Brand advertising is one of the most important investments a company can make, yet it's also one of the most misunderstood. Unlike performance marketing, which chases clicks and conversions, brand advertising builds the emotional associations and mental availability that drive long-term business growth. In this guide, we break down what brand advertising is, why it matters, the psychology behind it, and how to build a strategy that delivers measurable results.

What Is Brand Advertising?

Brand advertising is marketing communication designed to build awareness, shape perception, and create lasting emotional connections between a brand and its target audience. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which represents over 20,000 brands spending more than $400 billion annually, frames advertising effectiveness as the ability to generate both immediate and sustained business outcomes, with brand advertising targeting the long-term side of that equation.

Intent is the key distinction. Performance advertising drives immediate action. Brand advertising builds mental structures that influence future buying decisions. Research from the IPA Effectiveness Databank, analyzing 996 campaigns across 700 brands over 30 years, shows that emotional brand-building campaigns are almost twice as likely to drive top-box profit growth as activation campaigns alone. The data suggests brands achieve optimal results when allocating roughly 60% of budget to brand building and 40% to activation.

Goals & Purpose of Brand Advertising

The Business Purpose of Brand Advertising

The purpose of brand advertising is to build brand equity, differentiation, and pricing power that compound over time. Research presented at Cannes Lions found that the best-known brands win business in 81% of cases, while brands known only by target buyers close deals just 4% of the time.

Brand advertising also protects margins. Harvard Business Review research found that emotionally connected customers are 52% more valuable than highly satisfied customers. Dentsu's Superpowers Index shows brand building jumped from the fifth priority to number one among B2B marketers in 2024, signaling widespread recognition that brand equity is a strategic imperative, not just a nice-to-have.

How Customers Benefit From Brand Advertising

Customers benefit from brand advertising primarily through trust, familiarity, and informed decision-making. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 80% of consumers say they trust the brands they use to do what is right, and brand trust now outpaces institutional trust. This trust simplifies purchasing decisions in a crowded marketplace.

Edelman's research also shows that 68% of consumers consider it very important for brands to help them feel good. When brands invest in advertising that communicates authentic values, they give consumers a meaningful framework for choosing products and services that align with what matters to them.

Brand Advertising's Role in the Customer Journey

Brand advertising influences every stage of the customer journey. At the awareness stage, it establishes mental availability so that a brand comes to mind when a need arises. During consideration, brand associations create shortcuts in decision-making. At the point of purchase, accumulated brand equity tips the scale.

WARC and IPA research demonstrates that brands that increase share of voice by 10% above share of market typically see a 0.5% increase in total market share, proving that brand advertising's full-funnel influence drives measurable commercial outcomes over time.

Key Elements of Effective Brand Advertising

• Strong Audience & Persona Insights.
  Effective brand campaigns start with deep audience understanding beyond demographics. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 50% of consumers say ads influence their brand opinions before purchase, but only when relevant and authentic.

• Clear Brand Messaging & Positioning.
  Dentsu's Superpowers Index found that while 71% of marketers believe they communicate distinctly, 68% of buyers say brands sound the same. Differentiated positioning is essential.

• Memorable Creative.
  Research from Kantar and Affectiva found that digital ads that evoke strong emotions are 4 times more likely to drive long-term brand equity and 2.6 times more likely to go viral.

• Strategic Channel Selection.
  With CTV ad spending reaching $33.35 billion in 2025, today's channel strategy must span traditional and digital touchpoints to reach audiences where they are most receptive.

• Brand Measurement Framework.
  The WARC ROI Benchmark report found that median profit ROI for top-performing advertisers rose from 1.9:1 in 2017 to 2.5:1 in 2024, driven by improvements in measurement tools and strategy.

How Brand Advertising Works

The Psychology Behind Brand Ads

Brand advertising leverages how the brain forms memories and makes decisions. Neuroscience research shows that the amygdala processes the emotional significance of brand interactions, with positive emotional experiences creating stronger, longer-lasting memories. 

An IPA analysis found that purely emotional campaigns achieved a 31% success rate, compared with 16% for purely rational ones. Nielsen research shows ads with above-average emotional response generate a 23% increase in sales volume. Emotional brand advertising drives hard commercial outcomes.

Brand Advertising Mechanics

Brand campaigns build and reinforce mental associations over time. Each exposure strengthens the connection between a brand and specific attributes, such as quality, innovation, trust, or belonging. IPA and Nielsen research confirm that excess share of voice is strongly linked to market share growth and increased mental availability. Brands grow by ensuring more people think of them first when buying occasions arise.

