by Ber | Apr 3, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
In the beginning was the channel. Then there were channels, plural, and they were managed separately, by separate teams, with separate KPIs, and they didn’t talk to each other, and that was called “multichannel,” and it was fine, more or less, in the way that most things that are somewhat disorganized are fine. And then came the consultants, and they looked upon the channels, and they said: “What if the channels were not separate? What if the customer experience were seamless across all touchpoints? What if we called it ‘omnichannel’ and charged accordingly?” And lo, the omnichannel age began.
That was approximately fifteen years ago. In the interim, the word “omnichannel” has been used to describe approximately every possible combination of marketing activities, from genuinely integrated customer experiences to a company that has a website, an Instagram, and a newsletter they send out on alternating Thursdays when someone remembers to log into Mailchimp. The word has traveled so far from its original meaning that it now functions primarily as a signal of seriousness rather than a description of capability. Saying you have an omnichannel strategy is like saying you have a strategic approach to breathing. It sounds important. It is impossible to disagree with. It commits you to absolutely nothing specific.
What Omnichannel Was Supposed to Mean
The genuine version of omnichannel is straightforward and genuinely hard: a customer’s experience of your brand should be coherent and continuous regardless of which channel they use, and the channels should share information so that the experience improves with each interaction rather than resetting to zero every time the customer moves from your app to your store to your customer service line. If you called your bank last week and explained a problem, you shouldn’t have to explain it again when you open the app. If you put something in your online cart and then walk into the physical store, the store associate should know, or at least the system should.
This is technically achievable and organizationally catastrophic. It requires shared data infrastructure across systems that were built at different times by different teams and frequently don’t communicate. It requires breaking down the organizational silos where the digital team, the retail team, the CRM team, and the customer service team each own their piece of the customer and protect it from the others. It requires someone with enough authority and enough persistence to force these teams to coordinate, and that person either doesn’t exist or is currently stuck in a steering committee meeting about the omnichannel strategy deck.
The Omnichannel Strategy Deck
Most companies’ omnichannel journey begins with a strategy deck. The deck outlines the vision: a seamless customer experience, unified data, integrated communications, consistent brand presence across all touchpoints. The deck is beautiful. The vision is compelling. The roadmap at the back of the deck has sixteen workstreams and a three-year timeline and a budget that gets cut in half during the next planning cycle.
What actually gets implemented, typically, is the visible layer: the same visual identity applied consistently across channels, a content calendar that tries to coordinate messaging across platforms, a CRM system that is technically integrated with the website though the integration works less well than the vendor implied. This is not nothing. Consistency of appearance and message is genuinely valuable. It is also not what the omnichannel strategy deck promised, which was a fundamentally different customer experience powered by unified data and seamless transitions between touchpoints.
The gap between the deck and the reality is explained, in subsequent decks, as “Phase Two.” Phase Two will address the data infrastructure. Phase Two will break down the silos. Phase Two is always eighteen months away and has been eighteen months away for four years. In the interim, the company publishes case studies about its omnichannel approach that describe Phase One as if Phase Two had already happened.
The Omnichannel Meeting
The organizational reality of omnichannel is a meeting. Usually a recurring meeting. The Digital team presents their metrics. The Retail team presents their metrics. The CRM team presents their metrics. Everyone’s metrics look reasonable in isolation. Nobody can explain the customer who appears in the Digital data, the Retail data, and the CRM data as three different people with three different histories. The meeting ends with an action item to “align on attribution,” which produces a sub-meeting, which produces a shared document, which is last edited eighteen months ago.
The meeting exists because the organizational structure hasn’t changed to match the strategy. You can declare yourself omnichannel all you like, but if the incentives still reward each channel team for their channel’s performance in isolation, the coordination will be perfunctory. The channel managers are not being obstinate — they’re being rational. They are optimizing for the thing they’re measured on, which is not “contribution to a seamless customer journey” but “channel revenue” or “channel engagement.” The omnichannel strategy sits above the incentive structure without changing it, like a banner hung over a building that is structurally exactly the same as before the banner went up.
