Performance & Brand Marketing: Building Brands Beyond the Click

[00:00:00] Kelly: Planting an orchard versus picking your low hanging fruit. You know, if you just go after the performance, eventually you're out of fruit and there's nothing supporting it. And, and where do you find that balance and what are the, the levers available to kind of create that balance in the marketplace?

[00:00:12] Kelly: These are all things that I think really prompt some powerful conversations to be considered in that way.

[00:00:17] LuRae: Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by BOE Digital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms, because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action.

[00:00:36] LuRae: So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode. Hey

[00:00:39] Todd: everyone. Kelly McGuire, co-founder Luine Digital. Excited to talk about today's topic. Hello, happy Monday. It's Todd Kelly's.

[00:00:47] Kelly: partner and today we're gonna talk about the conversation around brand and performance marketing. This has been coming up a lot in conversations, that we've been having with some prospects and some clients and just agency meetings.

[00:01:02] Todd: I'm talking to other CEOs of agencies and this is sort of a common thread that's resurfacing Again, I think it's being driven by. All the automation of technology and things where brand maybe is maybe an afterthought still, but I think I start, I'm starting to see a resurgence, Kelly. So today I'm gonna pick your brain a little bit about that.

[00:01:22] Todd: And so, the first topic, I guess maybe the broader topic that you can spin off of is the importance of the consistency of the brand sort of message or voice across. Media and marketing. we're talking about this a lot, right? How are we seeing the brand consistency either failing to show up, or in your mind, how do you think it should show up in order to stay consistent in a relevant way yet Still do the job of like the performance side of things that we get tasked with, right? Because we, nobody ever comes to us and says, Hey, I want you to run a bunch of billboards and TV commercials. 'cause I just want people to know about my stuff. It's always people need to buy my stuff. So brand and consistency in marketing, where does that sit with you?

[00:02:10] Kelly: Yeah, cash flow is important in business. yeah, I think it's a really interesting topic to cover. I think we've had some recent. Engagements where it's come to light in a really interesting way, and it gets my mind sort of spinning in that direction where, you know, we had an interesting conversation with a company that really understood, or at least came to the conclusion and kinda let know they were having different conversations with different agencies and different service providers and.

[00:02:35] Kelly: they were talking about how it was a lot of the same pitch over and over, which is straight to the performance marketing and how Facebook can just take data and go find customers and you can grow and you can get all this return and, the person we were talking to, his history and background really helped him understand that there's a bigger picture and a bigger, longer term outcome and.

[00:02:54] Kelly: It prompted us to have the conversation where we ultimately agreed, which was interesting being that we're primarily a performance marketing agency, although I know you hate that term overall. that the idea of just trying to go straight to market and drive performance and get the ROI and the return, it was too soon.

[00:03:10] Kelly: It wasn't the right sort of order of operations in terms of being able to just Dr. Dive right in and capture that, and it kinda led into the bigger conversation, which was very refreshing. And you have to kind of prime the market. You have to enter the market. We, we had a big, long episode around kind of brand and the importance of brand, but for me it's, the leveraging and the utilization of brand when it comes to getting the outcomes and the results that you want.

[00:03:36] Kelly: once you've defined your brand and you know your value propositions and you know why someone should care and pay attention to whatever it is you're pitching and selling. How do you bring that to market? How do you use that? What is the order of operations to invest in high impact awareness and ad recall before you ask them to click on an ad and buy or to take an action?

[00:03:57] Kelly: What do you think the real human behavior of discovery to purchase is? we've talked so much about these other research things from, whether it was the ZO, the Zero moment of truth from Google, or you know, there's that concept of word of mouth and social validation and.

[00:04:13] Kelly: testimonials and ratings and reviews and all these things, all these components that play a role in what gets a person from, I've never heard of something to now I've heard of it and I'm willing to buy it there. There's a long path and it's very, very rarely a linear path unless it's a very small barrier of entry.

[00:04:31] Kelly: Kind of impulse purchase. And I think that's really where, I think it's an exciting conversation to have, which is, what does it mean to have a brand, but what does it mean to use that brand and to really have a short, medium, and long-term plan to bring it to market and to nurture a customer base from growing that customer base.

