Between big tech, beehives and brand building: why marketing needs courage again

Rory Sutherland had the honour of opening the congress. He did so in his own playful yet ruthlessly precise way. ‘Finance is from Mars; marketing is from Venus.’ His point was less light-hearted than the quote suggests. According to Sutherland, marketers have ceded too much ground to the finance function, out of a kind of learned mathematical insecurity. They’ve resigned themselves to what he calls ‘idiot metrics’: metrics that were never designed to capture the kind of value marketing is supposed to create.

Sutherland even argued that ROI is a completely wrong instrument to judge a large part of the discipline. In the logic of public companies, where every investment has to pay off on a quarterly basis, it becomes almost impossible to build a brand or a relationship. What remains is a form of transactional capitalism: short-term thinking that trades the future for a measurable today.

He dissected the clash between CFO and CMO as a collision of two fundamentally different world views: the ‘efficiency mindset’ versus the ‘opportunity mindset’. The first looks at value extraction: how do we squeeze maximum return out of what already exists? The second looks at value creation: which opportunities can we create that don’t exist yet?

In theory, companies need both. In practice, the efficiency logic almost always wins, simply because it fits better in spreadsheets. Marketing, which historically belongs in the corner of value creation, is increasingly judged on pure value extraction. That’s like evaluating research and development solely on quarterly profit.

Sutherland sketched a landscape in which companies dare less and less to invest in exploration, and more and more in exploitation. He illustrated that with his well-known bee metaphor. In a beehive, roughly 80% of the bees dutifully follow instructions and fly to the known flower fields. About 20% ignore the ‘briefing’ and go exploring. That’s inefficient – some will die without finding nectar – but evolutionarily essential. The hive that survives in the long run isn’t the most efficient one, but the hive that keeps discovering where the next source of nectar lies. When organisations cut that ‘senseless’ part out of their system, they cut out their future along with it.

Christian Van Thillo’s story dovetailed perfectly with this. Not because he talked about exactly the same thing, but because his analysis of the Belgian media landscape exposed the same underlying dynamic. The massive shift of media budgets to international tech platforms is no coincidence, but the logical consequence of the dominant efficiency logic. Big tech isn’t just a strong product. Above all, it’s a perfectly oiled system that caters to the reflexes of CFOs: cheap, scalable and instantly measurable. In a world where every euro has to show up in a dashboard straight away, it’s almost inevitable that budgets flow towards those platforms.

Van Thillo made it clear that this shift isn’t a cosmetic trend, but a structural threat to local media. The reflex to build a local ad platform in response sounds understandable but misses the point. The answer to big tech is not a smaller Belgian version of big tech. The real problem sits upstream, in the way we evaluate marketing and media. As long as we define value mainly as short-term ROI and clickable impressions, local players will always be at a disadvantage. Only when we dare to look at long-term value again (brand building, trust, context and cultural embeddedness) do the raison d’être and the competitive advantage of local media become obvious again.

The answer to how we make marketing effective again came from the research side. Nicola Tillin, SVP Lions Intelligence and Global MD at WARC, presented a sharply argued analysis based on the new reference work The Multiplier Effect: A CMO’s Guide to Brand Building in the Performance Era. In my view, this report is compulsory reading for any marketer who wants to understand why their budget underperforms its potential.

Tillin’s data confirmed Sutherland’s plea: many brands are undermining their own effectiveness. Not because they lack data, technology or optimisation, but because the balance between brand building and performance is completely skewed. The conclusion is as simple as it is uncomfortable: brands that invest too heavily in performance and structurally too little in brand building see their overall marketing return decline. Brands that instead opt for an integrated approach, where brand and performance reinforce one another, report on average up to 90% higher ROMI.

