The pressure on marketers to deliver short-term hits at the expense of long-term growth is reaching new levels, according to Suncorp Executive General Manager for Brand & Customer Experience, Mim Haysom.

Legendary adman Sir John Hegarty thinks the imbalance risks spinning out of control – at biblical proportions.

“People in my role are increasingly under pressure to drive growth faster, and the shorter tenure in roles doesn’t help, but that’s only going to get shorter [and then] the more pressure there is to deliver growth faster,” said Haysom. 

“It’s a challenge to stay the course and not get overly distracted by that pressure – you have to deliver, but you’ve also got to make sure that you protect the relationships that are going to help you deliver in the longer term. So it’s a real balancing act. It’s a challenge, and it’s getting harder.”

Haysom told a recent Mi3 commercial podcast that she has been able to protect brand investment from budget cuts while increasing performance spend – i.e. search and social – as customers scramble for cost of living pressure relief and better insurance deals. She said searches had spiked as much as 50 per cent last year, hence seeking to “capture that demand” by funnelling more budget into paid search.

Hegarty acknowledged the need to react to demand spikes. But he warned heightened pressure to shift investment to short-term demand capture risks marketing collapsing in on itself – a reset that may ultimately be required.

“We’re going to look back at this period of time and say we overreached on performance, and we didn’t invest enough in in persuasion, we didn’t invest enough in the culture of a brand,” Per Hegarty. “But just because we’re in the midst of this maelstrom at the moment, it isn’t the way it’s going to go on. It will change. I guarantee it will change, because people will [recognise] it’s becoming less effective, we’ve got more people switching off.

“I think the communications industry is in a crossroads, and it’s going to need to change.”

Hard vs. home

Hegarty said he asks CEOs one question: “Are you interested in incremental gain or exponential gain. What do you want?” 

He’s certain exponential gain will not be achieved by ever-sharper targeting as touted by the handful of platforms capturing the lion’s share of global ad dollars.

“At the moment, what we’re looking at is the ability to reach people, and they [the platforms] have sold something very, very clever – which is, ‘with this, there is no waste, we have eliminated waste’, and that is very attractive to a left-brain thinker. Most business people are left-brain thinkers, so they [the platforms] have managed to convince them that, ‘actually I have reduced waste, and actually I can talk directly to the person who needs to buy your product’. Now the flaw in that argument is, how do you know who wants to buy my product?,” said Hegarty. 

“You’re going down an ever-decreasing tunnel rather than expanding out.”

Hegarty gets religion

“When Jesus stood on the mount, what does it say in the Bible? He spoke to the masses. It doesn’t say in the Bible, Jesus spoke to 18-24 year olds with a disposable income of 20 shekels a week, and some personalised communication. Lo and behold, and whatever you think, that brand [the Bible] is still going today,” said Hegarty.

“That idea of conversion, that idea that a brand has got to go out and convert, is fundamentally important, and that’s what the left-brain people forget, that if you want to be here in 20 years’ time, you’ve got to grow the next group of people who are going to buy your product,” he added.

“A brand is made not just by the people who buy it, but also by the people who know about it, and that is crucial.”

“Promotion is fundamentally important, but you’ve got to have persuasion with it as well. You can’t have one without the other.”

Hegarty urged marketers to resist pressure to chop and change brand creative in pursuit of short-term marginal gain at the expense of genuine growth.

“The trouble we all have is we live in a bubble called commerce, and the people out there don’t, they live in a world called engage me, entertain me,” he suggested.

“The trouble is that we’re being encouraged by those who don’t really understand the principles of communication … to keep changing your message.”

Hegarty argued that marketers – particularly sellers of big ticket items – have been sold a lie in believing they need to be always on, and are therefore pumping out “digital landfill” that is killing their brand.

“Why not do four great things a year and get people talking?”

Performance politics

There’s growing evidence locally that even dyed in the wool performance advertisers are coming around to Hegarty’s view. Ecom pureplay Temple & Webster invested $5m in brand in H1 and said it plans to take brand investment north of $10m for full FY25 – when it has previously spent almost all of its circa $100m annual marketing spend within short-term tactical channels, i.e. search and social. Its rationale is that spiralling performance ad costs are now significantly degrading marketing return on investment – down 40 per cent over the last four years per the retailer’s H1 results.

But others are sceptical that approach will pay off.

While acknowledging both search and social are “maxed out”, Taboola CEO Adam Singolda suggests marketers taking money out of performance channels and investing it into brand are on a hiding to nothing.

“The industry at a macro level is going more and more towards performance advertising and outcomes …I get why people are trying those things [diverting performance budgets]. Maybe in some markets, you’re so out of options that you’re trying to be creative by putting some money into brand advertising in the hope that it increases your organic traffic and effectively reduces your price [acquisition cost],” he told Mi3.

“I salute it as a creative idea. But I think if you have a choice, you’ll never do it. There’s no world in which you don’t risk your job, whereby you have an option to put a dollar into something that creates results, but [instead] you choose branding.”

Singolda is positioning Taboola as a performance alternative – bidding to put performance ads onto premium publisher pages and provide an alternative to social media.

Whether Taboola can put a dent in Meta’s revenues – it’s eyeing $30bn – remains to be seen.

Either way, Suncorp’s Haysom – heading to Cannes next month as a creative data juror – is unequivocal on where her focus lies.

“You have to maintain a focus on creative excellence and customer obsession to get to really strong long-term business outcomes and to drive growth. So beware the shortcuts,” she says, particularly with AI creative.