An interesting question posed by Andréa Bensaid in her LinkedIn post earlier this week (link below).
The table in the illustration seems to show the extent to which CMOs are making branding a priority (… or were making it a priority in May 2024), their main focus.
More than 87% of respondents said they placed “brand building” at the top of their strategic measures for growth.
We are talking here about commercial growth, not just brand awareness.
In my opinion, the question asked by McKinsey reveals the typical profile of CMOs’ preferred marketing mix, namely:
1 – Brand building (87%): promoting brand content to strengthen the company’s position, its appeal, and the emotional spectrum of its influence on its audiences, particularly to capture their attention.
2 – Full funnel strategy (78%): … basically ensuring that point “1” above (at the top) actively contributes to the achievement of commercial objectives (at the bottom).
It is also interesting to note, if we continue to analyze the responses in the table, that everything else is inseparable from the first points. Investing in content only makes sense, for example, to fuel a full funnel strategy that combines brand messaging and product content.
In an ideal digital world, offering advertisers tools capable of delivering—and measuring—the impact of every dollar invested across the entire value chain in near real time, the responses in the table seem to me to be fairly consistent and part of the same effort.
When a brand invests in social advertising from its own BM, it is very rare for campaigns not to be “set up for performance.”
The communications department will undoubtedly not follow the same KPIs as the e-commerce department, but the budgets tend to be the same and are aligned with the same objectives.
Variations in ad-centric (impressions, clicks) or business-centric (CPL, ROAS, CA, etc.) indicators may be felt depending on the nature of the content and what is expected of it.
Andréa points out that over the years, branding budgets have been reduced in favor of performance channels.
I believe that the ability for an advertiser to leverage branded content in a performance strategy, while optimizing the entire funnel, allows them to streamline and optimize investments that were previously only measurable against somewhat vague and immediately unusable indicators.
Yes, budgets have undergone some adjustments, but the results in the table seem to me to be entirely consistent with the concerns of brands and with what we see every day at Mediads.
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