Source: WARC “The Multiplier Effect” 2025

A crucial key in that story is the well-known 95-5 rule. At any given time, only about 5% of your market is in buying mode; the other 95% is not. Brands that pour almost all their resources into that small, active group through retargeting, lower-funnel campaigns and short-term promotions at best harvest what demand is available today but do hardly any sowing for tomorrow. They fail to build mental availability, memory structures and emotional bonds that make people think of their brand spontaneously once they do enter the market. Performance activates existing demand but rarely creates new demand.

And that puts us squarely in the dynamic Sutherland describes as exploitation versus exploration. Performance is exploitation: hunting the low-hanging fruit of today. Brand building is exploration: investing in the far larger group of people who will become relevant tomorrow, next year or in five years. Both are needed, just not in the ratio most organisations are working with today.

It’s not as if we’re still in the dark about this. Research by Peter Field and Les Binet showed years ago that a 60/40 split, with at least 60% of budget for brand building, is most effective over the long term. The Multiplier Effect reconfirms that ratio and explains why a structural shift towards short-term thinking undermines total effectiveness. Brands that cut back on brand building lose pricing power, become more vulnerable to promo pressure, extract less efficiency from their performance budgets and see their future demand pool shrink. Underinvesting in brand building isn’t a cost saving. It’s a quiet erosion of value.

The real question for marketers is changing. Not: “How do we squeeze a bit more out of our performance budgets?” But: “How do we make sure performance no longer starves brand building of oxygen?” The most successful brands are not those that optimise hardest at the bottom of the funnel, but those that manage to see brand building and performance as one system. Brand building creates demand, performance converts it. That’s where the true multiplier effect lies.

Of course, brand building is no longer as simple as in the days of Don Draper. Once upon a time, one good idea, a big pile of money and a TV commercial would reach just about everyone. Those were the golden days of marketing and advertising. But they’re gone, and it’s about time we as marketers and agencies fully accepted that. The age of the big idea is over. Dead. Buried. Yet we still cling to it: we come up with one idea, produce a spot and then roll that idea out linearly across various performance channels, sometimes aimed almost exclusively at the 5% of consumers who are actively in-market.

Tom Roach’s talk focused precisely on this problem. Historically, brand building was based on singularity, consistency and repetition. One clear strategic core – a big idea, purpose or key message – that you repeat for years. And that works. In a recent report, System1 showed again that creative ideas don’t wear out through repetition: ‘Creative ideas don’t wear out, they wear in.’ That aligns perfectly with what we know from behavioural science: people love repetition and familiarity. Think of our cognitive bias towards the known and the work of Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk on mental availability: a brand lives mainly as a memory structure that fades unless you actively maintain it. Consistency is not a luxury, but a necessity.

But exactly that logic runs into the brick wall of today’s digital media reality. We spend less and less time watching linear TV – as Christian Van Thillo already pointed out – and more and more on digital platforms, especially Meta, YouTube and TikTok. And there, completely different rules apply. The business model of social media is about maximising attention time. Algorithms therefore prioritise content that is new, fresh and plentiful. Original content gets rewarded; repetition gets punished.

This creates a paradox. On TV, repetition leads to wear-in: the brand gets stronger the more often people see the same message. On social media, repetition leads to wear-out: performance falls off a cliff, sometimes by 45 to 60% after just four exposures.

Meta says it openly: when your creatives are too similar, the algorithm keeps hitting the same audience. Variety lowers CPA and increases reach. But that platform logic is at odds with the human logic of memory-building. Marketers are therefore trapped between two systems that contradict one another: humans need consistency, machines demand variation.

On top of that, we’re no longer building brands solely via TV and radio. Social platforms and YouTube have become powerful brand-building channels. However, these are environments where 85% of content isn’t even watched long enough (2.5 seconds) to form a memory. The real challenge isn’t just fragmentation, but the lack of (emotional) coherence across all those fragmented touchpoints.

Roach therefore proposes a new mental model. Not a return to the old way, but an evolution. Brands should no longer think in terms of one big idea that’s copy-pasted everywhere, but in terms of brands as systems of ideas: a family of related ideas that can vary per channel without losing the underlying brand logic.

