A former colleague texted me at 6:40 in the morning last week. Four words. Upper funnel is gone. She had been on the earnings call the day before, the one where the CFO used the phrase prudent stewardship twice and then suspended everything that could not produce a same quarter number.
I have read a lot of these transcripts this month. They rhyme. Trade spend holds. Search holds, sometimes grows. Retention email holds because it is nearly free. The brand line, the sponsorship, the long campaign that was finally starting to work, all suspended pending review.
It is not that anyone in the room hates brand. It is that in a panic, the argument that has a chart wins the argument that has a thesis.
The dashboard is not measuring what matters most. It is measuring what is easy to measure, and under pressure those two things quietly become the same thing.
Performance spend defends itself in real time. You cut it, the number moves, you put it back. It is legible to a finance team in a way that a two year salience curve simply is not. Brand spend has no such reflex. You cut it and nothing happens. Nothing happens for a while. Then the cost per acquisition on the channels you kept starts drifting up, quarter after quarter, and nobody connects the drift to a decision made in April 2020 because the decision was made in April 2020.
This is well documented and it keeps not mattering. Binet and Field spent years showing that the brands starving the long term to feed the short term buy a good year and pay for it with three bad ones. The recession work from 2008 and 2009 says the same thing. The companies that held or raised share of voice while competitors went dark came out the far side with pricing power the dark ones had to buy back at full retail.
Kellogg did it during the Depression while Post cut. We are still talking about that one because it worked and because it is rare, and it is rare for a very human reason. Nobody gets fired for the cut. The person who defends the brand line in a month like this is making a bet whose payoff arrives after their tenure, in a number they will not be around to claim.
You cut it and nothing happens. Nothing happens for a while.
I walked past Stumptown on Belmont on Tuesday, half boarded, a handwritten sign in the window. The name still meant something standing there in the rain with the lights off. That meaning took fifteen years and a great deal of unmeasurable money, and it is the only asset on the block that did not need the doors open to keep working.