GCC Marketers Know What's Right. They're Just Not Doing It.

There's a survey doing the rounds — Campaign Middle East covered it recently — about how GCC senior marketing leaders are 'rethinking the role of brand.' Here's the piece on it if you'd like to see it, but I'll summarize it anyway:

The research is from JWI, an independent agency, and I have no reason to doubt the numbers.

57% of the marketers surveyed said brand-building is the primary driver of long-term growth. But 72% admitted their actual current focus is on short-term performance. And 71% say they have paused or delayed campaigns at some point in the last couple of years.

Let's read that again slowly. Most of these people know the right answer. And most of them are still doing the opposite.

This is not a knowledge gap. Les Binet and Peter Field solved the knowledge gap over a decade ago. They went through the IPA Effectiveness Databank with data on hundreds of real campaigns with real results and showed pretty conclusively that the optimal split for most categories is roughly 60% long-term brand, 40% short-term activation.

That work has been sitting there since 2013. It's been cited, re-cited, presented at every marketing conference in every time zone. If you are a senior marketing leader, you probably have absorbed the basic findings of The Long and the Short of It.

(Yes, I will tell you my own misgivings about this data before we go further. One, it's data exclusively from a set of campaigns submitted for effectiveness awards. So the vast majority of campaigns out there aren't represented. You can give that a pass, if people thought the others weren't effective enough to submit for an award. So it's not the best data, but it's a reasonable start. )

So if the knowledge is there, and these surveyed marketers in the GCC agree with the knowledge — then why is 72% of their energy going into short-term performance?

I'll tell you why. Because their CFO doesn't care about brand health scores. Because their board wants to see revenue this quarter. Because their CEO read something about 'performance marketing ROI' on LinkedIn and now asks about it in every monthly review.

Because nobody ever got fired for buying a Meta conversion campaign, but you can absolutely get fired for defending a six-month brand campaign to a board that wanted to see results in six weeks.

The incentive structure is broken, not the understanding.

I've had this conversation, some version of it, with marketing heads across categories and countries. I've had this as well with the companies I've invested in - where the founders imagine a short-term pressure that even I, the investor in their business, don't have.

All these heads nod vigorously when we talk about mental availability, about how light buyers do most of the volume work, about how you need to be remembered at all category entry points before someone even gets to your landing page.

They get it. I know they genuinely get it. Then six weeks later they're asking us to 'optimize for conversions' because Q3 is looking soft.

Actually, as a sidebar — one of the more quietly damning findings in this research is that 80% of the marketers who paused campaigns were simultaneously reallocating that budget elsewhere rather than simply cutting. Meaning the money didn't disappear. It moved.

And I'd bet a fairly large amount that it moved toward 'performance'. Towards things that can generate a reportable number before the next leadership meeting.

Which tells you something important: the problem isn't budgets drying up, the problem is budgets running scared.

Now here's the thing that doesn't get said enough. The Binet/Field 60/40 isn't really about brand versus performance as separate religions: It's about the same money working at two different time horizons. Your performance campaign is harvesting demand that your brand campaign created.

If you only ever harvest and never plant, you will eventually stand in an empty field wondering what happened to your yields. The wheat didn't vanish. You just stopped growing it.

This is what is happening in a lot of GCC organizations right now. With one e-com firm we worked with across the GCC for a few years, we were called in to "do a little brand work" when 100% of their budgets were going into performance. This is interesting, because our background was in 'performance' - we were one of the world's first agencies to offer to work exclusively on performance. And our quick diagnosis was that all they were doing was plucking uncommitted buyers from Google search and not building any awareness or preference for the brand. It took an enormous amount of persuasion to get them to spend 5% on brand work.

But within a few months we proved - after tracking the relevant cookies - that brand work was driving performance sales - and doing so at 1/3rd the cost they were paying otherwise. In a few more years the 'brand' budgets edged up to about 30% of the whole - while the revenues tripled and the margins quadrupled.

This obeisance to the gods of Meta and Google isn't unique to the GCC, by the way. I see it in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe.

At the nub is the issue that the brand budget and the performance budget are managed by different teams, measured against different KPIs, and often sit with different agency relationships.

So nobody is even looking at them as one thing at different horizons. They're looking at two separate P&Ls and optimising each one independently.

Which is a bit like trying to run a marathon by only training your left leg. The analogy that works better for me is to say "Brand plants the seeds that performance harvests. In fact, without performance, the harvest will happen anyway. But without brand, your field will dry up pretty soon."

The other thing the survey findings hint at, without quite saying it, is that 'uncertainty' has become a very convenient excuse.

When the economy wobbles, when there's a regional tension, when a category softens — the first thing that gets paused is the thing that's hardest to attribute. Brand.

You can't draw a straight line from a TV campaign in January to a purchase in September, not neatly, not in a spreadsheet. So it gets cut. (Though actually you CAN draw a straight line from an online brand campaign with cookies and beacons on, till an online purchase that happens even 14 months later.)

The Facebook conversion campaign stays because someone can point to a cost-per-acquisition number, even if that number is measuring something that was going to happen anyway.

This "Attribution Theatre" is the enemy of brand investment. It always has been.

You build a measurement system that can only see short-term signals, and then you make long-term decisions based on what the system shows you. And then you wonder why your brand slowly hollows out while your cost-per-acquisition slowly climbs.

Ehrenberg-Bass has been saying for decades that most buyers in any category are light buyers: people who buy from you occasionally, irregularly, and who also buy from your competitors without much guilt or loyalty.

Coke drinkers drink Pepsi. Nike buyers own Adidas. The job of brand advertising is not to convert them or lock them in, that doesn't really happen much. The job of brand advertising is to make sure your brand is mentally available at the moment folks happen to be in a buying situation.

That takes time. That takes consistency. And that takes not pausing the campaign every time Q3 looks 'soft'.

The JWI research calls this a 'gap between awareness and action.' Which is a polite way of putting it.

I'd call it something less polite: It's the gap between knowing what's right and having the spine to defend it in a room full of people demanding short-term numbers.

The marketers who close that gap aren't the ones who find a better framework or read a better book.

They're the ones who've figured out how to tell their CFO a story that makes sense in CFO language. How brand investment today is the demand-generation cost-reduction mechanism of twelve months from now.

How a customer who already knows and trusts your brand costs significantly less to convert than a cold stranger seeing your performance ad for the first time.

That argument isn't complicated. It just requires someone in the room willing to make it, and willing to keep making it even when the quarterly numbers are making everyone nervous.

57% of GCC senior marketers say they believe in brand-building.

Good. I hope the other 43% are listening. And I hope all 57% find the nerve to act on what they already know.