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Foreign.
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Welcome to another episode of the Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone using the word brand formants unironically. I'm Kamika McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.
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I'm Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday Media. And I'm very concerned concern that people are using the term brandformance because what the hell?
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So what's interesting here, a little deep dive for you, a little history lesson. Originally this got like really popular back in 2024, a couple years ago when marketers first were prompted with the idea of having to figure out how to marry brand marketing and performance marketing that has since been rebranded here in the year of our Lord 2026 as brand health metrics. And something that I'm noticing.
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Is that better?
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No, no, it's just a rebrand. Everybody's got to figure out how to tie their brand performance. I'm so sorry to have to bring up the funnel here. If anybody is going to get PTSD from.
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We're just going deep into ad land jargon. This is all the Kool Aid just bathing in 100%.
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100%. It is the concept of full funnel marketing, but to put it in like layman's terms, what's effectively happening is a performance marketing correction. During COVID and the digital boom, every marketer and their mother said, hey, you know what's a fantastic idea? Conversions. And let's go straight to the bottom of that funnel and make sure that everybody is direct response and buying our products through Google meta, yada, yada yada, only to realize years later, post. Well, not quite post post Covid, but post ish Covid, right. That brand marketing still matters and they've got to find the money to do that. But in the world where there's more marketing to be done with less marketing dollars, they've still got to justify that spend. So quite a dilemma.
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All right, so. So now that we've cut through the like, BS terms and anyone, I swear to God, if anyone uses brand formants or brand health in a call with me, I will judge you. I think you should judge yourself. Okay, so this helps me make sense of something that came up at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail in March of this year. So we have these behind closed door town halls where the publishing executives are able to speak freely and anonymously about issues they're running into, compare notes, all of that. It's like group therapy for publishers.
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Love it.
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One thing that one person brought up in the room and then other People nodded along to was they're needing to retrain their sales team. This was a challenge that they put up on the challenge board. And so we asked, why do you need to retrain the sales team, thinking this is going to have something to do with AI because what doesn't have to do with AI? But. But no, it was actually their issue was they immediately post Covid. So in like kind of that false spring of 2021, they hired a bunch of new salespeople and these people were all trained on selling based on performance, going after what used to be called direct response advertisers, people who just cared about like, are people clicking my ads, coming to my websites and signing up for a test drive? Are they buying a product? Are they doing something immediately after seeing that ad?
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Yes.
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And where the publishers are needing to retrain those people is to retrain them, retrain them to be able to pitch brand awareness towards clients. These are people who can pitch performance, but they need to learn how to pitch brand awareness. And I was curious, like, what's going on on the brand side that's driving this on the publisher side? You're very close to the brand side. What is on here? How did we get to brandformance?
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Yes, there's something to be said about that. It's this weird, like rediscovery phase that marketers are going through during the digital boom Covid era where it was decided like everybody was shopping online, right? I was talking to brand marketers that for the first time was really like, really trying to figure out what their digital e commerce presence looked like. Now that conversation has shifted. I spent time talking to Sheba and Caesar pet food brands under Mars. I spend time talking to Tropicana, Kara Gold and a handful of others. And what kept coming up is like, we're looking at brand health metrics. And I was like, what the hell are brand health metrics? And essentially it's this conversation of like, and I'm going to tie it back to AI and I'm so sorry, but with new channels creeping up, open AI LLMs and things like that, that's like part of the fold where brands are now, like, oh, we've got to create a synonymous digital presence and have like a healthy brand, right? To be pulled into these LLMs to be considered for ChatGPT ads, yada yada yada. So that's kind of like this latest conversion as to what's happening here.
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Okay, so it's like reputation management or the brand version of what is. Celebrities have the Q Score. Wasn't that a thing for a while?
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I don't know if that's a Black Mirror episode or in real life.
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I think that was, like, a real thing. This is just speaking as someone who grew up in the shadows of Hollywood in Los Angeles, so maybe this is just my native land seeping into my mind, but. So Q score was basically like. I don't know if it was, like, a specific number or whatever, but I believe it was, like, a way for casting directors, talent agencies, whatever, to be able to determine, like, not how famous someone is. Are they, like, the good kind of famous, the bad kind of famous? Again, it was kind of like reputation scoring. It feels like brand health is effectively that. But, like, what are the actual metrics here?
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I'm so glad you asked. So performance metrics that were the traditional route that brands used to go by to determine, like, conversion rates and things like that. Everybody's haunted by return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, last click in platform metrics, or even, like, thank you for
- [06:22]
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using the full terms and not the acronyms.
