I was wrong about direct response and and brand.

I told myself a comforting story, direct response acquisition spend is our brand spend. We’re reaching new people, telling stories, and putting our name in front of audiences who had never heard of us. Sure, we also asked for money but that didn’t negate the brand effect. If anything, it felt efficient, responsible, even.

A LinkedIn exchange last week brought this view front and center.  The argument I was responding to was thoughtful and coherent, not a straw man.

Brand, the commenter said,is about who we are. It builds memory structures around identity, purpose, and distinctiveness. Direct response is about what we need someone to do right now, with a clear route to act. Different cognitive problems, different jobs. But the conclusion followed that direct response should still be dominant. Every execution should do both jobs at once. If your direct response creative is well designed, it should activate decisions and quietly build brand at the same time.

I used to agree with that framing. The problem is the evidence runs the other way.

What the research actually shows

The most comprehensive body of evidence on this question comes from the IPA Effectiveness Databank, analyzed by Les Binet and Peter Field across nearly 1,000 case studies spanning 700 brands, 83 categories, and roughly 30 years. Importantly, this includes both commercial brands and nonprofits. The conclusions do not diverge by sector.

Two big findings:

• Brand building is the primary driver of long-term growth. Direct response produces short-term spikes that do not compound. Organizations that rely almost entirely on activation plateau.
• Brand-dominant creative reliably delivers both long-term and short-term effects. Activation-dominant creative almost never does.

System1, an ad testing company, analyzed more than 40,000 US TV ads aired between 2018 and 2024. Ninety-two percent of ads that scored highly on long-term brand-building potential also delivered above-average short-term sales lift. Brand-first advertising does both jobs more often than not.

Flip the lens and the pattern collapses. Among ads optimized for short-term response, more than half delivered little to no long-term brand impact. Activation-first creative occasionally pulls double duty, but it is the exception, not the rule.

The integration the LinkedIn commenter described is real. But it only works reliably when brand leads and even then, is very hard to pull off in the same execution.

Why activation-first struggles to do both jobs

If the goal is integrated design, where every execution builds brand and drives response, a reasonable question follows. Why does direct response–dominant creative fail so consistently at building durable brand effects?

There are two structural reasons, and neither is about talent or effort.

Selection method.  Modern acquisition systems are designed to find people most likely to act now. Whether you are buying digital ads, renting lists from cooperatives, or running any performance media, the optimization logic is the same – prior donors, lookalikes, behavioral signals that predict near-term conversion.

Large-scale analyses of ad delivery show the consequence clearly, more than 80 percent of conversions occurred among people who already had positive brand bias before the ad ever appeared. The ad didn’t create preference, it harvested it.

This matters because brand building requires reach into unfamiliar, unprimed audiences. Even beautifully branded direct response creative cannot overcome distribution that systematically favors the already predisposed. The algorithm quietly undermines the brand-building goal regardless of creative quality.

The second barrier is content. Direct response asks for action, brand asks for attention. They solve different cognitive problems.

Content designed to trigger immediate behavior relies on urgency, specificity, and concrete asks. It foregrounds specific programs and beneficiaries to collapse the decision frame and accelerate choice.  This is exactly what conversion-oriented content should do.

Memory formation works differently. Brand’s actual job is to earn enough attention, and enough emotional resonance, to encode associations that persist after the ad is gone. Content that earns only fleeting attention, just enough to prompt a click or a gift, often fails to encode into long-term memory at all. What gets remembered is the issue or the offer, not who brought it to mind.

Advertising effectiveness research has been consistent on this for decades. Activation produces short-lived spikes that decay once the campaign ends. The effect is real, but it does not accumulate. Brand building compounds, feeding future response rather than borrowing from it.

This is not an argument for new money

At this point, many nonprofits mentally exit the conversation. Brand sounds nice, but there is no budget for it.

That reaction misses two practical unlocks.

• The money is already being spent, the question is how it is allocated.
• All marketing spend is performance marketing, It just performs on different timescales.

Brand is performance marketing measured over years, activation is performance marketing measured over weeks. The choice is not between brand and accountability, it’s between short clocks and long clocks.

For most organizations the vast majority of marketing spend is on direct response.  The research-backed starting point for established organizations is roughly a 60 percent brand, 40 percent activation balance. For smaller groups that need near-term revenue to keep the lights on, leaning 70/30 or even 80/20 toward activation is defensible. Cash flow matters, survival matters.

What does not work is pretending that 100 percent activation is a clever workaround. That isn’t a loophole, it’s a detrimental tradeoff.

There is a lot to doing brand ads well that goes beyond the scope of this post.  But the starting point isn’t doing a brand ad, it’s deciding whether you’re going to stick with the story I told myself for years.

The data says otherwise.

Kevin