Writing
Building Brand Identity Through Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is very good at measuring clicks. It is much worse at measuring what people think of you. Brand work lives in that slower layer — what someone associates with a company, whether they'd consider it later, whether the ads changed anything in their head at all. I spent years at YouTube building brand advertising and brand measurement products, and the gap between those two layers is where most of the interesting problems were.
Brand is not softer performance
The common framing is that brand advertising is performance advertising with fuzzier goals. I think that framing is wrong, and it leads platforms to build the wrong systems. Brand is a different product with different physics. The value being created is memory, familiarity, and permission to be considered later — none of which shows up in a conversion column this week, and some of which never shows up in a column at all.
If you optimize a brand campaign with direct-response machinery, you get direct-response outcomes: clicks from the people who were already going to click. The advertiser pays for brand and receives retargeting. This failure looks like success in every dashboard you have, which is exactly what makes it dangerous.
What the buyer is actually buying
A brand buyer is buying confidence: that the reach was real, the context was suitable, the attention wasn't fake, and the placement didn't damage the brand. Each of those words hides infrastructure. Reach needs forecasting and frequency controls. Context needs content understanding deep enough to know what the ad actually ran against — not just which video, but which moment in the video. Attention needs honest viewability assumptions across surfaces that differ wildly. Safety needs review systems that run before serving, not after the screenshot circulates.
And measurement has to answer the question the buyer actually has — did this change what people think? — which means lift studies and perception metrics, not engagement proxies. The temptation is always to report the metrics you have instead of the outcome they bought. Buyers notice. They are less naive than platform dashboards assume.
Why this has to be a system
Without that infrastructure, a brand offering isn't a product — it's a bespoke sales motion with a deck. Every campaign gets hand-curated, every measurement becomes a one-off study, and nothing scales. Making brand advertising a real platform product is mostly the unglamorous work of making the guarantees automatic: inventory normalization across surfaces, suitability checks in the serving path, frequency and reach controls matched to the objective, measurement loops that connect exposure to lift.
Brand identity is built slowly and damaged quickly. The systems should be designed around that asymmetry.