Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / Why CMOs Are Killing The Brand Awareness Campaign
Transcript
- Lucas: Look at the latest earnings calls from the big consumer goods companies. You see this pattern where they are aggressively cutting what used to be called brand awareness spend. It is not just a temporary pause because of inflation or interest rates. It is a structural shift in how the C-suite views marketing effectiveness. Luna: Right. They are realizing that buying eyeballs without buying customers is just expensive charity work. So what replaces it? Lucas: It replaces itself with performance creative. And I do not mean just slapping a discount code on a banner ad. I mean designing entire content ecosystems where every piece of media has a measurable path to a transaction. It is about killing the vanity metric of reach and replacing it with the brutal honesty of return on ad spend. Luna: But isn't that dangerous? If you only optimize for immediate sales, don't you lose the long-term brand equity that lets you charge premium prices later? Lucas: That is the old fear. But the data from late twenty twenty-five shows that pure play brand campaigns had an average half-life of maybe six weeks before the lift disappeared. Performance creative compounds. If you keep testing hooks and angles, you build a library of winning assets that lowers your cost per acquisition over time. It is an asset class now, not just an expense line item. Luna: So you are saying the creative department has effectively become a revenue operations team. They are no longer just making things look good. They are engineering conversions. Lucas: Exactly. And this brings us to the specific case we need to talk about. A mid-sized apparel retailer here in the US. Let us call them Apex Apparel. In Q three of twenty twenty-five, their CMO slashed their traditional display budget by forty percent and moved that money into social video testing. Luna: Forty percent is a huge slice of the pie. Did the board push back? Executives usually panic when they see that kind of budget reallocation without a clear guarantee. Lucas: They did push back initially. But the CMO had a simple defense. She showed them that their existing display ads were generating zero incremental lift above organic traffic. They were paying for people who were already going to buy. So she moved the money to test user-generated style content against high-production studio shots. Luna: And which format won? Usually, the polished studio stuff performs better in brand surveys, even if it costs more to produce. Lucas: Not this time. The raw, vertical video clips shot on iPhones performed three times better on a cost per acquisition basis. It felt counterintuitive to the creative director, but the numbers did not lie. The audience trusted the authenticity. The conversion rate jumped from point eight percent to two point four percent in six weeks. Luna: That is a massive delta. But how do you scale that? You cannot ask every creative team member to shoot iPhone videos all day. That sounds like a nightmare for quality control and brand consistency. Lucas: It is not about everyone shooting on iPhones. It is about building a modular creative workflow. Apex built a system where they have a core brand message, but they allow third-party creators and even loyal customers to interpret that message visually. It is decentralized production with centralized messaging. It scales because you are leveraging other people's audiences and other people's cameras. Luna: So the CMO becomes less of a gatekeeper and more of a curator. She sets the guardrails for the message and then lets the market decide which visual interpretation resonates most. Lucas: Precisely. And this changes the internal politics of the marketing department. The creative team stops feeling like artists who get interrupted by sales requests. They start feeling like growth hackers who use design as their primary tool. It is a cultural shift that is harder to manage than any software implementation. Luna: I can imagine the friction there. Traditional creatives might feel like their craft is being reduced to data points. How do you keep morale up when the only thing that matters is the click-through rate? Lucas: You give them ownership of the outcome. When a designer sees their specific hook drive ten thousand dollars in direct revenue, that is a powerful feedback loop. It connects their daily work to the company's survival. Most people want to know their work matters. Performance marketing gives them that proof instantly. Luna: It reminds me of how tech companies operate with their engineering teams. Ship fast, measure impact, iterate. Applying that same velocity to visual storytelling is a game changer for traditional sectors. Lucas: And it forces the finance team to change how they view marketing too. Historically, marketing was treated as a fixed cost. A percentage of revenue that you trim when things get tight. Now, it is being viewed as variable capital. You put money in, you measure the yield, and you adjust. It is much closer to how venture capitalists think about funding startups. Luna: Which makes sense given that we are in a tighter macroeconomic environment right now in late twenty twenty-six. Investors are demanding efficiency across the board. There is no room for fluffy brand building anymore. Lucas: Correct. The cost of capital is still elevated. Companies cannot afford to tie up cash in unproven initiatives. They need liquidity and predictable returns. Marketing that promises brand love is risky. Marketing that delivers verified transactions is safe. That is the arbitrage happening right now. Luna: Let us pause here for a second. If these conversations about marketing budgets and executive strategy have sparked something you've actually used in your own career, consider