A high click-through rate, a steady ROAS, and a clean dashboard can make a campaign look like a success. But these numbers can also hide the truth. They tell you what happened now, not what is still to come. The Brand as Performance (BaP) research shows that when marketers only track short-term results, they can overlook most of their campaign’s value.
The Illusion of Instant Success
In a Kroger BaP study, short-term reporting showed the kind of results marketers expect from an in-market campaign. However, when researchers tracked the same audience for seven months after the ads stopped, the picture was very different. More than 80 percent of the total sales lift happened after the campaign ended.
The delayed value came from two high-impact groups. Newly favorable non-customers were three times more likely to make a purchase in the months following the campaign. Newly favorable existing customers retained at a much higher rate, delivering repeat purchases long after media spend had stopped.
(Source: BRANDNOMIC$: The Solution to CMO/CFO Misalignment on the ROI of brand?)
Brand Favorability as the True Performance Metric
These results point to one metric that consistently predicts future performance: brand favorability. Favorables, meaning people with a positive view of the brand, are three times more likely to convert compared to non-favorables. In the Campbell’s BaP study, brand favorables delivered six times more sales per household through Kroger eCommerce and three times more sales per household in traditional retail than non-favorables.
Favorability is not a vague brand health measure. It is a quantifiable signal of future sales and retention. Tracking how a campaign moves people into this favorable state is essential for revealing the long-term financial impact of marketing.
Why Short-Term Metrics Miss the Point
Most attribution models are built to capture transactions that occur during or immediately after exposure. This ignores the lag effects of brand influence, the compounding value of favorability, and the purchasing power of audiences who are close to buying but not yet ready.
BaP’s combined methodology of multi-touch attribution and randomised controlled testing exposes these hidden effects. By shifting media weight toward audiences most likely to become favorable, brands can significantly increase total ROI.
Evidence From Targeting Research
The Persuadables study reinforces this. By focusing on heavy brand buyers who were close to their next purchase, campaigns achieved up to 16 times the return on ad spend compared to the average. In one packaged meat brand campaign, the Persuadables segment delivered $48.26 in incremental sales for every $1 spent, compared to the overall campaign average of $1.82 ROAS.
In another example, a dessert snack brand saw $17.32 ROAS from the Persuadables segment versus just $2.74 on average. These results prove that timing and audience quality dramatically influence returns.
(Source: The Persuadbles)
The Cost of Believing the Wrong Numbers
If you only measure what happens during the campaign, you risk making the wrong calls. You might cut investment in strategies that create the largest long-term gains because they do not spike immediate sales. You might over-invest in quick-response tactics that do not build lasting value. And you might fail to retain high-value customers who could deliver years of revenue.
A Better Way to Measure
The solution is to widen the measurement window and make brand favorability a core KPI alongside short-term sales. Use person-level ID data to connect exposure with both immediate and delayed purchases. Apply controlled experiments to separate incremental impact from background sales. Track how many people you move from unaware, to aware, to favorable, to customer.
The Takeaway
The most profitable marketing strategies are not always the ones that look best in real-time dashboards. Campaigns that grow brand favorability often deliver their biggest returns months after the last impression is served. If you only measure instant results, you undervalue your best work and limit growth. The right metrics do not just describe what happened. They reveal what is still to come.
