From left: Burger King's Katie Evans, The Drum's Jenni Baker, Nielsen's Emma Delserieys and the Independent's Jo Holdaway Marketers have long been divided on the right recipe for long-term sales growth: focus on sales, or focus on brand building. While the marketing landscape is rife with tech solutions to help brands and agencies easily track and validate their mid- and low-funnel spending, research shows that sales-driven efforts do little to acquire new customers-the top business objective cited by marketers for the 2022 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report.
With new customer acquisition and brand building at the forefront for marketers in the coming year, the need for balanced marketing strategies has never been greater. This need is also being embraced by brands around the world, especially after some began to over-emphasize conversion efforts heading into the pandemic.
There is a clear tension between brand awareness and the need to drive clear outcomes, said Emma Delserieys, vice president of customer success in Europe at Nielsen, during a recent panel discussion arranged by the Drum on the topic. Every advertiser wants the same thing-maximum brand awareness, quantifiable, immediate outcomes and all of that for the minimum budget they can spend.
Katie Evans, U.K. chief marketing officer for Burger King, noted a distinctive pivot to be more holistic in her brand's marketing efforts since she joined back in early 2018.
When I joined, there was a relatively traditional media strategy that was very focused on linear TV and short-term sales, Evans said. The company had brand awareness, but we put new emphasis on brand salience and brand affinity to drive differentiation in a busy market. That really drove the media strategy and approach for us.
Media sellers are seeing the shift as well, including Jo Holdaway, chief data and marketing officer at The Independent, a global, digital news brand.
As a media owner, we are seeing much less focus on performance marketing, much more focus on brand awareness as a brand that is offering clients a platform to advertise on, Holdaway said. We're seeing a real shift into more direct brand awareness campaigns, a lot more long-term partnership business, and a lot of the marketers out there want to associate their brands with our brand on a long-term sponsorship or branded content basis, and that is very different from what you would have seen five years ago.
Navigating the shift, or finding the right balance between long- and short-term goals can be daunting. Rather than trying to navigate the challenge alone, Delserieys advises working with partners to identify solutions that measure both the long-term effects and short-term impact and holding them accountable to delivering outcomes.
We see advertisers, for example, who have too many KPIs to be operationally efficient. We have others that only focus on one KPI, and that can come at the expense of finding true balance, Delserieys says. So typically, I advise to find the right KPIs for long- and short-term effects, measure both and place greater accountability on partners to deliver outcomes.
The importance of measurement is critical here, especially as consumer journeys aren't siloed in specific platforms or channels. This, however, is where many marketers are struggling to track their returns, as only 54% of global marketers are confident in their ability to measure full-funnel ROI.
-- The full-funnel ROI measurement challenge is real, acknowledged Holdaway. As a news brand, she says The Independent is very involved with podcasting, video, digital and social, but measuring the ROI of these channels holistically is a growing challenge. For example, she says it's relatively easy to measure whether people come back to the site or are more engaged with the site. But as a brand with many channels at work to drive registration and membership, largely through brand awareness efforts, attribution is the larger, growing challenge.
To improve full-funnel measurement, brands need to achieve a more holistic strategy by having the best data available at the granularity where it's available, combined with the best expertise to make sense of those different datasets, Delserieys said. At work as well as in life, in times of trouble or challenge, having the right partners to handhold you through this is key.
North America Stories
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
From left: Burger King's Katie Evans, The Drum's Jenni Baker, Nielsen's Emma Delserieys and the Independent's Jo Holdaway Marketers have long been divided on the right recipe for long-term sales growth: focus on sales, or focus on brand building. While the marketing landscape is rife with tech solutions to help brands and agencies easily track and validate their mid- and low-funnel spending, research shows that sales-driven efforts do little to acquire new customers-the top business objective cited by marketers for the 2022 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report.