The Honest Version
Here is what honest omnichannel communication would look like: “We are consistent in our visual identity and messaging across channels. Our website and app share data reasonably well. Our retail and digital teams meet monthly and have a good working relationship. Our customer service team has access to purchase history. We do not yet have fully unified customer profiles or seamless cross-channel handoffs, and that infrastructure project is in the roadmap for 2026.” That’s a real description of a real capability. It’s also never what appears in the brand presentation, because it sounds like an admission rather than a strategy.
The word “omnichannel” will continue to mean everything until it means nothing, and then a new word will arrive — probably something involving “unified” or “integrated” or “total customer experience” — and the cycle will begin again with fresh slides and the same underlying coordination problems. It’s not cynicism. It’s just how language works in marketing: the vocabulary evolves faster than the reality, and the gap between them is where most of the budget lives.
For those keeping score at home, the NoBriefs shop is itself available across multiple channels. Not because we have an omnichannel strategy — we just have a website and some social accounts and a desire to sell good things to people who are tired of bad words. The KPI Shark does not care which channel you use to find him. He is, you might say, channel-agnostic.
by Ber | Apr 3, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in creative agencies and marketing departments every few years, and it is always the same meeting with a different platform name substituted in. You’re in the conference room. Someone senior — usually someone whose media diet skews heavily toward industry trade press and LinkedIn articles about industry trade press — arrives with the expression of someone who has just discovered fire. “We need to be on TikTok,” they say. The room nods. In the back row, the 26-year-old social media manager who has been lobbying for a TikTok budget for eighteen months closes their eyes briefly and counts to three.
The creative director who discovers TikTok in the fourth year of TikTok’s relevance is one of marketing’s most reliable characters. They are well-intentioned, genuinely excited, and arriving at the party at precisely the moment the hosts are starting to clean up. Their enthusiasm is real. Their timing is catastrophically off. And their conviction that the brand’s TikTok presence will be different from all the other brand TikTok presences — more authentic, more native, more genuinely connected to the culture — will survive approximately three content planning meetings before collapsing under the weight of legal approval processes and the Communications Director’s concern about tone.
The Platform Adoption Curve, Explained Through Pain
Every platform has a lifecycle that follows a depressingly predictable curve. First, the early adopters arrive — young, creative, indifferent to brands, building culture organically. Then the culture becomes visible to people slightly outside it, and the clever brands show up: small teams, fast decision-making, willing to be genuinely weird. Then the platform “proves itself” with a case study that gets written up in Marketing Week. Then the budget gets allocated. Then the committee gets involved. Then the brand guidelines get applied. Then legal signs off on the content calendar. By this point, the people who made the platform interesting are doing something else, and the brands are talking to each other in an empty room.
TikTok followed this arc with particular speed, because TikTok’s culture moved faster than any platform before it. What worked in 2020 was irrelevant by 2021. The audio trends, the format conventions, the relationship between creators and audiences — all of it evolved faster than any brand approval process could track. The brands that succeeded on TikTok did so by giving small teams real autonomy and real speed. The brands that failed did so by treating TikTok like television with vertical video: produced, polished, and addressed to nobody in particular.
The Brief for the TikTok That Nobody Wanted
When the Creative Director’s TikTok enthusiasm reaches the briefing stage, something fascinating happens. The brief asks for content that is “authentic and native to the platform” while also being “on-brand,” “legally cleared,” “approved by Communications,” “suitable for all audiences,” “aligned with the current campaign,” and “avoiding anything that could be perceived as controversial.” These requirements are not compatible with each other. TikTok authenticity requires speed, rawness, and the willingness to fail publicly. Brand approval processes require the opposite of all three.
The result is content that looks like TikTok and feels like a brochure. It uses the right aspect ratio. It has text overlays in the right font. It might even use a trending audio — though the trend will be three weeks old by the time legal approved the audio license. It is technically a TikTok in the same way that a theme park ride is technically travel. It has the form without the substance, the format without the culture, the presence without the point.
