CANNES — They have traditionally been regarded as two distinct places on the marketing “funnel”. But could “branding” and “performance” advertising now be colliding together?
Whilst the former tactic aims to switch on consumer interest, the latter sees marketers pay for end results. Now there are so many ad technologies out there, things are changing, says Bob Walczak, the global CEO of Light Reaction, WPP’s performance marketing division.
“(There is) everything from viewability technology to programmatic and RTB, fraud prevention technology,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I think there’s a real opportunity with performance to be able to kind of uplevel that and talk about it more as an outcome. It’s almost a merger of branding and performance coming together to kind of deliver an outcome-based marketplace.”
Light Reaction, living in WPP’s Xaxis programmatic media company, sells marketing only with those defined customer outcomes.
“The problem is that the performance marketers have really kind of degraded the brand just to achieve that outcome,” Walczak adds. “I don’t think that’s any longer needed. I think you can leverage the technology, have quality media plus quality audiences and deliver a quality outcome leveraging the technology you have today.”
