Mumbai: New WARC playbook identifies a widening gap between marketers’ belief in brand building and the way organisations actually allocate budgets, measure effectiveness and structure teams, with 62% reporting flat or declining budgets and only 19% seeing brand equity as a driver of business outcomes
For years, the debate in marketing has revolved around a familiar question: should brands prioritise long-term brand building or short-term performance?
WARC’s The Multiplier Playbook 2026 suggests that the industry may now be asking the wrong question.
The more pressing challenge, according to the report, is not whether marketers understand the value of combining brand and performance, but whether their organisations are actually equipped to do it.
The playbook describes a gap between what marketers say they believe and what they are able to put into practice — effectively a “say-do gap”. Most CMOs understand the theory behind WARC’s earlier Multiplier Effect research, but translating that understanding into budgets, organisational structures, measurement systems and day-to-day marketing decisions remains difficult.
The report, published by WARC in May 2026, combines data, frameworks and real-world examples to identify the “blockers” preventing marketers from making progress and proposes practical “plays” to address them.
One of the clearest findings is the disconnect between the C-suite’s stated support for brand and its ability to connect brand investment with commercial outcomes.
WARC and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) polled 209 marketers from the ANA membership to understand how marketing is connecting with the C-suite. The results point to a striking contradiction.
While 67% of marketers believe the C-suite recognises the importance of brand, only 19% say brand equity is seen as a driver of business outcomes.
The implication is significant. Brand may have won the argument in principle, but it has not necessarily won the argument in the boardroom.
At the same time, 62% of marketers report flat or declining budgets. According to the report, this pressure is contributing to a shift towards short-term performance metrics at the expense of longer-term brand building.
That creates a structural problem for marketers. When budgets become constrained, investments whose returns are immediately visible tend to become easier to defend. Performance media can offer a stream of highly visible metrics — clicks, conversions, acquisition costs and return on advertising spend — while the effects of brand investment often take longer to materialise and are more difficult to attribute to a single campaign or channel.
The result can be a vicious cycle: short-term metrics drive budget decisions, budget decisions reinforce short-term marketing behaviour, and the organisation becomes increasingly dependent on measurable immediate returns.
From “brand versus performance” to brand as a multiplier
The starting point for WARC’s argument is its earlier Multiplier Effect research.
The report argues that stronger brand equity can act as a multiplier for performance advertising, increasing its impact and efficiency. In other words, brand and performance should not be viewed as competing uses of the marketing budget.
They are interconnected parts of a growth system.
This changes the role of performance advertising. Rather than operating as an isolated conversion engine, performance activity should also contribute to and draw strength from the brand’s underlying equity.
The report consequently challenges the idea of running separate “brand” and “performance” campaigns. Instead, it advocates enduring creative “platforms” based on foundational consumer truths that can be adapted and iterated over time.
This is an important distinction.
A campaign is typically built around a defined period, objective and media burst. A platform is designed to survive beyond an individual campaign. It creates consistency, allows executions to evolve and gives consumers repeated opportunities to associate distinctive ideas and assets with the brand.
For marketers operating in an increasingly fragmented media environment, that continuity becomes particularly important.
The organisational problem behind the integration problem
The difficulty, however, is that many organisations remain structurally divided between brand and performance.
WARC’s research suggests that the challenge cannot be solved simply by telling teams to “integrate”.
Brand and performance teams may have different objectives, different measurement systems and different definitions of the consumer they are trying to influence.
The playbook specifically notes that brand and performance teams often do not have a shared perspective on which audiences are most likely to deliver growth.
That is more consequential than it may initially appear.
If the brand team defines growth as increasing future category penetration while the performance team defines it as maximising immediate conversion among high-intent users, both teams can be successful against their own KPIs while the organisation remains strategically fragmented.
WARC therefore places considerable emphasis on creating a shared language within the marketing function.
Integration does not necessarily mean eliminating specialist teams or forcing brand and performance marketers into identical roles. Instead, it means aligning them around common business objectives, audiences and measures of success.
The report’s case studies reinforce this idea, highlighting examples where organisations create shared moments, platforms or objectives around which different marketing disciplines can operate together.
The C-suite challenge is really a translation challenge
Perhaps the most important lesson from the report for CMOs is that the case for brand cannot be presented purely in marketing language.
Telling a CEO that “brand matters” is unlikely to be enough.
The more effective argument is to connect brand equity to a specific commercial problem.
Does stronger brand preference improve customer acquisition?
Can greater distinctiveness reduce dependence on promotional activity?
Can stronger consideration increase penetration?