This content gets 200 views. Of those, 150 are employees and agency staff. The remaining 50 are people who landed on it by accident and scrolled away in under two seconds. The analytics are reported in the monthly dashboard with creative framing: “We’re building presence,” says the report. “Organic growth takes time.” It does take time. It also takes content that people actually want to watch, which is the part the brief forgot to address.
The Platform Graveyard
Behind every marketing department with an active TikTok account there is usually a row of abandoned platforms: a Snapchat account that posted six times in 2017, a Pinterest presence that was updated until someone left and nobody learned the password, a Google+ page that outlasted Google+ itself because someone forgot to delete it. Each of these represents a moment when a senior person discovered a platform and got excited, a junior person was assigned to “own” it without resources or strategic direction, and the whole thing quietly expired when the excitement moved on.
The platforms change. The pattern doesn’t. The discovery, the enthusiasm, the underfunded execution, the measured disappointment, the quiet abandonment — it’s as regular as seasons. The question worth asking, before the next platform discovery meeting, is not “how do we do TikTok?” but “do we have the organizational capability to do any platform well, and if not, why are we adding another one?”
The Way Out of the Cycle
Some brands have found an exit from this loop: be genuinely excellent on one or two platforms rather than adequately present on six. Give the people closest to the content — usually the youngest people on the team, the ones who actually use the platforms — real authority and real resources. Accept that being native to a platform means making content the platform’s audience actually enjoys, not content that fits the brand guidelines and happens to be vertical.
It requires trusting people who don’t sit in senior leadership, which is the hardest thing for most organizations to do. It requires accepting that some of the best content will make someone in Legal briefly uncomfortable. It requires admitting that the Creative Director discovering TikTok is not the same thing as the brand understanding TikTok.
If you’re the junior person in the back of that meeting, counting to three while senior leadership catches up to 2020, the NoBriefs community sees you. The Fuck The Brief collection was made for people who know exactly what needs to happen but are waiting for permission from someone who just downloaded the app. You know where to find us.
by Ber | Apr 3, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
It is Monday morning, 8:47 a.m., and somewhere in a home office with a ring light, a marketing director is composing a post about failure. Not a real failure — a curated one. A failure that taught a lesson, revealed a strength, and ultimately led to the breakthrough that now justifies the post. The failure has a three-act structure. It ends with gratitude. It will receive 847 likes from people who also failed productively and learned exactly the right things. It is LinkedIn thought leadership at its most refined: maximum emotion, minimum information, zero actual thoughts.
LinkedIn has achieved something remarkable. It has turned professional networking into a genre of inspirational fiction, a content format so thoroughly colonized by performed wisdom and humblebrag vulnerability that reading it has become a meditative exercise in learning to feel nothing. The thought leadership industrial complex is alive and well, and it is absolutely crushing it in terms of engagement metrics.
The Anatomy of a Thought Leadership Post
The classic LinkedIn thought leadership post follows a structure as reliable as a sonnet. It opens with a short sentence. Often a question. Or a bold claim. Then it subverts expectations. Then the pivot — usually signaled by the word “But.” Here comes the lesson. The lesson is universal. Something about resilience, or curiosity, or the importance of asking for help. The lesson was learned through experience, though the experience is described at a level of abstraction that makes it applicable to literally everyone and therefore useful to no one.
The post ends with a call to action. “What do you think?” or “Drop your thoughts below” or “Tag someone who needs to hear this.” The comments fill with people saying “so true,” “this is everything,” and “sharing this with my team.” Nobody shares it with their team. The team is also on LinkedIn, composing their own posts about different lessons learned through similar non-specific experiences.
The images are either selfies taken at conferences (conference selfies have their own sub-genre — the earnest handshake, the panel photo where everyone looks like they’re mid-profound-statement), or black-text-on-white-background quote cards, or photos of notebooks with the first line of the post written in them, because apparently writing the post wasn’t enough and someone needed to also photograph themselves writing the post.