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If I. If you guys want to be traumatized, I'm more than happy to do so.
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At some point, this episode is just gonna sound like me and Kimiko reciting the Alphabet.
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That's exactly what it is. And everybody take bets on what's an actual acronym and what I made up. Brand health metrics. Right. Like, as these things become, like, more sophisticated, then you move it into a little bit, like, incremental roas, which is kind of like that brand formance area. Brand health metrics have gotten to things like brand awareness, consideration, intent, and they're called, like, also, like, softer metrics, like new customer metrics and things like this that brands are now looking at to determine, like, how are people perceiving my brand, and what effect does that have on how often they purchase what they purchase and things like that, which I don't know. It seems very obvious, but here we are.
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Well, it's also, like, for a lot of. So I cover a lot of, like, the TV market for traditional TV advertisers. Things like brand lift, brand awareness, having studies for those. That's old hat for them. So is the. Are these brand health metrics just coming about as if they're a new thing? Because it's a new crop of advertisers that are learning about them. Whereas a png, Unilever, Pepsi and Coke, maybe. Like, really? You just find it out about this stuff?
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Well, what's interesting is, like, some of it. So for, like, Carol. But I Talked to them. Right. As they're expanding to the US and working on broadening their horizons, it's becoming relatively new. But for, like, let's say Mars owned Sheba and Caesar, it was less of, like, the soft metrics becoming new and more of, like, them having a new priority. Right now. That one, like I said, LLMs are coming into the picture. Technology has also made it a lot easier for them to determine, like, what the correlation is between their brand health and their sales. So it's not like my mother's favorite phrase is, there's nothing new under the sun, but it just seems like a reawakening of, like, oh, these things actually matter.
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Okay, are we about to start talking about Media Mix model? And I feel like we're heading towards media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling, because for whatever reason, people determine that there should be two variations of MMM for another acronym to throw into the mix.
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You would be correct, and that is indeed where we're headed. So on the one hand, talking about the technology that's made this a lot easier, generative AI has democratized what MMM is capable of, how they're able to measure, and things like that, and who has access to these dashboards. So. So I feel like in these conversations that I'm having, there's just been, I hate to use the word again, but a democratization of how easy it is to be able to connect the dots there, even when you're thinking about things like ctv. Right. The metrics have gotten better. When I wrote about this two years ago, it was kind of like the promised land. Since then, the ability for, like, targeting, the ability for measurement, the insights, the ad tech partners that these CTV platforms have to allow for, those insights have all improved. So, yeah, we're just coming full circle here with brand metrics.
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Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Cause I remember actually it was the May 2024 digitally Programmatic marketing Summit, where I remember talking to some people there about mmms media mix modeling. And the big thing they were talking about is that this has become more accessible to clients because the costs of these had gone down. Like, at that point, one person I was talk saying, yeah, it only costs like $120,000 a year to, like, have MMM as part of the mix. Which, I mean, for you and I, that's a bunch of money.
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Yeah.
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But for a brand who's spending, let's say their annual ad spend is $10 million, dedicating 1% of that to a tool that can tell you, like, okay, here's at A high level how your ad spend is correlating to brand lift, brand consideration towards actual sales, being able to like pull all of that together. Because for anyone who's been somewhat fortunate enough to like not have to deal with media mix modeling in the past, how I think of it is like a farmer's almanac for marketing where it takes all the historical data specific to a brand and it's marketing, but then also like economic factors. I mean honestly it could take like weather events into consideration, like all the factors that could affect the performance of marketing spend on a channel basis. Although that gets a little fuzzy because it's more so like here's how traditional TV did, here's how like digital video did.
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Yeah.
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And so it's broad strokes in that sense. But the point is to give a brand like a sense of here's how things have been going for you, here's the trend line and let's use this report card in a way to project where you should be spending your money going forward.
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Yeah.
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Tricky part about MMM is like things change so much. Like I remember immediately after Covid, it's just like do mmm, do media mix models even hold up anymore when you have this like hopefully once in a generation, once in a lifetime event that just kind of scraps everything it seems.
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Yes. With and with everything within marketing, like the better that something gets, the more scrutiny then it gets. And I think we're seeing the same thing with MMMs. But to your point, I talked to an strategist over at New Engine Digital marketing agency and one of the things that he told me is that two or three years ago only huge massive enterprises could afford some type of mmm. Right. Spending hundred thousand dollars. Now it can be obtained for hypothetically speaking, 10 a year in some use cases or even built internally if you're really good at like Claude or something like that.