Can brand equity help a business command a price premium?
Can a recognisable brand make performance advertising more efficient?
These are business questions rather than marketing questions.
The report’s findings suggest that marketers need to become better at translating brand metrics into the language of business outcomes.
That may be one reason why the gap between the 67% who say their C-suite recognises the importance of brand and the 19% who see brand equity connected to business outcomes is so revealing.
The issue is not necessarily that CEOs reject brand building. It is that the causal connection between brand equity and business performance remains insufficiently understood.
Creativity has become a measurement problem too
The report also takes aim at another tension in contemporary marketing: the perceived risk of creativity.
Creative work is inherently less predictable than optimisation-led marketing. In an environment dominated by dashboards and immediate performance metrics, that unpredictability can make ambitious creative strategies difficult to defend.
WARC’s answer is not to abandon measurement, but to change the way creativity is framed.
The playbook proposes a four-level “creativity stack” and argues that CMOs can use it to reduce the perceived risk associated with creative investment. It also calls for media, creative and measurement to be brought much closer together.
This is a particularly interesting reframing.
Creativity is often defended in terms of awards, emotional impact or brand fame. WARC instead encourages marketers to make a more commercial argument: creative quality can improve media efficiency.
If advertising is distinctive, memorable and recognisably connected to the brand, the media investment has a better chance of working harder.
That also changes the definition of creative waste.
The problem is not simply spending money on an unconventional idea that fails. There can be waste in producing large volumes of advertising that consumers do not notice, remember or associate with the brand.
The report consequently places emphasis on tightening distinctiveness and building stronger creative platforms rather than continuously generating disconnected executions.
The case for “fewer, bigger and longer”
Another implication of the playbook is a challenge to the industry’s growing appetite for constant creative refresh.
In an ecosystem where brands can produce hundreds of pieces of content for different platforms and audiences, volume can easily become a proxy for effectiveness.
But more advertising does not automatically mean more effective advertising.
The WARC approach instead favours stronger ideas that can be sustained, recognised and adapted over time.
This is particularly relevant when media fragmentation is considered. Consumers may encounter a brand through television, connected TV, YouTube, social platforms, search, retail media, influencers and outdoor advertising. The brand experiences these as different touchpoints, but the consumer does not necessarily distinguish between the organisational silos behind them.
The implication is that creative consistency becomes more—not less—important as the number of channels increases.
Measurement needs to move up a level
Ultimately, the Multiplier Playbook is also a critique of how marketing effectiveness is measured.
Channel metrics remain useful. They are necessary for optimisation and operational decision-making.
The problem arises when channel-level efficiency becomes a substitute for measuring the overall contribution of marketing to business growth.
A platform may report an impressive return on advertising spend because it captured consumers who were already close to purchase. That does not necessarily mean the activity created incremental demand.
Conversely, brand advertising may influence future consideration, preference and propensity to buy without generating an immediately attributable transaction.
The challenge for marketers is therefore to build measurement systems that can accommodate both.
The report’s central argument is not that performance metrics are wrong. It is that they are incomplete when used in isolation.
Marketing needs to be judged at two levels: how efficiently individual activities perform and how effectively the overall system creates incremental business growth.
What the findings mean for marketers
The most important contribution of The Multiplier Playbook 2026 is that it moves the brand-versus-performance debate away from ideology and towards organisational design.
The industry already has extensive evidence supporting the importance of brand building. WARC’s new research suggests that the next challenge is making that knowledge operational.
That means confronting uncomfortable questions.
Are brand and performance teams working towards the same definition of growth?
Do they use the same audience framework?
Are their budgets encouraging integration or reinforcing silos?
Does the C-suite understand how brand equity contributes to business outcomes?
Are marketers using short-term metrics as optimisation tools or as the definition of effectiveness?
Is creative being judged only on immediate response, or also on its ability to build distinctive memory structures?
And perhaps most importantly: are strong ideas being given enough time to work?
WARC’s answer is a clear call for marketers to close the gap between what they say they believe about effectiveness and what their organisations actually do.
The playbook’s own summary captures the challenge succinctly: most CMOs know the theory behind the Multiplier Effect but struggle to apply it; most CEOs recognise that brand is important but few connect brand equity to day-to-day business outcomes; and marketers need to bring creative, media and measurement much closer together.
For an industry that has spent the last decade becoming increasingly obsessed with measurability, the report offers a provocative conclusion: the next frontier of marketing effectiveness may not be better dashboards, but better integration.
Brand and performance do not need to win against each other.
The bigger opportunity is to make them work harder for each other.