The Thought That Isn’t Leadership
The term “thought leadership” was coined in the 1990s to describe genuine domain expertise — the kind of thinking that moves an industry forward, challenges conventional wisdom, or introduces a framework that changes how people work. It was a useful concept. Then it was discovered by content strategy, and like all useful concepts discovered by content strategy, it was immediately turned into a template.
Real thought leadership is uncomfortable. It requires having an opinion that some people will disagree with. It requires specificity — not “failure leads to growth” but “here is exactly why this specific approach to product pricing fails in enterprise SaaS, and here is the data.” It requires, at minimum, the presence of an actual thought.
What LinkedIn has produced instead is the aesthetics of thought leadership without the substance: the vulnerability without the risk, the opinion without the argument, the expertise without the specifics. It is possible to post on LinkedIn every day for a year and say absolutely nothing of professional value while accumulating thousands of followers who are waiting for you to say something of professional value. The followers keep waiting. The posts keep coming. The engagement keeps climbing. Everyone involved calls this success.
Why Marketers Are the Worst Offenders
Every profession has its LinkedIn voice, but marketing has a special relationship with the platform because marketers understand, better than anyone, how LinkedIn’s algorithm works and what kind of content it rewards. The result is a self-referential loop: marketers post content optimized for LinkedIn engagement about the importance of authentic content. They write about the dangers of vanity metrics while obsessing over their follower count. They discuss the value of genuine connection while A/B testing their post hooks to maximize the click-through on “see more.”
There is a particular brand of LinkedIn post beloved by marketing professionals that goes: “Nobody talks about this, but [extremely common observation in the marketing industry].” Nobody talks about the importance of knowing your audience. Nobody talks about how email marketing still works. Nobody talks about the fact that strategy should precede tactics. These observations have been talked about, relentlessly, in every marketing conference, podcast, and textbook for the past thirty years. They continue to perform extremely well on LinkedIn because the platform has no memory and the audience is always new.
The Exit, If You Want It
There is a version of LinkedIn that is genuinely useful — for job searching, for connecting with specific people you want to work with, for occasionally finding a piece of writing that is actually good because someone decided to write something true and specific instead of broadly inspirational. That LinkedIn exists. It is outnumbered about forty to one by the thought leadership version, but it’s there.
The antidote to thought leadership is simply leadership — having a point of view you’d defend in a meeting, not just in a post. Knowing something well enough to be wrong about it in an interesting way. Writing something that not everyone will like because it actually says something.
If you’ve ever posted something on LinkedIn and then watched the algorithm reward you for it while knowing, in the quiet part of your brain, that you wrote it for the algorithm and not for the reader — you’re already more self-aware than most. That’s a start. Wear the NoBriefs badge honestly: the Spreadsheet Sloth knows that not all productivity is real productivity, and not all posting is real communication. Sometimes it’s just noise wearing a ring light.
by Ber | Apr 3, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
You have tested the green button against the blue button. You have tested “Buy Now” against “Get Started” against “Claim Your Spot.” You have tested hero images, subject lines, headline fonts, CTA placement, and whether the word “free” in an email subject line increases or decreases open rates (the answer changes every six months, depending on who you ask). You have optimized every pixel of the customer journey. You have never once questioned whether the destination is worth reaching.
Welcome to the golden age of A/B testing, where we measure everything and understand nothing, where data replaces judgment, and where the appearance of scientific rigor substitutes for actual strategic thinking. It’s a beautiful system, really — endlessly productive, perpetually inconclusive, and completely immune to the uncomfortable question of whether you’re optimizing the right thing at all.
How Testing Became a Religion
The democratization of A/B testing tools was supposed to bring empiricism to marketing. And for a while, it did. Instead of arguing about opinions in a conference room, teams could run experiments. Instead of HiPPO decisions (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), data would rule. The shift was genuine and valuable. Then, like most genuinely useful things, it was taken approximately forty steps too far.
The problem began when testing stopped being a tool and became an identity. “We’re a data-driven culture” is now the marketing equivalent of “we move fast and break things” — a slogan that sounds rigorous and signals virtue without committing to anything specific. In practice, data-driven culture often means: we run tests on things that are easy to test, measure things that are easy to measure, and declare victory when a metric goes up, even if nobody can explain why or whether it matters.
