Branding Benefits Series: Over-reliance on short-term ad results is killing campaign effectiveness

Modern marketers want immediate results, and as a result their ads often ask for an immediate response.

However, recent findings based on the seminal marketing publication “The Long and Short of It” show that the focus on instantaneous ROI is devastating potential profits long term.

So how did we get here? Digital advertising has hung its hat on available metrics and the ROI that can be attributed to them. These metrics themselves tend to skew toward the more immediate and easier to measure sales spikes to prove performance and associated value.

Since short term is easier to sell through, advocate for, and justify in, over time it became the status quo. It takes more advanced statistical skills and marketing experience to substantiate longer-term brand-building efforts.

Because of this, marketing dollars have shifted, especially in the last decade, away from the more abstract long-term branding efforts advertising has traditionally been founded in and toward the easier to measure short-term metrics.

This sub-optimal approach ends up cannibalizing campaign dollars and advertisers are beholden to the more immediate marketing results.

Traditional brand campaigns take time and patience to develop and even longer to deliver on a promise of measurable sales impact.

But if marketers are willing to stay the course and remain patient, brand building ads can drive performance exponentially in 24-36 months, where as short-term response ads typically hit maximum efficiency within the first year of deployment.