It's not just a war on Iran. It's a war on brand budgets.

I hear the bells toll around brands in the UAE. "The CFO told us to cut our costs, so we're doing away with the brand spend." Poof.

Not that we have any fish to fry in this fight. We're an agency that doesn't charge media commissions anyway - so it matters not to us whether you want us to buy from Meta or from Hypermedia. We don't make more or less money either way.

But it does matter to us indirectly, because we earn most of our money from revenue share. Yes, we're that sort of agency which puts its skin in the game.

And every time we've pulled money out of brand ads and put money into pay-per-click we've seen revenues, margins, and our incomes go down.

Because we don't eat at the trough of under-the-table media kickbacks or whatever politically correct term bribery is called these days, we can see how the marketing machine works. And it basically lines up with what Byron Sharp and his gang at Ehrenberg-Bass have been telling us for a while.

Brands grow when their light users grow. (Not heavy users mind you - loyalty marketing is mostly a waste of money, and more on that in another piece.)

And to grow light users a brand needs to keep recruiting more light users, as it keeps losing some of them due to natural attrition. Again, no such thing as loyalty.

The only way to grow light users is via brand advertising: Get people to know who you are, what you do, what your name is, what your identity is, and how to recognize you. Once they see you enough times, you get into their heads, yes that Byron Sharp-esque "mental availability" again.

And if and when these folks are in a buying frame of mind, if you're at hand ("physical availability") and if you're in their head all at the same moment, then there's a good chance you'll be purchased.

That's as simple as it really is.

Now how does "performance advertising" work?

Two ways. One, it gets the 'f*** the brand* bottom fishers. The ones wanting the cheapest flight from Dubai to Delhi, who cares. Sure you can pay a lot of money to Sundar Pichai to get these guys to buy from you (both by discounting your cost to reduce your margin and then discounting the margin further by paying Google top dollar for a top spot.) But you get them today, and another airline or venture-funded travel portal pulls the same trick tomorrow, so you lose the customer to them. So why even bother getting these guys? Are you really such a masochist?

And the other types you get from 'performance ads' are those who anyway wanted something in your category - or even were looking for your brand - and then found your paid ad on their search, or it was cunningly re-targeted from a brand ad they already saw. And because they'd heard of you due to the brand ads, they get willingly pulled to the checkout counter by another sales guy who attributes the sale to him. When it was always yours. All this does is bring in revenue that was always going to come to you anyway- but you're paying twice for it, once for the brand ads, the second time for the performance ads.

This tells you two things. (a) Last click attribution is nonsense. And (b) all that performance campaigns do is insert themselves between your customer and the purchase that was going to happen anyway, and then charge you for the dubious pleasure.

Now you see what happens when you cut brand spend and put the money in the Google / Meta bucket, whether it's war or peace?

New light users stop coming in. (Or if they come in, they're the bottom fishers who never come back unless you're the cheapest.) And old light users keep going out, as they always do.

While the guys who were going to buy from you keep buying anyway, this time via a stop at the PPC corral. This brings you less margin, as you're paying a more to get the guys who were anyway already yours.

We've seen this happen brand after brand, war after war, recession after recession.

We've also seen the opposite. We've raised brand spends in these so-called bad times, and almost always, brands that did so have done well.

We're lucky to be part-owners of some of the brands we market - lucky enough to be agency AND client. (The Agency - Client fights here are so much fun!)

In fact, for one of them, in the beauty business, we kept the brand spend up during this recent war in the GCC when the others went silent. And had the biggest ever sales in that week. 30% more than we ever did in peace time. And there was neither discounting nor performance ads.

What we're saying isn't new. Nielsen recently documented what anyone who's been in this business longer than five years could have told you for free.

That the C-suite belief in long-term brand building has dropped from 80% to 69% of CMOs in a single year.

Economic uncertainty, tariff jitters, Straits of Hormuz, the usual suspects. Everyone's running toward 'immediately trackable performance channels.' Everyone's demanding proof.

We have a question. Proof of what, exactly?

Here's the thing about 'immediately trackable' metrics. They are, by definition, measuring things that were already going to happen. Someone who was going to buy your toothpaste anyway clicked your retargeted ad. You paid for the click. You called it a conversion. Your attribution model called it a win. Your CFO nodded. Everyone went home and drank a beer.

Meanwhile, the 43-year-old who'd never bought your brand and might have, if she'd seen your ad ten times in the last 2 months - she bought someone else's toothpaste.

Your model never saw her. She was never in your funnel. She doesn't exist in your dashboard.