[00:04:49] Kelly: we've used this analogy of, planting an orchard versus picking your low hanging fruit. if you just go after the performance, eventually you're out of fruit and there's nothing supporting it. and where do you find that balance and what are the, the levers available to kind of create that balance in the marketplace?

[00:05:03] Kelly: These are all things that I think really prompt some powerful conversations to be considered in that way.

[00:05:08] Todd: There's something you just said about how brands show up in all these different channels, that strikes me as the thing that's probably created the most difficulty for the consistency of the brand.

[00:05:21] Todd: The old days of media and advertising, we had television, print, and radio, and out of home you had maybe four sort of major channels, and those were very controllable, right? There was no one, no one else could control the brand in those environments 'cause how could you control it, right?

[00:05:40] Todd: There's no social media and so. You saying all those things just sort of makes me think about the idea of consistency of the brand voice and taking that all the way from the top to the bottom. And that strikes me as that's probably what's creating so much of the difficulty of brand consistency, is that brands have lost control of their ability to stay consistent.

[00:06:00] Todd: Right? Because people now can take your brand and do whatever they want with it through the guise of. A social media post or a YouTube video or a TikTok, this or that or whatever, and the brand's like, I have no more control of my brand anymore. I, it's whatever people say it is. And that's an interesting thing to think about, in terms of the idea of consistency.

[00:06:23] Kelly: Yeah. I mean, there's tremendous fragmentation in the market that creates a lot of challenge and there's a lot. Of outside influence and factors that have to be considered when making decisions that when you combine those, it creates this, this amazing amount of variability that has to be thought through.

[00:06:44] Kelly: And I think that's what creates the position that we talk about a lot in finding good engagements with agencies and partners because. I don't think that we operate in an environment where you can just go buy a media buying service and say, okay, I just need someone to place Facebook ads for me. I just need someone to place Google ads with me, and it's zero sum.

[00:07:06] Kelly: As long as I'm buying keywords and they're showing up, I'm gonna get what I want. I really think that in the fragmentation and the saturation of messaging that people are exposed to and what you're getting people to do. That strategic approach, that overarching thought and oversight on what you're doing becomes extra critical to get to what you want to be.

[00:07:26] Kelly: So when you're buying those Google ads and those keywords, you need to be thinking about what is the upstream experience of that user before they've conducted that search so that when. You show up as one of four or five options that they can click on. They're going to select your brand or your message because it's not the first time they've heard of it.

[00:07:47] Kelly: There's some familiarity, there's some pull to it and how much does someone need to be exposed to it? What is the intent behind that search? Are they still in research mode or, are they in buy now mode? And really looking at it from that journey perspective and where you've been able to insert yourself, where you've been able to convey some influence and some value.

[00:08:06] Kelly: Then being able to extrapolate that into a bigger plan that is constantly evolving and learning and improving. Because you can kind of see, when I do these things, I see these outcomes and it's positive or negative and I can move. And that's kind of again, that overall marketing approach where, yes, there's all these individual pieces.

[00:08:24] Kelly: It's not that hard to buy Facebook ads. It's not that hard to buy Google ads. It's honestly not even that hard to buy some of the programmatic ads. I won't go down that rabbit hole, but it's getting easier in certain ways there. And in a silo, you might be able to extract a little bit of value in the short term if you've never used it and it's sort of novel and new to the brand.

[00:08:44] Kelly: But for that to all come together and really move you in the direction that is the max potential of your brand and your product. That all needs to be managed in a very holistic way, a very strategic way, and thought about all of those variables and nuances. When should I be educating a customer? When should I be generating net new exposure?

[00:09:02] Kelly: When should I re be remarketing and converting my existing pool? There's so much balance and so much decision, and then you bring that around as not only is it where should I invest my dollars, in what environments? But what message, what brand, what value proposition, what educational element, what thing needs to be exposed to that person in order for that ad impression that I'm buying to be as valuable as possible?

[00:09:26] Kelly: What am I actually asking someone to do? Do I just want them to remember my brand? Do I want them to do a search? Do I want them to click on the ad? Do I want them to go to a store? There's all these things that you have to think about the outcomes, and you have to put that all together into that decision making process to make those best decisions.