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Well also I mean Google open sourced and media mix model called Meridian like a year or two ago, in which case then it makes it so that anyone could effectively build an MMM in house.
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So you've got the tools on one hand which have made it a lot easier for brand health metrics to matter again. And on the other hand you've got kind of marketers, their hands are being forced because brand awareness, brand health is becoming important as LLM start to, you know, crawl not just their sites but also like their reputation online. So it's kind of two things that are happening simultaneously. I'm curious Tim, because at one point you were covering this kind of paid ads and what social advertising looked like pre Covid. My I showed up only during COVID What did this look like beforehand? Was brand health bare metrics important back then? Are we just coming full circle? Like I suspect?
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Yes, but to like a specific type of advertising. So like what was going on with. Let's use Facebook as an example because if we're talking social, Facebook's always generally the best example for social advertising. So in the like 2015-2019 timeframe, Facebook was really trying to go hard after brand advertisers. It was doing deals with like Nielsen and Catalina to be able to for advertisers to measure their Facebook ads like they would their traditional TV ads, to do brand lift studies, to be able to associate their Facebook advertising to shopper data shopper performance through things like Catalina. But that was pretty limited to like the traditional TV advertiser. Like traditional brand advertising. Facebook was trying to go after that big money.
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Yeah, yeah.
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At the same time you had in that period of time the rise of the direct to consumer companies. Yes, these were brands that grew up on Facebook ads, but they grew up as what was then called direct response advertisers at some point in that time got rebranded towards performance marketers. But basically these were the people who cared about cost per click, cared about. Here's another one for you. Cac. Do you know about cac?
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Customer acquisition costs?
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Yep, there we are. And then what's the LT like? Life ltv Lifetime value.
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Yes.
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So like all these and roas return on ad spend was another one. So these were all advertisers who are just like, look, if I'm putting a dollar in, I want to know exactly how much I'm getting out of that. But towards 2018 timeframe, a lot of those DTC advertisers were still doing well and had built up really respectable businesses, but they were hitting a cap in a way on their customers. They realized, oh, I need to build a brand, I need to get into brand advertising. And so what started happening is you had some of those brands start advertising on tv, little bit on streaming, but like traditional TV was where money was going. And we had a bunch of reporting in 2018, 2019 timeframe around the DTC advertisers that were investing in traditional TV. And you also had a lot of the traditional TV networks really loving that that money was starting to get spent with them. Seeing that as the next wave. Even like immediately post Covid, I remember having conversations with some of the big TV networks, ad sales execs about how they were Trying to go after DTC advertising. Yeah, but Covid kind of threw everything up in the wash. Because pre Covid, these things were kind of happening in parallel where the digital platforms were trying to provide the high level brand health metrics to the traditional brand advertisers. And, and the D2C advertisers were starting to learn or get into brand advertising, but weren't quite at the point yet to like be investing in brand lift studies, brand awareness, because they didn't have like the historical data that would have helped that to make sense. If you're doing a brand lift study, you need to have historical baselines, benchmarks to be able to judge against. And so it sounds like now enough time has passed where we're at this point where the these two parallel tracks have intersected.
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Well, it's only a matter of time. Sure. But yes, that's, that's absolutely it. As I'm talking to media buyers, like I had to, I talked to some media buyers at Media by Mother and one of their talking points and it was so funny talking to them because it was like a very clear frustration where even bigger brands are still having to kind of come on board with brand health metrics because Everybody, not just D2C's to your point, have become accustomed to conversions, which is put a dollar in, get a dollar out. Right. Even with like sports marketing, live sports, that's become a bigger thing. More and more brands are getting into this space. But Media by Mother, you know, folks were basically saying like they're trying to get their clients over the line because they're in live sports marketing. There is not this conversion, put a dollar in, get a dollar out. But there's still a value. You just have to wait for it. So then this is again where the brand health metrics come in to try advertisers that there is some type of like metric that you can take back to your CFO to then say, this is what we need money for.
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Right.
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That's kind of what I'm hearing happening here.
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Right. Which is kind of like it's become more of an issue in the past decade because you have these digital native advertisers that are like. Oh yeah, very. It's like they're very used to like instant gratification in a way. So it's like you have, they're like the iPad kids of advertising. I think that's fair. You expect to like be able to watch anything at any time right now.
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Yeah.
