The AI Advertising Podcast: S2
Episode 7
Balancing Brand & Performance: Full-Funnel Strategy and AI
About This Episode
Marketers have long been obsessed with performance—but is it costing us long-term growth?
This episode explores the growing tension between brand and performance marketing and the role of AI in helping marketers finally see the full funnel.
Becky Tasker | VP of Growth Marketing, StackAdapt
Transcript
Diego Pineda (00:00:00)
Today, we’re exploring a fundamental tension in marketing: Performance vs. Brand.
In a recent survey by StackAdapt and Ascend2, we found that 80% marketers prioritize performance marketing over brand building. And for many, it pays off. Top performers are three times more likely to focus heavily on performance.
But there’s a hidden cost. 88% of marketers say poor measurement undermines their confidence in channel performance. And 42% point to cross-funnel measurement as their top challenge.
That’s what we’re calling the Orchestration Gap. And our guest today has a lot to say about it.
Becky Tasker is the VP of Growth Marketing at StackAdapt. She’s seen how an over-reliance on performance marketing can backfire—and why brand building is no longer optional.
Let’s get into it.
Podcast Intro (00:00:58)
Welcome to the AI Advertising Podcast, brought to you by StackAdapt. I’m your host, Diego Pineda. Get ready to dive into AI, Ads, and Aha moments.
Diego Pineda (00:01:13)
For over a decade, marketers have refined attribution models, optimized spend, and zeroed in on ROAS. It’s made performance marketing incredibly powerful—and incredibly dominant.
Becky Tasker (00:01:28)
Performance marketing has really become the default because frankly, it’s one of the easiest to measure now. So as marketers have really focused on things like attribution and channel performance over the last decade, we’ve gotten really good attribution models like first touch or last touch, or maybe it’s an influence model. For some of these channels that are further downstream. But I think what has happened is we’ve rotated into performance marketing and proving dollar for dollar every value that we actually enact. We have lost sight of the full marketing funnel.
Diego Pineda (00:02:06)
But Becky says this narrow focus on measurable outcomes has led to a dangerous side effect: funnel shrinkage.
Becky Tasker (00:02:15)
When you focus on something like last touch attribution or, again, rigorous performance marketing, typically what you are looking for is that dollar for dollar return and basically being able to say, OK, if I put a dollar into one of these marketing channels, I know that I’m going to get six dollars of pipeline or six dollars of revenue in return. But what happens is you’re working these folks or consumers that are always ready in the funnel. You’re putting your efforts there, you’re converting them. But if you’re not building your top of funnel and you’re building awareness and interest in getting people into work, Essentially, that funnel can dry up. And I think what some companies are starting to see is that their performance marketing, while it’s still performing, it’s getting tougher to perform, it’s getting less efficient. And it’s likely because there aren’t as many warm consumers or leads to actually work.
Diego Pineda (00:03:09)
In other words, we’ve become so good at optimizing the bottom of the funnel that we’ve stopped filling the top.
Diego Pineda (00:03:20)
42% of marketers say cross-funnel measurement is their biggest barrier. And Becky agrees: the way we track impact is siloed.
Becky Tasker (00:03:29)
I think the biggest mistake is really focusing on the last piece of the funnel. So bottom funnel, downstream efforts where you are looking for that direct conversion. We should always be looking at that, but that is only a piece of the consumer journey. As a marketing leader, I definitely want to look at the holistic full funnel. I want to know how we are generating awareness and are we actually moving our consumers or our accounts closer to the businesses and that they’re interested in? And are we actually able to capture that interest? So I would say making sure that you’re looking not only at your bottom funnel or kind of last click attribution and measurement, but building out your pieces of the pie. So it has brand and awareness in it too. And you’re looking holistically across the funnel.
It’s really uncomfortable when you’re launching awareness or brand awareness campaigns and your KPIs or your metrics don’t directly tie into that form fill, right? Or that purchase that you’re looking for. It makes it uncomfortable because you don’t have those direct results. What you need to do though, is again, take a step back, look at the full funnel journey and recognize that, okay, maybe my brand marketing is more based on impressions. Maybe it is more based on getting accounts to warm up with us or consumers to warm up with us and readiness and building that into the way that you are measuring.