That’s why we must move away from the logic of ‘one campaign, many formats’. The answer lies in a creative brand platform that is flexible enough to adapt to platforms and algorithms, yet robust enough to build recognition and memory. A platform that allows space for emotional storytelling, for reinforcing memory structures and for activation-led executions, without reinventing the wheel every single time.

That is the new assignment for brand building: variation within recognisability. Consistency in brand logic, flexibility in creation. Only then can brands serve both the human need for familiarity and the algorithmic hunger for novelty. Brands that master this won’t suffer from a fragmented media landscape. They’ll use it to their advantage.

Fernando Machado, globally renowned CMO responsible for groundbreaking work at Dove, Burger King and Activision, closed the congress. He did so with a confronting yet clarifying message. As modern marketers we operate in a world that’s changing faster than ever, and at the same time we’re under more pressure than ever to prove ROI. To be successful, we have to resist that reflex. Not because creativity is ‘fun’, but because it demonstrably delivers better results.

Machado underlined this with an ironic slide about the ‘benefits’ of a modern marketing career: money, reputation, mental health? Not quite. What we do get is the responsibility to make decisions that often feel uncomfortable. And that’s precisely where differentiation begins.

He zoomed in on his time at Burger King, a brand that was anything but distinctive when he arrived: a quarter of McDonald’s budget, half the number of locations, and a competitor with an iconic creative tradition. And yet Burger King managed to grow faster than McDonald’s. Not despite creativity, but thanks to it. Campaigns like Whopper Detour and Moldy Whopper weren’t provocation for provocation’s sake, but strategic choices. With a limited budget, the brand had to launch ideas that would stick.

He illustrated this with the contrast between a safe, risk-free commercial Burger King had made before his arrival – a spot no one could object to, but no one would remember either – and the later campaigns that made the brand culturally relevant again.

His point wasn’t that brands should shock. His point was that distinctiveness almost always goes hand in hand with fear. The ideas that drive business impact are rarely the ones everyone felt comfortable with at the beginning. Fear is not a stop sign, but a signal that you’re holding onto something potentially important. As Machado put it, citing Bill Bernbach: ‘The biggest risk is not taking a risk.’

He closed with a series of recommendations that every CMO and marketer should take to heart. Respect your brand’s history, but don’t be afraid to reinterpret it. Brief your agency sharply but give them the freedom to help redefine the question. And above all: don’t kill the ideas that scare you a little too quickly. Give them time to mature. His most characteristic advice summed it up perfectly: ‘Be afraid, very afraid, but do it.’

And so, the talk by Average Rob – the content creator who launched his own beer brand – became an unintended translation of Machado’s advice. Entertaining, light-hearted, but essentially the same message: dare to do something that feels bigger than yourself, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Put all the keynotes side by side and a strikingly consistent picture emerges. Rory Sutherland showed how the profession has become obsessed with measurability at the expense of value creation. Nicola Tillin demonstrated that effectiveness only arises when brand building and performance are in balance. Tom Roach showed that to achieve that, we have to work differently: no longer in campaigns, but in creative systems that can handle both human logic and platform logic. And Fernando Machado reminded everyone of the essence: growth requires distinctiveness, and distinctiveness requires courage.

Together, they’re not loose insights but a single warning: the industry is structurally out of balance. We’ve perfected optimisation, but neglected construction. Performance without brand does not create a market. Data without imagination does not create preference. And creativity without courage does not create difference.

That’s why 2026 won’t be a technological tipping point, but a strategic one. The question is not whether we can measure, automate and personalise even more, but whether we are willing to invest again in what builds value in the long term: mental availability, pricing power and cultural relevance.

This calls for CMOs who dare to define effectiveness more broadly than a dashboard. CEOs and CFOs who are prepared to judge results over several years. Creative partners who don’t just optimise within the logic of algorithms but put brand logic back in the lead. The companies that will win are not those that optimise the hardest, but those that dare to create again. Because the future of brands won’t be decided by algorithms, but by the choices we make today.