This is not a new observation. Les Binet and Peter Field have been saying this since 2007, with the IPA Databank behind them: one of the largest bodies of actual marketing effectiveness evidence ever assembled.

Their finding, which I'll summarize in one line because they spent years proving it is straightforward: short-term activation and long-term brand building are both simultaneously necessary, and the ratio that works best is roughly 60% brand to 40% performance, though this varies by category.

Not 40/60 the other way. Not 20/80. Not 'whatever the CFO will sign off on this quarter.'

And yet here we are, 19 years later, in 2026, watching CMOs collectively move the dial in exactly the other direction, and calling it prudence.

I've sat in enough boardrooms to know how this goes. The CFO asks the CMO to justify the brand spend. The CMO, who knows in her bones that it works but can't point to a clean number on a slide, flinches. The performance team across the table has a dashboard full of CPAs and ROAS figures and last-click attributions that look extremely convincing if you don't think too hard about what they're actually measuring, especially when they're waving their hands so excitedly.

The CFO likes clean numbers. The performance budget survives. The brand budget gets trimmed. Repeat next quarter.

The truly evil part is that this damage doesn't show up immediately.

Brand equity erodes slowly — like rust, not like a car crash. You don't notice it happening. You keep hitting your short-term numbers for a while, because you're harvesting the equity you built over the past several years.

Then one quarter it stops working. Then pricing power mysteriously disappears. Then you're running promotions to move volume, which further trains your customers to wait for the discount.

Then some bright consultant recommends a 'brand refresh.' And so the cycle continues.

Procter & Gamble went through a version of this between 2012 and 2017. They cut reach, went narrow on targeting, poured into digital performance, declared victory. And then Marc Pritchard stood up at the IAB and called the whole thing out. P&G's own conclusion, from their own data, was that hyper-targeted digital had made their advertising less effective, not more.

They went back to broad reach. Their results improved.

That wasn't a small company running a boutique experiment. That was the world's largest advertiser, telling you, plainly, that they'd gotten it wrong.

The Nielsen piece also mentions retail media networks and creator marketing as measurable brand-building vehicles. We'll be charitable here and say: sometimes, yes. But we'd be careful if we were you.

Retail media is largely a toll that retailers charge you for access to shelves you were already on, dressed up in measurement language.

And 'creator marketing' - which two years ago, we called influencer marketing, and which ten years ago, we called celebrity endorsement - has a long and distinguished history of producing vanity metrics while shifting approximately zero volume.

There are exceptions. Yes, but they're exceptions.

What we find horribly fascinating is the problem at the center. The C-suite is 'demanding proof.' But proof of what exactly, and measured how, and over what time horizon?

A brand impression seen by someone who doesn't buy for another eight months — how do you measure that? You can't, really. Not cleanly. Not with the kind of dashboard tidiness that CFOs prefer.

So what happens is that marketers measure what's measurable and call it what matters. Those are not the same thing. Measuring the things you can measure precisely is not the same as measuring the things that matter precisely. Sure, your Insta video got 14,000 likes. But so what?

This, incidentally, is not unique to marketing. It's a general disease of organizations and education systems (Hello, MBAs!) that have learned to love metrics.

Bob McNamara ran the Vietnam War on the numbers dead on each side. He was measuring something. But he was measuring the wrong thing. The war did not go well for the USA.

Not a perfect analogy, we'll grant you. But the error is identical.

At Pinstorm, we've come at this from a different direction because we had to.

We charge on outcomes, not on hours spent. Which means we're personally, financially incentivized to make the actual thing work — and not to look busy justifying a media plan full of network junk where we maximize our media margins and kickbacks.

And what we've found, consistently, across markets, is that the Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass theories hold.

Brand investment pays back, and how.

It pays back over a longer horizon than most CFOs have patience for - or maybe even job longevity for, which is a corporate governance problem, and maybe a low-IQ Board problem. But it's not a marketing problem.

And the answer to a corporate governance problem is not to abandon your marketing strategy. Though we appreciate that's easier said than done when the CFO is in the room and your job is on the line.

The 69% of CMOs who still believe in long-term brand building - down from 80% - we're not worried about those people. We applaud them. They know. They'll be fine when the dust settles and the drones stop flying.

It's the ones who've convinced themselves that chasing trackable short-term signals is actually the smart, data-driven, rigorous approach - those are the ones who will have to make a belief U-turn in their careers. And lose a few promotions while doing so.

They're not being rigorous. They're being safe. There's a difference.

Binet said it more diplomatically than we will: short-termism is a perfectly rational response to the incentives most marketers face, and a perfectly catastrophic one for the brands they run.

The two things are simultaneously true.

Which, we suppose, is the tragedy of it.