There is a ton of data out there, but measuring this type of impact, I think is relatively new. It’s getting better and it has gotten better in the last couple of years. But now marketers should consider adding things to their toolkit like media mix modeling, where they can actually look at how they’re investing in these upper channels and then do some statistical modeling and see how it’s impacting downstream results, maybe three to six months later. They can also do kind of first touch attribution, multiple attribution models to get more data here. But again, you kind of have to think of your journey in different stages and different metrics for those stages.
Diego Pineda (00:05:32)
So, the answer lies in stitching together that journey. That means layering in things like media mix modeling and multitouch attribution. But as Becky points out, this shift requires more than tools. It requires trust—and alignment.
Diego Pineda (00:05:54)
So can AI help solve the measurement crisis? Maybe.
Becky Tasker (00:05:58)
I think one of the things about AI right now is that it’s really, really great at maybe some contextual optimizations or helping us find campaign efficiencies within a campaign when our data set is really predefined and where we’ve got really rigorous structure behind it. I think where we still need to see AI grow and again companies grow is with a holistic infrastructure and data set, to help a marketer look at the end-to-end funnel. I always say for AI, it’s as good as the base data that you give it. And so if you are operating in silos or your data structure is different, again, for upper funnel awareness marketing versus your performance marketing downstream, AI right now will have a hard time stitching it together. So a marketer does need to think about their infrastructure and data quality to fuel AI to get those results. So if we can get that infrastructure correct, I think AI can do a lot for us and really automate a lot of this at the end of the day. What I have seen though is you know marketers venture into some new measurement methods or again, MMM modeling that I mentioned earlier, and sometimes they can struggle because of the data integrity that they um actually need to clean up and you know make perfect to be used.
Diego Pineda (00:07:18)
But there’s another risk: blind trust. Becky cautions against treating AI outputs as gospel.
Becky Tasker (00:07:26)
You want to be careful with your AI outputs, because even if I as a marketing leader go and do something contextual with AI, not even data driven, and but you can get your AI algorithms or responses to hallucinate and start inferring what you’re trying to get it to say, instead of it giving you the real results. So I think you have to exercise caution.
My advice here is to always take AI with a grain of salt and validate it, until you feel really, really good about the output. And so this could be in the form of iterative testing, giving it new data, new data sets, giving it the same data set over and over again, right, and giving it different questions and seeing how it responds. But I do think there’s an art and a science behind how we prompt our AI generative tools to get the right results. And so right now, again, exercise caution, absolutely use it. And I do think in a future world, we’ll have something that’s offering more and more benefits even quicker than it is today.
Diego Pineda (00:08:33)
If performance marketing is the short game, brand is the long game. And Becky is betting on both.
Becky Tasker (00:08:40)
I think one of the big things that I’m focusing on and recommending is to take a bet on awareness marketing. And so what that means in my life is we’re actually dedicating our, you know, performance or our growth marketing budget in ratios of how many dollars are we going to dedicate to brand marketing and how many dollars are we going to dedicate to performance marketing. In order to do that, I had a lot of internal conversations, a lot of executive alignment, a lot of team alignment, because it can be you knowm a risk. And this is something that I would love to see marketers leave behind in 2026.
It’s definitely a risk for somebody like me to move all of, not all of my dollars, but some of my dollars from performance marketing, which again, I know is a dollar in and a dollar out into brand. But I am taking a bet and a belief that if I do move my money from some performance marketing channels into brand marketing, that I’ll go back to that rate rising tide raises all ships concept. And we will begin to build our upper funnel and our awareness and warm leads. So our performance marketing has more to work from. I’m leaving behind just the short-term game for marketers. And I’m venturing into playing both short-term and long-term in marketing.
