Only about 5% of potential buyers are shopping in a category at any given time, according to the 95-5 rule. The other 95% will cycle into the market later, and the brands they remember have the advantage when they do. According to BERA.ai data, that advantage holds across the funnel. Brands with stronger equity convert better at every stage, and the biggest gain comes between consideration and usage.
Creative platforms give brand and performance advertising a shared idea to build from, so each makes the other more effective. At BERA’s Multiplier Playbook Day, an event dedicated to connecting brand investment to business growth, David Tiltman, chief content officer at WARC, opened the afternoon with a keynote on creative platforms and the work customers actually see.
A single creative idea, executed with consistency, can drive sales now and keep a brand top of mind until the rest of the market is ready to buy.
Advertising has two jobs
The 95-5 rule, from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, means advertising has to convert buyers in-market today while building memory with those who will shop later. Brand advertising earns attention and builds memory, often through emotion, and performance advertising gives people with existing demand a timely reason to buy. Doing both is significantly more effective, and creative platforms help the two work as one.
Build ideas that stretch
A creative platform is an advertising concept with enough breadth and depth to work across many types of ads. A single ad rarely builds emotional memory and drives conversions at the same time, so a platform lets brand and performance ads tell the same story in different ways. Brands can develop one from the top down, starting with a big brand idea and extending it into sales, or from the bottom up, starting with a promotion and adding brand meaning.
McDonald’s, for example, took the top-down route after recognizing its marketing had become too performance-driven and disconnected. Its Famous Orders platform grew out of small behavioral insights from fans and turned celebrity orders into menus people could buy in restaurants. Instacart, on the other hand, went bottom up, turning a price promotion into a brand moment by tapping into 90s nostalgia and rolling prices back to what goods cost in 1999.
Go deep and go long
Going deep means carrying an idea through every stage of the funnel, and going long means sticking with it over time. Analytic Partners analyzed 51,218 pieces of creative and found genuine wear-out in just 14 of them. Research published by WARC also shows the value of consistency. Ads using distinctive brand assets for four to five years averaged a 3.5-star rating for long-term growth potential, compared with 2.4 stars for assets used for one year. Snickers has kept “You’re not you when you’re hungry” going since 2010, a form of disguised repetition that holds the brand in memory without feeling stale.
Staying coherent matters more as brands produce more assets across more channels. Adding the brand view can show how quickly those gains build. Tracking brand equity over time shows whether a platform keeps strengthening the perceptions that drive these returns.
Avoid budget red zones
Most companies should put 40% to 60% of their budget into brand advertising. Spending less than 30% makes it hard for brand work to pay off, and most advertisers should treat search spending above 25% of budget as a warning sign, with travel and hospitality among the exceptions.
Traditional marketing mix models capture media’s direct path to sales but can miss the indirect path that runs through brand equity. BERA.ai analysis can measure both. BERA’s analysis of dozens of marketing mix models found that brand equity contributes an average of 15% of total sales. Measuring how media builds brand equity alongside its immediate sales impact gives marketers a clearer picture of where their budgets work hardest.
Telstra, Australia’s biggest telecom company, tested a 50/50 brand and performance budget split in 2023, then increased its brand allocation to 40% in fiscal 2024. According to its CMO, marketing subsequently delivered 13.4% growth in media-driven revenue and a 27.5% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS).
Brands with smaller budgets can see similar gains, as FitFlop’s UK business shows. After hitting a performance plateau, it cut its lowest-performing performance campaigns and redirected investment into brand-building activity. WARC reported that the new approach increased total website revenue by 30% and ROAS by 68%.
Bring media and creative back together
Creative quality and media effectiveness reinforce each other. Research published by WARC examined six campaigns and found that those with high scores for both creative and media quality delivered 5.3 times stronger brand awareness lift and 2.5 times better ad recall than lower-scoring campaigns. The findings show why creative and media decisions need to work together to get the greatest return from advertising investment.
Playing it safe also carries a cost, and System1’s research on the cost of dull estimates US advertisers would need to spend an additional $189 billion on media to make less engaging ads as effective as more emotionally engaging creative.
How to prove what a creative platform is worth
Proving a creative platform’s value starts with a baseline. BERA.ai tracks brand equity before a platform launches and continuously after, so marketers can see when and how perceptions shift.
The next step is identifying which perceptions matter most for the brand and which ones the platform moves. A top-down platform built on a big brand idea may lift Regard and Meaningfulness, while a bottom-up promotion may do more to build Familiarity with new buyers.
The final step links those equity changes to business outcomes. BERA’s Brand-to-Business™ analysis ties brand equity to customer growth, share of wallet, pricing power, and revenue.
For one beverage brand, brand equity drove 17.6% of total revenue, or $185 million in 2024, and each one-point lift in brand equity was worth an additional $3.7 million. That turns a platform’s long-term brand building into a number marketers can project forward and defend in budget conversations.
