Brand is a long game, but your first campaign matters most

You’ve done the hard yards. Targets are being hit, the performance machine is humming, and you’ve even managed to stash away budget thanks to some efficiencies you’ve found. Now for the first time, you're thinking about investing in brand.

You’re right to do so. Research shows there’s a bigger market out there. More customers who’d buy from you, if they knew who you were. Plenty more might convert too if they better understood your product’s benefits or how it fits into their lives. And you know it’s something price and product ads can’t do alone.

Before you rush into briefing an emotionally driven campaign with sweeping shots and a catchy soundtrack, take a minute. Remember that your business’ first brand campaign is the most important one you’ll ever launch. Get it right, and you’ll unlock sustainable, compounding growth. Get it wrong, and you’ll poison the well and kill off future investment before the big payoff ever arrives.

Brand isn’t fluff. It’s strategy, positioning, and distinctiveness delivered through committed long-term investment. But the first time you do it, the stakes are higher than you might realise. Not because it’s new but because everyone including your CFO, CEO, and board, will be watching. And they expect results.

The biggest mistake marketers make is believing the myth that brand only works over time, and therefore can’t show any short-term return. It’s true that your brand campaign won’t deliver on performance timelines of instant returns, but it can still generate short-term payoffs. And that can be enough to keep it on the plan. This is why you need to design your first brand campaign with the precision of an investment fund manager, and not the naivety of someone rolling the dice.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to manage the long and the short of it all.

Step one: Start with the business case, not the brief

Before you pick up the phone to the creative agency, you need to build a robust business case. Sit down with your media agency and work out exactly how brand investment drives both short and long-term growth. What’s the size of the prize? Where are your awareness and consideration levels now and where could they be with sustained investment?

Most media mix models tell the same story: brand spend drives incremental sales from day one. It may not match performance dollar-for-dollar in the early weeks – maybe half, maybe a third – but these are sales you wouldn’t have made otherwise. If you can’t show some immediate returns then the whole thing risks stalling, or worse, backfiring. Once brand loses internal credibility, you’re unlikely to get a second chance.

You also need to make it clear this isn’t just an ad – it’s an asset. If you can’t explain how brand contributes to revenue, share, pricing power, or margin, don’t expect your CFO to write the cheque.

Then build a forecast. Show how early movement in consideration can lead to future market share. Set expectations around the lag – it might take up to 6 months before your baseline begins to move meaningfully. Frame the whole thing as a compound investment that pays off big over time.

Step 2: Set up the right measurement framework

The trap for many first timers is judging the delivery of your brand campaign by the same measures used for performance (CTRs, CPCs, last-click attribution). GA4 won’t help you isolate incremental brand effects, especially if you’re using traditional channels. Instead, you need to decide on an uplift methodology. Measuring causal short-term impact is essential, as it’s your proof of concept that the campaign still can move the needle before the long-term benefits kick in.

One way to build confidence without blowing the budget is to set up an incrementality test on a smaller scale — using state splits, time-based holdouts, or channel isolation. This lets you prove impact in a controlled environment before you scale up the investment.

You’ll also need a full-funnel measurement framework to track how softer metrics (awareness, consideration, preference, sentiment) shift over time and translate into business outcomes. Tools like Tracksuit help define and monitor these KPIs from day one – and on an ongoing monthly basis. These are the early indicators of your brand’s ability to steal share and increase pricing power.

Step 3: Mitigate risk like an investment fund manager

Deploying your brand investment is about managing risk, just like any good investment portfolio. Every creative and media choice you make either increases or reduces the likelihood of your campaign falling short.

Start with the fundamentals. Your working to non-working media ratio really matters. Non-working should sit around 25% of your total spend – any higher, and you're sacrificing reach. If you're investing more heavily in production to build a big, beautiful brand idea, make sure you can get multiple years out of those assets to justify the upfront cost.

There’s also value in building a rough media plan before you dive into creative development. Creative that’s made for the media channels it runs in is 13% more effective. I’ve seen too many marketers sink money into an emotive brand film only to realise too late they can’t really afford to run it where it matters. Build for reality, not fantasy.

Creative effectiveness also matters. Depending on who you believe, it can drive up to 47% of campaign ROI. Performance hinges on what actually drives decision-making in your category: trust, value, ease, performance, etc. Build the work around those needs and you will create brand cues that are easy to understand, simple to recall, and likely to influence purchase. This is the kind of salience that wins shelf space in the brain.

Aim for creative that’s distinctive, bold, and memorable but don’t confuse originality with effectiveness. Great creative should still surprise and delight, but it must fit the context of your category. Add music. Create assets that are instantly recognisable. Design for flexibility. Too often, brand platforms are built for a single hero film, when they should be built to have limitless flex across multiple touchpoints, over multiple years.

And remember: your creative choices have a compounding effect when paired with media. Running a beautifully shot but strategically irrelevant ad in event viewing TV or digital video can set fire to your brand spend very quickly.

Step 4: Win the room and hold it

Your brand campaign needs to land with your internal stakeholders as much as it needs to land with consumers. Bring your stakeholders on the journey and get them involved very early in the decision making. Show them how long it takes, what to expect, and how quickly you’ll know it’s working. It’s been a complex journey of decisions and nuances to get you to the final boss – don’t dump it all on them at once and expect them to understand it like they’ve been working on it for 6 months.

Make sure your performance team is involved from the outset too – their buy-in is crucial for aligning short-term metrics with long-term goals, and they’ll be the first to spot any early uplift worth amplifying.

In the end, most businesses don’t fail at brand because they did the wrong thing. They fail because they were unable to measure an early uplift, forcing them to pull the pin in panic before the results were fully realised.

Adrian Cosstick is Head of Strategy at Half Dome. He’s worked in various agency, commercial and marketing roles over the last 15 years, and is passionate about delivering causal advertising effectiveness for his clients.