As businesses across APAC gear up for 2027, the debate over performance marketing versus brand-building continues to intensify. Currently, 55% of agencies in the region report that their clients prioritize short-term performance marketing over long-term brand-building, according to WARC’s 2026 Asian Effectiveness Report. However, new research suggests that a balanced approach, termed brandformance, delivers superior results.
Studies, including WARC’s report and Analytic Edge’s meta-analysis, highlight that brandformance campaigns, which integrate branding and performance marketing, can drive 1.6X higher ROI for Indian advertisers compared to paid social media. This approach addresses the uneven distribution of consumer demand, where only 5% to 20% of buyers are immediately ready to purchase, while the rest are future buyers. Performance marketing captures existing demand, while brand marketing cultivates future demand.
The rise of AI-empowered shoppers has further complicated this dynamic, as consumers now move unpredictably between being out-of-market and in-market buyers. This non-linear behavior blurs the lines between short-term sales and long-term growth, making a balanced investment strategy essential to avoid the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Valley of Death. Research by Les Binet and Peter Field supports this, showing that brand-building enhances performance marketing’s short-term goals.
Advertisers like Lenovo India, Ajio, and Zepto are leveraging AI-powered campaigns such as Performance Max and AI Max for Search to boost performance marketing. Meanwhile, brands like Dutchie and Vaseline are using YouTube’s Demand Gen campaigns to drive awareness, engagement, and conversions. Data from Analytic Edge’s Debiased Machine Learning studies reveals that YouTube brand-building can significantly boost the ROI of Google performance campaigns, with uplifts as high as 157% in Japan.
Running both YouTube and Google performance ads together delivers combined average ROI that is 2.4X of paid social ROI in Australia, 1.3X in Japan, 1.6X in India, and 1.2X in SEA. Even short-term brandformance campaigns outperform social media performance ads alone. Brands like GCash have successfully implemented this strategy, seeing a 14.5% rise in daily users and a 95% drop in CAC compared to standard search baselines.