In a conversational interview, Michael Kaminsky asks for the strongest argument for running a brand campaign and whether it can ever be effective. The respondent explains that the push for brand advertising usually emerges from teams entrenched in a short‑term, direct‑response mindset that measures success only in immediate sales (“gumball‑machine marketing”). While that approach can grow a brand through sales, it overlooks other growth levers. The speaker advocates taking a longer‑term view: measuring advertising impact over its full effect horizon, expanding beyond narrow channel mixes, and deliberately targeting audiences who are not currently in‑market. Because 95‑99% of the potential market is not ready to buy at any given moment, exposing them to brand messages builds awareness so that when they do become purchase‑ready they are more likely to choose the advertised brand. The answer acknowledges that this strategy requires scientific measurement and comes with caveats, but it outlines when and why a brand campaign can make sense.
Chapters
What's the steel man case for doing a brand campaign? Does it ever work? Like, I've heard of Apple, I've heard of Nike, those maybe worked. Are there times when people should be doing brand campaigns? What sort of brands? Like, when is the right time for this? Or what is the case where this might actually do the job that, that people would want it to do?
Yeah, look, I see this quite a bit, um, when people are talking about, oh, we should entertain this notion of brand campaigns. It generally comes from a team that is quite constrained by their current culture and the channels that they're using, the way they're marketing. So they'll And they'll tend to be very direct response orientated. So I do advertising, I wanna see an instant return on that, and they'll measure it in a very short sort of space of time. And if that didn't work, then the advertising hasn't worked, right? So it tends to be very sort of product focus, feature benefit messaging focused. And it's about, I call it gumball machine marketing, advertise, feature the product. If it sells, I get a gumball outta the machine, let's do it again or not. And that can work very well, and you can grow your brand like that through sales. In fact, the best way to grow brands is through sales and getting more customers relative to your competitors. And I think this is what gets missed in this discussion, is that there are other ways to grow your brand apart from brand advertising. But I think when people entertain this notion of brand campaigns and advertising, there is a realization within the organization that we might want to take a bit of a long-term view and measure advertising effects over its full effect range as opposed to a very short window of time. And then we might want to broaden our channels outside of a very narrow channel focus to something that's a bit what we call broader reaching. And you might want to also target people who are not in market ready to buy, but who will buy later. And there's a lot of science behind that because 99 to 95% of your market is not in market at any one point in time. So therefore it is beneficial to market to people who won't buy, which sounds weird, but those people will will remember you, hopefully, depending on your ad. Lots of caveats there. And so then when it's time to purchase, they will know who you are and be more likely to purchase you over someone else. So that's the kind of short answer to that.