The result is teams that have run 200 experiments on their homepage and cannot tell you what their brand stands for. Teams that can produce a confidence interval for a subject line variant but have no idea why customers churn after 90 days. Teams that treat statistical significance as a moral category — as if a p-value of 0.04 is not just a number but a verdict from the universe that green buttons are objectively better than blue ones.
The Local Maximum Trap
Here is what nobody puts in the A/B testing case study: optimization without strategic direction leads you, very efficiently, somewhere you don’t want to be. Every incremental test improves what exists. None of them ask whether what exists should continue to exist.
This is the local maximum problem. You can optimize a mediocre product page to be the best possible version of a mediocre product page. Your conversion rate will climb 0.3% per experiment until it can climb no further. You will have squeezed every drop from a lemon that, strategically speaking, you should have replaced with a different fruit two years ago. But the dashboard looks great. The quarterly report is full of winning experiments. Everyone involved gets a mention in the retrospective under “wins.”
The deeper issue is that A/B testing is structurally incapable of questioning its own premises. You can test two versions of a landing page. You cannot test whether the landing page is the right mechanism for what you’re trying to achieve. You can test two subject lines. You cannot test whether email is the right channel. Those questions require judgment, context, and the willingness to consider that your current approach might be fundamentally wrong — qualities that do not produce clean dashboards and cannot be automated.
Data as Alibi
There is a more cynical function that testing serves in large organizations, and it’s worth naming honestly: it provides cover. When a decision goes wrong, “we had the data” is the modern version of “I was just following orders.” It distributes responsibility so thoroughly that nobody is accountable for anything. The test said to do it. The algorithm recommended it. The confidence interval supported it. Who could argue with that?
This is why genuinely bold creative decisions almost never come out of A/B testing. Testing can tell you which version of an existing concept performs marginally better. It cannot tell you to do something completely different. It cannot tell you to run the campaign that makes your legal team nervous and your competitors jealous. It cannot tell you to make the thing that nobody has made before because, by definition, you can’t test something against itself before it exists.
The great brand-building moments in marketing history were not A/B tested into existence. They were made by people with strong points of view who were willing to be wrong in an interesting way rather than right in a boring one. Testing would have optimized those ideas into something safe and forgettable.
What Good Testing Actually Looks Like
None of this means testing is bad. It means testing is a tool, not a philosophy. Used well, it answers tactical questions quickly and cheaply: which headline communicates the value proposition more clearly? Which onboarding flow reduces drop-off? These are real questions with measurable answers, and testing is exactly the right instrument for them.
The problems start when testing substitutes for strategy, when the question “what should we be doing?” is replaced by “which version of what we’re already doing performs better?” The first question is hard, uncomfortable, and requires people in a room with different opinions and no easy answers. The second question produces a dashboard. Guess which one gets more organizational energy.
If you’re the kind of marketer who has sat in the meeting where someone says “let’s test it” as a way of avoiding a decision, you know exactly what this piece is about. And if you want a daily reminder that your job is more than optimizing button colors, the NoBriefs shop has what you need — starting with the Fuck The Brief collection, for when the brief itself is the thing that’s failing the test.
by Ber | Apr 3, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
Somewhere in your company’s shared drive, nestled between the Q3 performance report nobody opened and the brand guidelines nobody follows, lives Jennifer. Jennifer is 34. She’s a mid-level marketing manager. She drives a hybrid car, loves yoga on weekends, and is “digitally savvy but values authenticity.” She has two kids named something tasteful like Mia and Lucas. She earns €52,000 a year and her biggest pain point is “finding time for herself.” She is your target audience. She does not exist.
The marketing persona is one of the most elaborate fictions the industry has ever produced — a literary character with the depth of a fortune cookie and the strategic value of a horoscope. Yet companies spend thousands of euros on workshops, consultants, and wall-sized sticky-note sessions to give birth to Jennifer, only to promptly file her away and never consult her again.
