P&G’s Marc Pritchard opened last week’s ANA Masters of Marketing with a talk called “Robots Can’t Build Brands.” Much of the coverage since has framed the week as a pendulum swing, as though performance had its decade, and brand now gets its turn.
I came home from Orlando with a different read. The marketers with the strongest stories did not trade one metric for another. They kept performance marketing, made brand the reason it works, tied both to business results, and had someone independent check the numbers. In a world where AI increasingly sits between brands and buyers, that combination is the differentiator.
Performance is now table stakes
Over the last decade marketers built real skill in performance, and that mattered. It is also now business as usual. Everyone has the same platforms, the same tools and the same optimization, and AI is making all of it faster and more alike. What performance cannot do on its own is make a brand worth choosing. Our BrandZ work has said the same thing for more than twenty years. Brands that mean something special to more people get chosen more often, keep their customers longer and hold their price.
AB InBev’s global CMO Marcel Marcondes put it plainly in Orlando, describing organic growth as something that comes only from brand-led marketing built around the consumer.
Outcomes decide on two different clocks
Brand investment must connect to financial performance, and the difficulty is timing. A click that ends in a basket shows up immediately. Brand pays back more slowly, so it cannot be judged on the same clock. When the quarter is the only clock available, you fund what the quarter can see, and the thing that actually built the business gets a little less each year.
The answer is to run both clocks at once. Put the short-term results the market demands, and the mid-term growth brand delivers side by side, in the view your CFO already reads.
That cuts both ways, because a beloved brand with no results is a failing business too. At the conference, Coca-Cola’s Manolo Arroyo described the company’s move to total consumer base, a behavioral measure, as its key metric, and reported adding 160 million consumers. I do not read that as a verdict against how people feel about a brand. Feeling still matters. The useful question is whether it shows up in what people buy, and I would guess most teams have never tested their headline metric that way.
The other half of this is who does the checking. I spent almost ten years at Meta, and one of the lessons I took from it is that you cannot grade your own homework. The most sophisticated advertisers and platforms seem to agree. Netflix has expanded its own conversion measurement considerably this year, and it still led with independent brand lift showing it ahead of advertisers’ total media mix. Both, not either. Kantar sells measurement, so weigh my view accordingly.
We now market to people and to machines
Pritchard’s argument was that AI makes execution faster, but the ideas that move people still start with people. He pointed to a Mr. Clean “retirement” stunt that ran with no TV at all and grew total brand sales 7%.
That matters more now because machines sit between brands and buyers. Our Media Reactions research found a net 75% of marketers plan to increase spend on AI assistants next year, while only 24% of consumers trust brand recommendations from them. And those assistants build their answers largely from material brands did not write: reviews, creator videos, and what customers say after they buy.
So the job has changed. We no longer control the message or the medium, and the work now is to shape the inputs that inform what an assistant says about us. A brand built mostly on targeting and signal gives it very little to go on. A brand with a clear and consistent meaning gives it plenty.
Where I would start
Look at your performance work and ask whether anyone would know it came from you. Put a longer brand window alongside your quarterly outcomes, on the page your CFO already reads. Then test whether your headline brand metric moves with buying, or only with sentiment.
And ask an AI assistant what makes your brand different. If you would not sign off on its answer, you have found next year’s brief.
