When Channels Override Strategy: Why the Performance Trap Was Inevitable

Everyone agrees that brand building matters. There's no shortage of articles urging marketers to prioritise long-term brand over short-term performance.

Yet brand budgets still get cut. Performance optimisation keeps winning out.

Most explanations focus on short-termism or marketers being seduced by immediate ROI. But that misses the structural reality: once advertising budgets migrated into digital channels, the industry created conditions where brand building simply became harder. We did not consciously choose performance over brand. We chose channels better suited to performance, and our objectives followed. The tail started wagging the dog.

How We Got Here

Over the past 15 years, the industry shifted about 60 to 70 percent of budgets into digital channels. This shift was driven by promises of precision, measurability and efficiency. As the budgets moved, so did the expertise. A generation of planners has now been trained almost exclusively in digital performance environments.

Search captures intent that already exists. Social optimises for immediate response in scrolling feeds. Programmatic is engineered around behavioural signals and short-term outcomes, not shared cultural experiences. None of these environments are designed to deliver the foundations of brand building: sustained attention, emotional resonance, creative expression at scale, or collective cultural moments.

Commercial incentives reinforced this. JBPs, minimum spend agreements, certifications and agency delivery models all rewarded activation, not long-term planning.

In other words, we perhaps unwittingly built an industry infrastructure around performance. Strategy didn’t shift first. Channels did. And strategy adapted to what the channels made easiest.

The Inevitable Outcome

When most budget sits in performance-optimised channels, and when teams are trained to excel in those channels, performance outcomes are not just likely. They are inevitable.

Digital measurability amplified this. Performance metrics are immediate and concrete. Brand metrics are slower and more abstract. In budget discussions, concrete always beats abstract.

Can you build brand on digital? Yes. High-quality video on YouTube, premium social content and creator-led storytelling can all contribute. But these have become the primary brand-building vehicles by default, not because they are the most effective tools for the job. They are simply where the budgets live and where planners feel most capable when given that rare Brand campaign brief.

The Human Reality

I saw this first-hand when mentoring at the Campaign Asia Media Works event in Bangkok in May 2024, working with ten talented media professionals from Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and beyond.

Every one of them was several years into their career. Not one had worked on a brand campaign. They'd spent their entire professional life planning performance campaigns.

The Standard Chartered brief at that event was the first time they had planned for true brand-building objectives. And here is the important part: they enjoyed it. Planning a brand campaign was energising. The issue was not a lack of interest. It was lack of opportunity.

Even when clients want to shift towards brand building, the agency infrastructure makes it difficult. It requires different team structures, different fees, different tools and different ways of working. A team pivot can take months to implement.

The Path Forward

The decline in brand investment is not surprising. It is the logical result of letting channel allocation determine strategic intent.

Traditional offline channels such as TV, Cinema, Radio and Outdoor are structurally built for brand building. They create shared cultural moments, sustain attention at scale and deliver emotional impact. They do this not because of nostalgia, but because their structures and audience behaviours support these effects.

If marketers genuinely want to rebuild brand strength, they need to acknowledge that channel selection is not a tactical optimisation exercise. Channels define the type of attention you get, the creative canvas available, the emotions you can evoke and the cultural impact you can generate.

If you want different outcomes, do not let your channels dictate your objectives. Choose the channels that make your objectives possible.