[00:09:42] Kelly: And that to me is the evolution of a brand, right? It's not just that I have a product, I simply have to buy a couple ads, get them to see it and click through. That's the, I need a vision, I need a value proposition, and then I need a plan of action built on strategy and data to deploy and build an engine long term.

[00:10:00] Kelly: That's a lot, Kelly. It's a lot, but I mean, again, it's, it is the difference between I can just spin up a company and drive sales to. I want something that's gonna last for 50 years and is gonna get better and, educational and be established and have an audience and a consumer base like that is a true, mature, healthy business model that you should have a media partner that's helping play its role in that.

[00:10:25] Todd: Yeah, I agree. Don't disagree with any of it. One of the things that makes me think about, and I'm sort of gonna flip our order of questions around a little bit, about, There's been so much evolution in the last 10 to 15 years as you and I have worked in digital about the availability and use of data, All the cookie data and other data that's been collected about us and what you and I have largely seen is most everything we've done is turned to the use of that data for the sake of performance. And so it makes me think about. Did we go too far with that? Right. Again, 'cause think before the internet, right?

[00:11:02] Todd: there was largely not a lot of data available when you ran a linear TV campaign. It was reach and frequency, calculated against audiences or, or addressable markets and number of spots to be run. And there was some math. There, but that was pretty much it. You had some demographic and overlays and that stuff, and there wasn't a lot to it and brand, you were still focused on this sort of brand storytelling.

[00:11:28] Todd: Now it feels like the decisions are so data driven that maybe. Marketers are all of us are losing sight of the brand identity. piece of that, right? Because we're so focused on using the data to try and get what we want, that I think maybe we're forgetting to give consumers what they need and the data help will help us refine who we're saying something to and what we're saying.

[00:11:56] Todd: But I also wonder, do you think that that's. Just completely skewed the vision and blurred the vision of like what the true essence of building a brand is all about.

[00:12:06] Kelly: Yeah. It's really funny that you asked that 'cause you would almost think that we planned this ahead, but it just happened by circumstance.

[00:12:11] Kelly: 'cause I just had this conversation with client that we're going through and having to illuminate this around, which is trying to explain what a user journey goes into and what goes into the signals that. Media platforms use to sort of determine success and what they should do more or less of.

[00:12:30] Kelly: But then understanding that it's not a simplified consumer journey and data and attribution is by no means perfect. And it's kind of getting worse to be honest. which is to say that it's rare that a consumer will just simply see one ad from one platform. I see one Facebook ad and then I act right.

[00:12:48] Kelly: It's a lot more likely that. And we've talked about these journeys. I might see a CTV ad and then I'll remember an ad, and then maybe I get served a Facebook ad. And because I remembered it from that video, I clicked on it and then I searched around, but I wasn't ready to buy. And so then when I want to buy it a week later, now I'm gonna Google search it and I'm either gonna click on the paid or the organic, and eventually I'm gonna make my way through.

[00:13:09] Kelly: And every single piece of media that kind of played a role in that journey had some value to kind of come in here. This is the whole argument around last touch attribution. And Google always looks great in that because who remembers to type things in directly? You almost always finding it via search, so it always looks great.

[00:13:24] Kelly: But the idea that there's this singular journey and to understand that there's only one way to look at the value of media. It gets very convoluted because there's a lot of different pieces there. You could have three different platforms that can technically say, I drove that sale, and three of them will raise their hand and give you a signal and say, three transactions came through and each of them is right.

[00:13:44] Kelly: They played a role that maybe that doesn't happen if they didn't play their role, but there's only one transaction that happens. So how do you look at the big picture of what's driving business and all the components and make those decisions? And then you throw in the confusion around. Actual data signal loss that's happening, right?

[00:14:00] Kelly: Everything that comes through with Apple devices not coming through and TMS being stripped and that last touch attribution and those elongated journeys where people get. kind of replaced cookies in the latest attribution. And then you look at look back windows. Is it a 30 day, is it a one day? Is it a seven day?

