If you ask a marketer in this region why their brand marketing budget hasn’t budged in years while performance spend keeps climbing, chances are you’d get the same answer almost every time: It’s too hard to measure.
The line of reasoning then usually follows that what is hard to measure is hard to value – hence it being too hard to put more dollars against those brand items even when intuitively most know they are working very hard.
I’m calling time on this thinking once and for all.
I’ve spent years measuring the nuts and bolts of hundreds of campaigns, which is why I can say with certainty that brand channels aren’t harder to measure than performance channels. They’ve simply been measured less consistently, often because the right approach wasn’t as easily readable or as well understood as the dashboards marketers have become used to.
There’s a real need to bring brand building back into the conversation, backed by trusted measurement to give it the credibility it deserves.
Social has played a big role in this shift of thinking, and the rise in performance marketing capability across this region, as they offer fast, straightforward ways to demonstrate results. But as those same channels start reaching the same audiences with diminishing returns, there’s a real need to bring brand building back into the conversation, backed by trusted measurement to give it the credibility it deserves.
I had the chance to dig into this issue at ATS Singapore recently, where the importance of closing the gaps in measurement frameworks was solidly under the spotlight. It’s clear there’s still a stubborn discrepancy between what measurement can do today and what most marketers assume it can do.
I think this disconnect exists because the measurement marketers have seen has been unconvincing; either borrowed from platforms which have no incentive to show anything but good results, or measured in silos and therefore unable to offer a full picture of campaign effectiveness.
There’s also been a tendency to rely on outdated metrics, like ad recall, as a proxy for exposure, which is inherently flawed. If you ask someone if they remember seeing an ad, you’re not measuring exposure, you’re just tracking familiarity. There’s a high risk people will default to naming the brands they already know, regardless of whether they saw the campaign you’re asking about.
As a general rule of thumb, you should only trust measurement that confirms someone was actually exposed to an impression, rather than assuming it. Today, independent third-party providers can passively verify digital ad exposure through technologies such as pixel matching and impression-level tracking, ensuring Brand Lift results are based on real exposure, not assumptions.
As a general rule of thumb, you should only trust measurement that confirms someone was actually exposed to an impression, rather than assuming it.
Without confirmed exposure, a Brand Lift number tells you nothing about how or whether your media spend worked. The murkiness of those results mean more marketers deviate from investing in brand marketing, therefore missing out on all it has to offer.
My fellow panelist at ATS Singapore, Raveena Udasi Mathew, summed this up nicely when she argued performance marketing itself is no longer a differentiator – instead, it’s the ability to measure across channels and deliver an omnichannel view that is setting businesses apart.
With all that being said, no matter how powerful and accurate your form of measurement, it has to be consistent across the entire funnel. Too much of our industry runs one methodology for social, a different tool for TV and nothing at all for OOH. It’s no wonder they flounder when asked to compare results across all three.
A clear solution: we need to leave measuring in silos in the past.
A campaign measured on three different bases can’t be optimized against itself because there’s no baseline to optimize toward. For brand marketing to improve, and thus for measurement infrastructure to improve across the board, there needs to be consistent, independent measurement across the entire funnel.
Advertising on brand channels is often justified by intuition, or simply due to it being category convention, but there’s more value in building consistent measurement so that brand spend can be defended with the same confidence and rigor as performance spend.
My hope is that more marketers start treating brand building not as an afterthought, but as a standard that runs across every channel. It won’t change the way the media works, but it might change how confidently we can talk about why it works and build stronger investment plans as a result.
And ultimately, making every dollar work harder is the holy grail for every marketer in 2026 and beyond.
Simon is Commercial Director for SEA and India at On Device.