How Personas Are Born (and Die on the Same Day)
The persona creation workshop follows a sacred ritual. A facilitator — who charges €1,200 a day and owns at least one pair of quirky glasses — leads a cross-functional team through a series of exercises. What does our customer fear? What does she aspire to? What does she read? The team, composed entirely of people who are not the customer, makes educated guesses. Someone writes “LinkedIn and maybe TikTok?” Someone else says “she probably shops at Zara but wishes she could afford COS.” Everyone nods. Jennifer is born.
By the end of the workshop, Jennifer has a photo (stock, obviously — a smiling woman of ambiguous ethnicity chosen for maximum inclusivity with minimum effort), a name, and an origin story more detailed than most employee onboarding documents. She has a “jobs to be done,” a “day in the life,” and a quote that nobody actually said but feels like she would say, probably something like: “I want brands that understand me.”
Jennifer is then placed in a beautiful PDF, sent to the design team with the instruction to “keep her in mind,” and never spoken of again. The actual campaign is made for the CEO’s cousin, who saw a competitor’s ad and said they wanted something “similar but more premium.”
The Data Problem Nobody Mentions
Here is the uncomfortable truth about most marketing personas: they are not based on data. They are based on vibes, assumptions, and whatever the Head of Sales said loudly in the last meeting. Real customer research — interviews, behavioral data, purchase pattern analysis — is expensive, time-consuming, and inconveniently messy. Personas, by contrast, can be invented in an afternoon and presented with the visual confidence of a TED Talk.
The result is a character who is simultaneously too specific and completely useless. Jennifer is 34, but what about the 28-year-old who actually converts? Jennifer is worried about sustainability, but what if your actual buyer is a 55-year-old procurement manager who just wants the invoice on time? The persona, instead of clarifying the audience, creates a fictional target that the team aims at while the real customers wander in through the side door.
There is a particular cruelty in this process: the more detailed the persona, the more convincing it feels, and the more dangerous it becomes. A one-pager with a stock photo and a salary band has the aesthetic authority of market research. Nobody questions Jennifer. Questioning Jennifer means questioning the workshop, and the workshop cost €4,000.
The Persona Industrial Complex
The persona business is thriving. There are tools, templates, platforms, and entire methodologies dedicated to helping you build better fictional humans. Some of these tools use AI to generate personas from your CRM data, which is genuinely useful, though it does raise the philosophical question of whether Jennifer generated by an algorithm is any less made-up than Jennifer generated by a roomful of people eating catered sandwiches.
The larger problem is structural. The persona is a tool designed for a world where marketing teams need to humanize abstracted data — to give a face to a segment. The intent is noble. The execution is a game of telephone between your actual customers and a stock photo woman who enjoys weekend yoga. Somewhere between the insight and the output, Jennifer stopped being a tool and became a totem.
What would actually help? Talking to real customers. Reading real complaints. Watching real behavior. Conducting interviews where the person on the other side says unexpected things that ruin your assumptions. It’s less photogenic than a persona card, and it won’t look good framed on the office wall, but it has the rare quality of being true.
Jennifer Sends Her Regards
Jennifer doesn’t mind that you’ve forgotten her. She’s used to it. She lives in the slide deck between the market sizing chart and the competitive landscape table, eternally 34, eternally concerned about work-life balance, eternally waiting for a brand that finally gets her.
Meanwhile, your actual customers are out there — complicated, inconsistent, price-sensitive in ways Jennifer isn’t, loyal to brands Jennifer has never heard of. They don’t have a name or a stock photo. They haven’t been workshopped. They’re a mess. They’re the whole point.
If the absurdity of marketing theater is something you feel in your bones every day, you’re in the right place. The NoBriefs shop was built for people who have sat through one too many persona workshops and lived to tell the tale. The KPI Shark knows that the most dangerous metric is the one that makes everyone feel productive without doing anything useful. Come join the club.
by Ber | Apr 2, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
In the beginning, there was the big idea. The campaign that changed how people felt about a brand. The work that lived in culture for years, that people remembered decades later, that made careers and moved markets in ways that couldn’t be cleanly attributed to any single impression or click. The industry was built on the belief that great creative work was worth making even when you couldn’t fully explain why it worked — that the brand-building effect of advertising was real, even if it was diffuse, delayed, and difficult to measure in a quarterly report.
