Months after hearing Trade Desk Chairman and CEO Jeff Green share a cogent analogy about the challenges our industry faces, I still see reminders daily—especially at a time when 2026 budgets are under review.
At the event he spoke at, Green demonstrated the misalignment too many advertisers have created regarding brand building so-called "performance marketing."
He pointed out that our industry historically overlooks the massive amount of money and time a luxury car brand spends building its brand attributes only for a "find cars near me" search query to be treated as the most important factor in attribution models, deserving an outsized share of investment.
In short: If you sold some cars because you bought search ads, then you think all you have to do is buy even more search ads.
To bring home the point, he compared this misalignment to a soccer team that focuses salary increases solely on the striker who scored goals, ignoring the defenders and midfielders who got the ball upfield.
Anyone who watched the Premier League last season saw what happened when the world's best distributor, Ballon d'Or-winning Rodri, got injured and could no longer pass to the world's best striker, Erling Haaland—far fewer opportunities to score, and the team's lowest finish in seven years.
As a fan of sports analogies myself who has used a similar one to describe this misalignment issue, I loved this argument. But if sports don't speak to you, imagine what would happen to an apple farm that spends all their resources picking existing apples instead of planting trees to grow the next year's crop. No brand building today means no conversions tomorrow.
Why Lower-Funnel Wins Aren't Enough
These observations are not new, but sometimes it takes a high-profile industry leader like Green to say what many marketers have been shouting for years: Lower-funnel wins don't exist without strong upper-funnel brand advertising.
Many marketers quietly admit they're over-allocating to lower-funnel tactics at the expense of generating future demand through branding. But with the shortening half-life of the CMO role, marketers don't have patience to spare.
Much of the blame falls on historical measurement issues, such as marketing-mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) tools, which struggle to properly account for how brand building can drive future sales.
The Rise of Performance Branding
Now for some good news: Every year, brand building is becoming more scientific, data-driven, and analytical. You can start to turn the knobs on brand campaigns daily, just like you can for direct-response campaigns.
Thought leaders such as McKinsey have called this movement "performance branding." Marketers are slowly leaving the era of "passive branding" for a new, more scientific approach focusing on the top of the funnel.
Using identity solutions, real-time analytics of massive brand datasets, and machine learning algorithms enables instantaneous optimization of campaigns for brand outcomes.
To be clear, brand building produces as much "performance" as any stage of the funnel—if you measure the right outcome. The goal of advertising as a business function is to drive sales. But the goal of each campaign, or further, each impression, should not be to drive sales. In fact, that approach can lead to fewer sales!
So, pick an upper-funnel outcome for your upper-funnel campaigns.
AI and the Future of Brand Performance
The best days are ahead for performance branding, as AI will further highlight its importance. More marketers will turn to generative AI to mass-produce thousands, or even millions, of brand assets at scale, auto-analyze every possible data cut of campaigns, and optimize faster than humans can.
Imagine when purchases are made by agents that won't fall for direct-response ads, but will instead make purchase decisions in part based on a product's reputation, perception, and "vibe" it finds online. In other words, branding.
Building Your Performance Branding Muscles Now
With all of these changes, we'll soon look back at performance branding best practices from 2025 as if they came from the dark ages. So my advice to marketers: Build your performance branding muscles now, or you'll really be falling behind by the end of the decade.
And if you're listening, soccer managers: Pay your midfielders and defenders. If we can't fix marketing, we might as well fix the beautiful game.
More Resources on Branding
Why the Outcomes Era Is a Win for the Top of the Funnel: Connecting Brand-Building to Sales
How to Align Brand and Performance Marketing Without Sacrificing Either: A Framework for Marketers
The Power of Emotional Advertising in B2B Brand-Building: Feelings vs. Function