Diego Pineda (00:10:05)
StackAdapt’s survey data backs this up: 38% of marketing leaders now believe that aligning brand and performance will unlock the greatest long-term growth. And Becky sees it as a necessary evolution—especially in B2B.
Becky Tasker (00:10:19)
B2B marketers, again, for the last decade, have really thrived in building engines that anchor in performance marketing. And I do think that that is rooted in an obsession to prove every dollar that we spend as a B2B marketer has a direct impact to the business. You know, most of my B2B network or colleagues or mentors that I talk to don’t spend a lot of time in brand and awareness marketing. And I do think, again, in 2026, I want to see them make that leap to get more into brands and to get more into being top of mind for consumers. There’s research out there today that basically says for a B2B buyer, they are not in a purchase cycle 90% of the time. They only talk to companies when they are in a purchase cycle and they want to do most of the research themselves before they even talk to anybody in sales. So truly using advertising and programmatic and brand marketing to capture the attention, 90% of the time that they aren’t in market will truly become an imperative because that dictates what companies the consumers are actually going to go to and talk when they are ready to purchase or in that 10% of their time.
Diego Pineda (00:11:40)
So what’s the one thing marketing leaders should do this year to future-proof their strategy?
Becky Tasker (00:11:46)
One thing that marketing leaders should invest in again, as upper funnel and brand marketing. The reason that I say this, and again, it’s harder to prove out if you’re comparing it to performance marketing, but if you invest there, what you’re going to start seeing is more brand presence. Brand presence also equates to how is a company getting picked up in the new LLMs, right? We talked about AI a little bit earlier, but how is the company getting picked up in all of the LLMs? How is your brand presence not only bolstered through the placements you directly go and coordinate and manage with your teams, but how are they influencing where else your company shows up? You do have a belief that if you’re not investing in brand marketing today, others are, right? And they will go capture the share of voice, they will capture the presence and they will be top of mind for your consumers when your consumers enter the purchase cycle. So again, it’s a longer term game, but we are competing now in a world where it’s more about presence and share of voice and being the top of mind for consumers and making sure we’re in their hearts when they go to make a purchasing decision.
Diego Pineda (00:13:00)
And if you’re wondering whether the future is brand or performance?
Becky Tasker (00:13:04)
The future is both brand and performance marketing. Marketers will always have to play in performance land and make sure that we are driving results that can be directly attributable that do relate to our efforts. I think it’s a balancing act of how long do we stay in performance marketing or how much do we invest in performance marketing and how do we take steps into brand marketing and awareness and upper funnel and what is a logical shift that we can bring a company on. So recommendations here are if you’re dedicating something like 100% of your budget to performance marketing, try investing 20% of that into brand, and see how it goes and treat it as an experiment. Make sure you have everybody internally aligned that we’re going to do that. But again, start playing both the short term game or the short game and long game.
Diego Pineda (00:13:57)
The message is clear: the marketers who win in 2026 won’t be the ones who go all-in on either side. They’ll be the ones who build a bridge between both.
Diego Pineda (00:14:11)
Let’s recap, the best marketers don’t just measure more. They orchestrate more.
The bottleneck is not measurement anymore, but execution. Most marketers already have enough data and visibility. The real advantage now comes from how you use that data to make unified, cross-channel decisions that drive growth. It’s not about better attribution—it’s about better alignment.
Here are 3 moves you can make now:
Audit your funnel orchestration: Map how your teams and platforms work together across the funnel. Where are the handoffs broken? Where are signals siloed?
Rebalance for long-term growth: Shift at least 20% of your performance budget into brand. Track downstream impact over time—and align your team around both short- and long-term goals.
Invest in operational alignment, not just analytics: Make sure your data, creative, media, and messaging are working in sync. AI can help—but only if your foundation is connected.
The marketers who win in 2026 will be the ones who act in unison.
Podcast Outro (00:15:27)
Thanks for listening to this episode of The AI Advertising Podcast. This podcast is produced by StackAdapt. Visit us at stackadpat.com for more information about using AI in your advertising campaigns. If you liked what you heard, remember to subscribe, and we’ll see you next time.
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