[00:14:16] Kelly: Is it click? Is it view through? What are all the things that go through? And when you really untake a step back, you understand there's no perfect attribution. This s drove this and I know with full confidence everything that's working, that's where the ability and the expertise and the knowledge base to.

[00:14:31] Kelly: Understand what the confidence level and the data signal you have is and how to use it properly to make the best decisions for the overall good of things. If you are simply looking for a 100% accurate, clear signal of do this, and you'll get that without problem, I. It's an unrealistic expectation. Yet our industry has tried to make it seem like digital is infallible and can just tell you exactly every single thing you have to do and what exactly you'll get from it.

[00:14:58] Kelly: And this promise has been tried to be developed, and there's been so many companies that have come and gone making that promise and not being able to fulfill on it. I take it back to you need that understanding and that sophistication of a team that can collaborate and work together and interpret the signals in the best way possible to get you to the recommendations and the growth and the outputs that you can have.

[00:15:19] Kelly: And that's where it becomes really important to understand the overall ecosystem and all of the variables. And a lot of times it gets even harder because the variables that determine success. Are not always media buying variables. It's not always your targeting or even your creative. It can be your website's not set up for success.

[00:15:38] Kelly: Your data signals dropping out your, you know, there can be all kinds of other things that you have to be able to see and tweak in order to get the mix right. You could have perfect targeting and perfect ads and all of that and still not see what you want because you, you haven't thought through. Is your form too low on it and people won't scroll.

[00:15:54] Kelly: Are you mobile optimized? Are you having these issues in other places? Like everything works together. It's like a, perfect recipe for a cake where every little ingredient is important. And if you mix up the sugar for the salt, you're gonna have a very different outcome in there.

[00:16:09] Kelly: You know, if you miss an ingredient, if you don't have the baking powder, is a baking powder, baking soda? I'm not a baker, but whatever makes it rise, right? Like you can have everything else, right? But if you get one thing wrong, it can make the whole thing kind of collapse. And again, if you were just looking at media buying singularly.

[00:16:23] Kelly: For buying an ad and delivering it versus how it plays a role in the overall mix. It can be so problematic and lead to such bad assumptions and outcomes, that I think it's just, it's so important to be able to think about, is this as a marketing engine versus, again, just a service that that's one-to-one in that way.

[00:16:41] Todd: Well, so therein lies. The question I was asking is you just rattled off all these different ways that a consumer comes into contact with a product or service that is provided by said brand and the consistency of that brand voice coming through. All of those different. Ways, I think is the challenge that we're talking about today, right?

[00:17:05] Todd: Because there's just so many touch points, so many exposure points, so many interaction points that any one of us can have on any given day, with a product or service that's being, communicated to us through an ad, in any number of screens or ways that, yeah. The conversation we're having today is how in the world do marketers.

[00:17:26] Todd: Preserve and maintain their brand consistency through all of those interactions. And then the next step I'll take this to is however that can be done for better or worse in totality or lack of comprehensiveness. There are data signals, right? There are metrics that get left behind from a lot of this.

[00:17:47] Todd: we've always been told, oh, it's hard to measure brand. It's, what are we measuring when we measure brand? what are the metrics or the KPIs? What are the things that you think, marketers should be thinking about or looking for when it comes to thinking about brand?

[00:18:02] Todd: not just down to the bottom of the funnel, like you said, right? Where's that last touch? Attribution, but really thinking about. The orchard model, right. I know that I have to keep fertilizing and, growing the orchard because if I just pick from the bottom, like you said, eventually I'll run out. So, but those metrics up above, they're harder to see, right?

[00:18:20] Todd: You can't see the top of the tree. You can't tell when the fruit is ripe or whatever. how do we know what's working as marketers at the, at that brand consistency level? What metrics, what are our eyes are important?

[00:18:32] Kelly: I think this kind of where it really sums it all up to me in the way that I think that this should be approached, which is I think everyone wants that guarantee.

[00:18:41] Kelly: They want that, tell me what I can spend and exactly what I'm gonna get and make sure I get it. And I just think that's a false hope in that there's still risk in what we do. there's that old adage of 50% of my marketing doesn't work, I just don't know which 50%. And I think as long as that has existed, people have tried to break that and be like, no, I can tell you exactly what does and doesn't work, and I'll fix all of your problems for you.

