What Is Brandformance? The Approach Uniting Brand Building and Performance Marketing

Marketing has a new portmanteau making the rounds: "brandformance". Behind the buzzword sits a serious idea that is reshaping how ambitious companies organize their budgets and their teams.

In a piece for the Forbes Agency Council, Ilan Nass, founder and Chief Revenue Officer of performance marketing agency Taktical Digital, defines brandformance as a holistic approach that integrates brand building and performance marketing to obtain measurable results across multiple channels.

The premise is that the old split between "brand" and "performance" no longer reflects how people actually buy. Consumers move fluidly between platforms, and every touchpoint either strengthens the brand or weakens it. A conversion campaign that feels off-brand erodes trust; a brand campaign with no measurable outcome erodes budget.

Nass breaks the concept into two parts, with brand building acting as both anchor and catalyst for performance.

The brand side is about native content: pieces that fit the platform where they live and sound like the brand itself. Here he gives a starring role to creator partnerships, noting that strategic collaboration with content creators is vital for developing engaging, authentic content tailored to specific platforms and user journeys. Data from each iteration feeds the next one.

The performance side is about efficiency: targeted media buying and omnichannel distribution that put the right message in front of the right audience at the right time, with data-driven optimization maximizing ROI. Done well, performance marketing also generates positive collective sentiment from customers, which compounds into recurring business.

The article grounds the concept with a client case: by radically expanding a brand's reach with native Instagram content and then editing the top-performing videos to run as paid media, Taktical reports seeing more than a 100% increase in revenue, with content reaching hundreds of thousands to millions of views.

The broader benefits Nass lists read like a CFO's checklist: quantifiable results from integrated efforts, optimized spend by eliminating siloed work, and a competitive advantage in crowded marketplaces through strong identity plus targeted messaging. His e-commerce example is telling: put most ad spend into high-intent search terms and let thought leadership build the brand, rather than forcing every asset to sell.

Brandformance is a useful name for something we have long argued in creator marketing: the false wall between brand and performance is one of the most expensive mistakes in the industry. A creator campaign that "only converts" leaves brand equity on the table; one that "only builds awareness" is impossible to defend in a budget review. The strongest programs do both at once, which is exactly why we measure creator campaigns on FTDs, retention and LTV while treating every piece of content as a brand asset.

The Forbes piece also gets the operational detail right: creators are the brandformance engine. A streamer who genuinely fits your brand produces native content that builds awareness inside a trusted community, and the same content, amplified with paid media, becomes your best-performing ad unit. One investment, two returns.

Whether you call it brandformance or simply good marketing, the direction is clear: unify the teams, unify the metrics, and judge every campaign by both the conversion it drives and the brand it builds.

Source: Forbes Agency Council: "What Is Brandformance And How Does It Propel Brands?", by Ilan Nass (Taktical Digital)

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