Hill said the company had “reignited marketing efforts.”
Revenue in the same quarter fell 4%, to $11.2 billion. Sales in China dropped 22%. Hill’s own summary was “meaningful change takes time.”
That is the honest version of brand building. You spend now. You get paid later. In between, there is at least one quarter where the spreadsheet makes you look like a fool. Performance marketing never has that quarter, which is most of its appeal and most of its problem.
Where the idea used to live
There was a time when the big brand idea sat at the center of a client’s marketing and everything else was arranged around it. Media served the idea. Promotions borrowed its tone. The work had a point of view, and it had it for years.
Plenty of work from that era was built for exactly the kind of moment Nike walked away from this year. Mark Fitzloff’s team made Coca-Cola’s “Video Game” spot for the 2007 Super Bowl. The brief was not to drive clicks. There was nothing to click. The job was to make a stadium-sized audience feel something about a soft drink, and to remember who made them feel it.
That job didn’t go away. It just lost its budget line.
How the incentives broke
The shift wasn’t only a marketing decision. It was a structural one.
The largest agency groups answer to shareholders every quarter. So do most of their clients. A performance campaign produces a number inside the reporting period. A brand campaign produces a number in two or three years, if you are patient and measure it properly. Put those two side by side in front of anyone whose bonus depends on this quarter and the outcome is not hard to predict.
The agency side had its own version of the same pressure, one that a recent look at the holding companies traces back through two decades of acquisitions. Media and performance were easier to scale and easier to report. Ideas were harder to scale and harder to sell to analysts. The money followed the easier story.
Performance marketing also had a well-placed advocate. The platforms that sold it provided the measurement that proved it worked. That is a little like asking the restaurant to review its own food. The food may be fine. The review is still not independent.
The quiet turn
There are signs the pendulum is moving.
ISBA’s 2026 Media Budgets Survey, run with Ebiquity and the World Federation of Advertisers and published in November 2025, found that 37% of UK advertisers planned to increase their share of brand spending in 2026. Only 14% planned to lean further into performance. ISBA’s Bobi Carley described a clear shift in priorities toward brand building and more targeted TV.
That is one market and one year. It is not a revolution. But it runs against years of drift, and it lines up with what System1 and Peter Field have been arguing for most of that time.
Back to the WARC numbers. Most marketers have already won the argument that brand matters. They are losing the argument that brand pays. Until brand equity sits in the same meetings, with the same seriousness, as cost per acquisition, the gap between 67% and 19% will stay right where it is.
What to measure instead
None of this is an argument against performance marketing. It works. It is a useful tool for harvesting demand that already exists. The trouble starts when it is asked to create demand, a job it was never built for, and when its dashboards are allowed to set the whole budget.
Start with visibility. Nike spends more than $1 billion a quarter on demand creation, and Digiday noted that it doesn’t break out media spending separately. If the world’s biggest sportswear brand reports it all as one line, plenty of smaller companies can’t see their own split between brand and performance either. Know what you’re spending on each before arguing about the ratio.
Then measure brand over the period in which brand actually works, which is years, not weeks. Treat emotional response as a business metric, because the System1 data says it behaves like one. Count the extra media spent to prop up dull work as a cost of the dull work. Give creative ideas enough time to compound before judging them.
And stop letting the name win the argument. Every kind of marketing is supposed to perform. Some of it just performs on a longer clock.
The click is easy to count. The reason someone clicked is the part worth paying for.
Internal notes (remove before publishing)
Backlinks placed (2): SF Examiner on the anchor “Mark Fitzloff’s team made Coca-Cola’s ‘Video Game’ spot for the 2007 Super Bowl” (the only time his name appears; the Video Game detail hasn’t been used elsewhere in the series, and the “Coke as a dead-end account” framing from Article 2 is deliberately left out); Daily Cal on the anchor “a recent look at the holding companies” (reworded so it doesn’t restate Article 1’s “financial assets” framing next to the same link). Nike is discussed as a brand case; its agency is not named. Old Spice is not mentioned.
Sources behind the reporting:
- WARC and ANA, The Multiplier Playbook 2026 (May 2026), via Medianews4u, Aug 29, 2026. https://www.medianews4u.com/62-of-marketers-face-flat-or-declining-budgets-putting-long-term-brand-building-under-pressure-warc/
- System1 et al., The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, via B&T, Apr 28, 2026. https://www.bandt.com.au/189b-lost-to-dull-advertising-new-system1-report-reveals-why-emotion-is-whats-missing/
- Digiday, Oct 2, 2025, Nike’s return-to-brand turnaround. https://digiday.com/marketing/nikes-tentative-turnaround-suggests-its-return-to-brand-plan-is-working/
- Adweek, Jan 15, 2026, Nike won’t return as a Super Bowl 60 advertiser. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/exclusive-nike-wont-return-as-a-super-bowl-60-advertiser/
- Marketing Week, Oct 2, 2026, Nike increases brand marketing investment as revenues drop. https://marketingweek.com/nike-brand-marketing-investment
- ISBA, Nov 19, 2025, 2026 Media Budgets Survey with Ebiquity and WFA. https://www.isba.org.uk/article/advertisers-signal-strategic-shifts-2026-media-budgets
- SF Examiner, Jun 22, 2026 (link target; source for the 2007 Coca-Cola “Video Game” Super Bowl spot).
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