[00:19:04] Kelly: And the reality is, is we're still working with human behavior and the subtlety and the nuance that comes with that and the shifting sands that we all operate on, which is, cultural and economics and, competition and different media vehicles and everything that comes and goes and moves.

[00:19:23] Kelly: That at the end of the day, I think you have to be able to make confident decisions, very well informed, educated risks and bets that you want to take and have a clear outcome of. I believe that this is the right place and way for me to invest my. Limited resources. 'cause I'm assuming that we're talking in the vast majority of people that don't just have billions of dollars to buy whatever and everything all at once, right?

[00:19:48] Kelly: People have to pick and choose the bets that they can make and understand what that looks like. I'm gonna place this bet 'cause I think my product fits this audience. I think I have a good message. I think I have a good journey. I think it's gonna work for this reason. And then have the patience and expertise to place that bet, to work that campaign through and analyze the outcomes and look at the signals and look at everything and start to break it down into what am I seeing and what are the things, what are the, tailwinds that are driving it forward?

[00:20:19] Kelly: Or what are the headwinds that might be preventing it from doing what I thought it would do when I decided this was, about worth taking. What can I learn from it? What can I evolve? Where can I shift? Things to start to see what the reaction of the market is. Should I change my creative? Should I change my targeting?

[00:20:34] Kelly: Should I change the platform? Should I introduce something new? This is the movement that happens in an evolving living campaign that takes that expertise and that knowledge and starts to make. What's the next best dollar I should spend and how should I do it? And when I do find a winner, how do I find my point of diminishing return?

[00:20:50] Kelly: How much can I scale and grow that before I have to pivot? Or if I pivot out of something because it's not working, what could I take from that learning that makes me make the next right informed decision in the next right bet so that, again, I'm evolving and growing towards something. I'm not just throwing things against the wall.

[00:21:06] Kelly: I'm not just guessing, but all of this comes around to, I think, what is my biggest headline, which is. Marketing still carries risk. Not everything is guaranteed. to tolerate what your risk is and you have to make strategic bets and you have to be confident that if something doesn't work, we've always said this, for a test to be a test, it has to be able to fail.

[00:21:24] Kelly: 'cause if it can't fail, it's not a test. it's a plan that either works or doesn't. And so, but if it fails. There's value that can come from that failure if you're smart about it, and you can minimize your exposure to that failure of knowing when is the right time to pivot or pull the plug.

[00:21:40] Kelly: When have I reached data significance that I can make a decision? It's not an anomaly. I didn't not give it enough time. I didn't give it the right possible, inputs, but I'm confident that the market is telling me this isn't working. But I can also read what it tells me might be the next thing that works.

[00:21:56] Kelly: And again, that's the work that goes into it, right? That's the art in the science. the science is the data and the targeting and making sure everything you're doing is working, but the art of it is interpreting it and educated guessing towards what is gonna work and what should I do next, and what, realistically do I believe in?

[00:22:12] Kelly: And then having the resources and the talent to deploy all of that so that everything you collect in your outcomes you can believe in and make choices versus being like, well, that didn't work and I don't know what to do about it, or that really worked and I hope I can just magically replicate it again.

[00:22:28] Kelly: everyone wants to go viral and that's wonderful when you do, but if you ever watch Shark Tank, they always get really nervous about this. I've said this before because it's like. You got lucky what you're banking on getting lucky again. Like that's awesome when it happens, but it's not a great business model to build off of that.

[00:22:43] Kelly: I'm just gonna keep getting lucky. Like you really need to be able to know what is driving and not driving so that you can evolve and have control over your destiny in your business and be able to react to all those external forces when there's an economic downturn. Do you know what to do when there's.

[00:22:58] Kelly: price competition, do you know what to do when Facebook all of a sudden changes this algorithm on you? Do you have another element available? Like you want to be in control of your destiny as much as possible by being smart about your business? And that again, goes back to a marketing engine, not just a media buying thing.

