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 (... were making it one in May 2024), their main hobbyhorse.
More than 87% of respondents put "Brand-building" at the top of the list of strategic measures used to drive growth.
We're talking about commercial growth here, not just brand awareness.
In my opinion, the question posed by Mc Kinsey actually allows us to see the typical profile of the marketing mix preferred by CMOs emerge from the responses, namely :
1 - Brand-building (87%): the enhancement of branded content to reinforce the company's territory, its preference, the emotional spectrum of its outreach to its audiences in order, in particular, to capture attention.
2 - Full funnel strategy (78%): ... basically making sure that point "1" above (at the very top) plays an active part in achieving business objectives (at the very bottom).
In fact, it's interesting to note that everything else is inseparable from the first points. Investing in content, for example, only makes sense if you want to feed a full funnel strategy that mixes brand message and product content.
In an ideally digital world, offering advertisers tools capable of serving - and measuring - the impact of every euro invested across the entire value chain in near-real time, the answers in the table seem to me to be rather coherent and part of the same effort.
When a brand invests in social advertising from its own BM, it's very rare that the campaigns aren't "set up to perform".
The communications department may not follow the same KPIs as the ecommerce department, but budgets tend to be the same and are aligned with the same objectives.
Variations in ad-centric (impressions, clicks) or business-centric (CPL, ROAS, sales, etc.) indicators may be felt, depending on the very nature of the content and what is expected of it.
Andréa points out that, over the years, branding budgets have been cut in favor of perf channels.
I believe that an advertiser's ability to leverage branded content as part of a perf strategy, while optimizing the entire funnel, enables them to rationalize and optimize investments that were previously based solely on indicators that were a little vague and not immediately usable.
Yes, the budgets have undergone a few adjustments, but the results of the table seem to me to be entirely consistent with the concerns of brands and with what we see every day at Mediads.