supporting the show directly. A small group of listeners chips in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that is literally what funds making these detailed deep dives possible. No ads, just the conversation. Lucas: Yeah, it keeps the lights on and allows us to dig into these specific cases without needing a corporate sponsor dictating the narrative. It really does make a difference. Luna: Thanks for keeping this independent. Now, let us get back to the data. You mentioned earlier that this shift is forcing finance teams to change their mindset. What are the specific metrics they are asking for now instead of standard ROI? Lucas: They are asking for blended return on ad spend. Not just the return on the last click, but the full journey. If a customer sees a social video, clicks a link, browses the site for ten minutes, leaves, and then comes back via email to buy, the finance team wants to know that total value. They are moving away from last-click attribution because it understates the value of the creative work. Luna: That is a huge distinction. Last-click attribution basically tells the finance team that the email campaign did all the work and the social video did nothing. Which is obviously wrong. Lucas: Obviously wrong. But until recently, the technology made it easy to blame the last touchpoint. Now, with better privacy-compliant tracking and first-party data collection, companies can stitch together those journeys. They can see that the creative was the ignition, even if the checkout button was the final spark. Luna: So the creative team gets credit for opening the door, not just for closing the sale. That feels fairer. But does this create pressure to over-optimize? To tweak every pixel until the creativity becomes sterile? Lucas: That is the real risk. You can optimize the hell out of a bad idea. If the product is weak or the pricing is off, no amount of creative testing will save it. Some CMOs are falling into this trap. They focus so hard on the hook that they forget the offer. The lesson here is that creative supports strategy. It does not replace it. Luna: Right. You can have the best video in the world, but if you are selling a subscription service during a recession with a complicated cancellation policy, nobody is going to convert. The foundation has to be solid first. Lucas: Exactly. So the smart CMOs are using performance creative to validate their offers, not just to sell them. They are running cheap tests to see if people want the product before they scale the budget. It is a de-risking mechanism. It turns marketing into R&D for your sales engine. Luna: That is a brilliant way to frame it. R&D for sales. It shifts the perception of marketing from a cost center that burns cash to a lab that discovers profitable paths. Lucas: And that is why the job description for CMOs is changing. They are no longer just storytellers. They are experimentalists. They need to be comfortable with failure. They need to run hundreds of small experiments to find the few winners that justify the budget. It is a different skill set entirely. Luna: It requires a lot of intellectual humility. Admitting that your favorite creative concept failed and pivoting quickly. Most leaders struggle with that ego check. Lucas: They do. But the market rewards the humble ones. The ones who say 'this didn't work, let's try that' are the ones who survive the next downturn. The ones who defend their beloved brand campaign until the bank account hits zero are the ones who get replaced. Luna: So the question for any marketing leader listening today is whether they are willing to kill their darlings. Are they ready to treat their creative output as disposable data rather than permanent art? Lucas: That is the core tension. Can you separate your identity from your output? Because if you cannot, you will never truly embrace performance marketing. You will always hold back, protecting the brand image at the expense of the bottom line. And in twenty twenty-six, the bottom line protects the brand image. Luna: Powerful thought. It suggests that the future of marketing belongs to those who can balance artistic integrity with financial discipline. Who do you think wins that balance better? Tech companies or traditional brands? Lucas: Tech companies have been doing this for a decade. They have the infrastructure. But traditional brands are catching up fast because they have to. The ones that will win are the hybrids. The ones who respect the craft of storytelling but wield it with the precision of a scalpel. Luna: A scalpel. I like that. Precise, deliberate, and effective. Much better than a sledgehammer that breaks everything in its path. Lucas: Exactly. And as we move further into the year, watch for the companies that announce these creative transformations. They will likely show up as the most efficient operators in their sector. The rest will be left trying to explain why their brand awareness numbers looked pretty, but their bank accounts did not. Luna: It seems like the era of looking busy is over. The era of proving value is here. Where do you see this going in the next twelve months? Lucas: I think we will see AI tools handle the grunt work of testing. Generating fifty variations of a headline or image in seconds. So the human CMO's role shifts from approving assets to curating the strategy behind the automation. It is less about making more content and more about making smarter decisions about which content to amplify. Luna: So the human element becomes even more critical, not less. Because you need judgment to decide what is worth automating in the first place. Lucas: Absolutely. Technology amplifies intent. If your intent is vague, the technology just wastes money faster. If your intent is sharp, the technology builds a empire. That is the choice facing every marketing leader right now.