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Whereas like the traditional advertisers who have these do These brand lift studies and are updating their MMM models every, I mean quarterly is pretty rapid, but like once or twice a year who kind of recognize you have to wait on these things? Yes, that's like those of us who are around when you had to wait once a week for a new episode of your show. And like there was then you were gonna have seasons and summer, you weren't gonna have your show around all that. Now everyone, it sounds like, is having to get used to the fact that like this stuff isn't moving. The brand health metrics don't move that quickly, but the market moves so quickly that that feels like a big challenge at the moment. Because I would think even when it comes to the AI chatbots, which seems to be driving a lot of this brand health interest, how quickly are you able to see changes in brand appearance or brand consideration on these AI chatbots and then how quickly does that get reflected in the models? Tim, in the marketing models?
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We could have a whole separate podcast about the concept of AI visibility. I'm actually reporting on that right now. I'm sure you've seen there has been a slew of companies that have cropped up, both old and new. Microsoft, Adobe, Semrush, and then some newer ones that are all promising AI visibility. But that is a big question of how quickly are these models being filled with information for a marketer to then say, okay, this is what I know about how my brand appears in these chatbots to then go and make a decision about what the marketing strategy looks like, what brand health metrics look like and things like this. So nobody has a good answer for that one.
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To complicate things even further, like how much does that matter too? Like what's the. Because part of all of this when it comes to media mix models or marketing mix models is it's not only reporting on the performance or the impact or the amount of spend, but there's also a weighting to it. W E I G H T I N G weighting.
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Thank you.
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Look at me spelling be champion. Sixth grade, baby. But like, okay, we're showing up in these AI chatbot models, great, but does that actually matter or do we like kind of tamp down the importance of that? How do we recalibrate that over time? It gets super complicated. Which as someone who doesn't have to deal with this stuff, really fascinating. But that also leads to terms like brandformance.
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So double edged sword, we come full circle. It's really interesting to see how they're going to continue moving forward Even, like I said, talking to the folks at Media by Mother, they said, you know, before the super bowl started this year, they had brands that were like, you know, no, thank you. And they were like, you best get on board while you can, whether it be organically advertising around it or like in it. And their clients were like, well, we can't prove the efficacy of it immediately, so no thanks. Lo and behold, there's like brand health metrics that start being tacked onto these things and these clients come back and say, hey, actually this is where, you know, they start to put their head in their hands. But I am curious kind of what this looks like going forward, because to your point, I don't know if anybody has a good grasp right now on how much information that you actually need to determine what AI visibility impacts are, how much it matters.
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Sure, the answer is more always, always.
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But also, like this, the same conversation that we had about like, data, where workers had all the data in the world, even with the death of third party cookies, and still, how helpful was it if you couldn't, you know, parse through it in a way that made sense?
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A
This makes me wonder about a term we haven't used yet, a metric we haven't talked about yet, but was very popular for a period of time and I feel like has faded, although I'm sure it's still being used certain places. The effective cpm.
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Oh, oh, this is a new one for me, please.
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So effective CPM is basically the idea of it's especially popular when it comes to, I mean, Facebook used it, I think YouTube has used it too. But like TV and streaming, especially addressable TV, it gets really popular because it's the idea of you have the actual CPM that you paid, but then what are you paying to reach the target audience? Like, basically, what are the filters to account for whatever waste that is part of that? Because you can have traditional TV where you're paying a certain CPM to just reach anyone who's watching at that point in time. But then if you're able to get the measurement reporting to be able to say and like X number of people in your target audience were watching, then like, the pricing evaluation changes a bit more. And so effective cpm, now that I'm thinking about it, based on this conversation we've been having, feels like the pricing model of the brandformance marketer.
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Oh boy, it makes sense. And it also kind of takes us back to like, is anything new at this point besides, you know, like the LLM chatbots and whatnot? But it seems that things are becoming full circle, and anybody who was on Madison Avenue during the Mad Men era is probably rolling around their grave now that we're coming back to the same things they started with.
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That said, there's always a new twist on things, so I think the broad contours are a circle, but it's also kind of a spiral. And then the question is just like, are we spiraling in? Are we spiraling out? Are we spiraling up? Are we spiraling down? I know with all of the terms that we've been thrown around in this conversation, I definitely feel like I'm spiraling in some direction. But Kamika, I really appreciate you walking through all of this with me, helping me to understand it in a way that doesn't feel like a ton of jargon, and also helping me to connect the dots. Going back to what the publishers were saying about needing to retrain their sales teams from being performance sellers to brand sellers.
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Yeah, this was fun. Thanks so much for letting me app.
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A
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Digiday podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Get more from Digiday with our daily newsletter sent out each weekday morning. Visit digiday.comnewsletters to sign up.
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Sam.