Then came performance marketing, and the big idea got a conversion rate.
The logic was impeccable: digital advertising allowed you to measure what was working with a precision that had never existed before. You could see exactly how many people clicked, converted, bought, and returned. You could A/B test everything. You could allocate budget to what performed and cut what didn’t. The result, in theory, was a more efficient, more accountable, more rational marketing function. The result, in practice, was something more complicated and considerably more damaging to the craft of advertising than the industry has been willing to fully acknowledge.
What Gets Measured Gets Made (And Everything Else Doesn’t)
The practical effect of optimizing marketing spend around measurable performance metrics is that you create a systematic bias against anything whose value is real but diffuse — brand awareness, emotional resonance, cultural relevance, the slow accumulation of positive associations that determines whether a brand is trusted, liked, and chosen over time. These things are hard to measure in a dashboard. Therefore, they are systematically underfunded in organizations where the dashboard is the decision-making tool.
This produces a specific kind of marketing that is technically excellent and strategically hollow: campaigns that drive clicks without building brand equity, content that converts without creating preference, advertising that performs in the short term by accelerating existing intent without doing anything to create future intent. You can run this playbook for several years and look extremely good in the monthly report while quietly dismantling the brand foundations that made the performance possible in the first place.
The grocery industry has a term for this: “eating the seed corn.” You can solve this year’s food problem by consuming next year’s seeds. The harvest numbers look fine right up until there’s no harvest.
The Creative That Performance Marketing Produces
Ask a performance marketing team to brief creative work and watch what happens to the brief. The audience becomes “people who have previously expressed purchase intent in this category.” The message becomes the offer, the discount, the feature comparison. The format becomes whatever the platform has determined converts best this quarter. The success metric becomes cost per acquisition.
None of this is wrong. All of it, applied exclusively, produces advertising that is indistinguishable from every other piece of advertising in the same category — because it’s optimized against the same data, serving the same audience, making the same offer, in the same formats that the algorithm has decided perform best. The result is creative convergence at scale: entire categories of advertising that look and sound identical because they’ve all been optimized toward the same conversion signals.
The creative professionals working in pure performance environments often describe the experience the same way: the work is technically demanding, the feedback loop is fast and clear, and the creative latitude is approximately zero. You are not making advertising; you are making variables for a test. This is a legitimate discipline. It is not what most people went into advertising to do, and the talent pipeline consequences of making it the dominant mode of the industry are becoming visible in the quality of work being produced.
The Evidence That Brand Building Actually Works
The research on this is not ambiguous. The Binet and Field “The Long and the Short of It” analysis of IPA effectiveness data established clearly that the optimal marketing investment split for most categories is approximately 60% brand-building activity and 40% performance/activation activity — with the brand-building investment providing the context and preference that makes the performance activity more efficient.
The brands that have maintained this balance — that have continued to invest in genuinely creative, genuinely brand-building work even when the short-term attribution is murky — have consistently outperformed brands that shifted entirely to performance marketing, particularly over time horizons longer than one quarter. This finding has been replicated across categories, markets, and time periods. It is as close to settled science as marketing research gets.
The industry knows this. The reversion to performance-only thinking happens anyway, because quarterly performance pressure, short CMO tenures, and the genuine difficulty of defending brand investment in a meeting full of people who prefer dashboards with green arrows make the rational long-term choice organizationally difficult to sustain. Knowing the right thing and doing it are different problems.
The creatives who have spent their careers making brand-building work — work that doesn’t convert immediately, that operates on emotion rather than offer, that tries to make people feel something rather than click something — deserve recognition for doing the harder, more important job. The Fuck The Brief collection is for everyone who’s been told their work “can’t be attributed” and knows that’s the whole point.
Good work takes time to prove itself. In the meantime, the NoBriefs Club shop has your back.