[00:23:14] Kelly: You had all these direct to consumer brands that didn't do that. They had an engine, they put money in, they got it out. And when that broke, how many hundreds, if not thousands of companies were like. I don't know what to do. Like I just need to keep hiring and firing the next agency until I find someone who finds the magic sauce again.

[00:23:31] Kelly: And I didn't work for a lot of people.

[00:23:32] Todd: Yeah. 'cause they, didn't build brands. And I, guess now that I'm thinking about this conversation I had, I had an experience today that I think maybe proves it or maybe it just proves that I'm old and I'm old school about things. But I had to book our hotels today for upcoming travel that we have next week.

[00:23:50] Todd: And. I went and looked at American Express and I looked at our travel portal and I didn't like what I saw there, so what did I do? I turned to Google, right, right. That's what we all do and I went to the hotels.google.com and I was looking for all these hotels and I'm like, you know, it's too confusing.

[00:24:07] Todd: There's all this random stuff that's coming up, but I know it's always a consistent brand promise that's delivered, and that's how brand is supposed to work. And that is, I know if I go to a Marriott or a Hilton Garden Inn or whatever it is, that brand experience is gonna be consistent and it's gonna be known and familiar and it's good, and I know what I'm gonna get.

[00:24:31] Todd: And so despite all the, I always ask you at the end of the show, what ads do you recall seeing last? And so today I saw a bunch of ads. For a bunch of hotels, many of which I'm not familiar with, didn't recognize, didn't really get a value prop out of them, that made me want to go explore them any further.

[00:24:48] Todd: And so what did I do? I went and booked, some Marriott. Hotel because that's the brand that I know I'm familiar with, and they're consistent in what they deliver in their product. and so none of those other hotels got our business because quite frankly, even though they were advertising in my search, I don't think they did a very good job to convince me that, A, that they're gonna outperform a strong brand like a Marriott property.

[00:25:13] Todd: And so I went with Marriott and somebody could have advertised to me today and got our business. Thousands of dollars worth of hotel stays in travel, but they didn't. And so I guess none of those ads were very memorable. And Marriott, you you created a good brand that I am, loyal to and so you get my business.

[00:25:30] Kelly: But you can think of that also in another way. Right? Which is how many campaigns or experiences or marketing efforts do have you likely been exposed to for those brands over. Maybe dozen, you know, decades of, of a lot experience. And every single one of those probably didn't get a signal that it was being effective to drive thousands of dollars worth of business from you someday for that brand.

[00:25:55] Kelly: And so if they were solely relying on when that campaign was happening, If it was worth spending those dollars or not in that moment, if it drove those dollars, it would've looked like a failure. But in the grand scheme and the bigger picture of moving the business forward, it had long-term value that they reaped rewards of doing that and having that consistency.

[00:26:13] Kelly: And so again, being able to step back from, the forest for the trees and not simply look at that immediate gratification and that perfect signal that tells you exactly what is and isn't working, but to have that belief and that bigger ability to look at the overall. it is so much more beneficial in the long run, even if it's not as immediately satisfactory in what it's giving you.

[00:26:34] Todd: Yeah. Well that's my point. So Marriott, kudos to you. You built a brand affinity with me and so you got our business, our corporate business today and to the rest of the hotel brands out there, you better work harder to build better brand affinity. alright, well that's a lot to say. I think it proves that, Building a brand is, is the right way to go. And again, yeah, the money machine of put a dollar in, get $5 out isn't probably all that effective. And, brand still matters. Metrics there are there to validate it, like you said, the signals. So, marketers build your brands. Thank you Kelly, for always your wisdom and a lot to say about things that hopefully are, Good, coachable, guiding moments out there. For anybody that's listening, I think there's a lot of nuggets in there to pick up on, or at least some affirmations or validations that, people are either doing things right or missing a step or two.

[00:27:23] Kelly: So I'll, I'll be satisfied if it just sparks some thought and some consideration,

[00:27:26] Todd: I'm disagreed with thinking about it more than just accepting the reality is, I think a great outcome in all of this. So thanks. There we go. Thanks everyone for listening. We might be contrary to somebody's opinion out there, right?