How Digital Has Changed Brand Advertising

Digital channels have added precision, measurability, and scale to brand advertising. CTV ad spending will surpass traditional TV by 2028 at $46.89 billion, while podcast ad revenue is projected to exceed $3 billion in 2025, according to the IAB. The proliferation of digital channels means brands can now orchestrate cross-channel campaigns with measurement capabilities that were unimaginable a decade ago.

Types of Brand Advertising

• Traditional Channels.
  Television, radio, print, and outdoor remain powerful for mass reach. Nike's strategic shift back toward brand building in late 2024 included reinvesting in broadcast and out-of-home campaigns with agency partner Wieden+Kennedy, recognizing that broad-reach traditional media remains essential for cultural impact.

• Digital Channels.
  Social media, display, video, and CTV are the fastest-growing channels for brand advertising. Streaming captures approximately 38% of total TV ad spend in 2025, up from 15% in 2020, and YouTube is expected to capture nearly 12% of CTV ad revenue by the end of 2026.

• Brand Experience Channels.
  Global experiential marketing spending reached $128.35B in 2024, a 10.5% increase, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the first time. Live events captured a 67.1% share of B2C experiential marketing, with the Paris Olympics providing a major opportunity for brand engagement.

• Emerging Channels.
  Influencer partnerships, podcast advertising, and retail media represent the newest frontier. Kantar reports that 41% of marketers globally plan to increase retail media investment in 2025, while podcast advertising continues its trajectory toward $2.6 billion by 2026.

Examples of Brand Advertising Campaigns

• Apple's "Shot on iPhone."
  This user-generated content campaign generated over 29 million uses of #ShotoniPhone on Instagram, $6.5B in earned media value, and a 47% increase in brand awareness for iPhone camera capabilities. It won a 2025 Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness.

• Dove's Super Bowl Campaigns (2024–2025).
  Dove's 2024 "Hard Knocks" ad drove measurable results with women describing Dove as "trustworthy" (+9.2 points) and "wholesome" (+7.9 points) post-Super Bowl, according to Harris Poll's QuestBrand data. The 2025 follow-up, "These Legs," continued this purpose-driven strategy at advertising's biggest stage.

• Spotify Wrapped.
  This annual campaign transforms personal listening data into shareable brand content. In 2023, #SpotifyWrapped garnered 73.7 billion views on TikTok alone, and the 2022 edition generated 425 million social media mentions within three days. The campaign has earned a Cannes Lion and multiple Webby Awards, proving the power of turning customers into brand advocates.

How to Create a Brand Advertising Strategy

1. Define Your Audience

Build detailed personas grounded in data, including psychographics, media habits, and emotional drivers behind purchasing decisions.

2. Create Your Goals

Establish measurable objectives tied to brand metrics: awareness lift, consideration, favorability, or purchase intent, aligned with broader business outcomes.

3. Develop Messaging

Craft messaging that breaks through sameness. Remember that 68% of buyers say brands sound the same, so your voice must be distinctive and authentic.

4. Choose Creative Format

Select formats matching your message and audience. Video remains the most powerful format for emotional storytelling, but the specific format should follow audience behavior.

5. Select Channels

Build a cross-channel plan balancing reach and relevance. Integrated campaigns achieve 67% higher recall than single-channel efforts.

6. Build Targeting, Strategy, and Budget

Set budgets with the ESOV principle: to grow market share, your share of voice must exceed your current share of market.

7. Launch

Execute across channels with consistent creative and messaging. Ensure tracking and measurement infrastructure is in place from day one.

8. Optimize

Monitor performance and continuously test creative variations. Kantar confirms that emotionally resonant creative dramatically outperforms generic messaging.

9. Measure

Evaluate against brand metrics established at the outset and connect brand lift data to downstream business outcomes to build a case for continued investment.

How to Measure Brand Advertising Effectiveness

Nielsen Brand Lift uses control/exposed survey methodology to measure shifts in awareness, favorability, and purchase intent. Kantar's LIFT solution adds long-term brand equity measurement through its Meaningfully Different Framework.

Incrementality testing measures true causal impact. The ANA reports that 71% of advertisers now rank incrementality as their most important KPI. Best practice combines incrementality testing with Marketing Mix Modeling for continuous, validated ROI measurement.

Long-term business impact metrics connect brand investment to revenue. Tracking branded search volume, direct traffic, and acquisition costs over time reveals the cumulative impact of brand advertising.

The correlation between share of voice and market share provides a strategic planning framework. WARC confirms that excess share of voice is strongly linked to market share growth. Brands investing above their weight reap compounding returns in mental availability and commercial performance.

For marketing teams ready to unlock measurable brand growth, Agility's precision brand advertising platform combines hyper-targeted persona development, iterative creative testing, and cross-channel measurement to ensure every campaign drives real business results. Whether you're building brand equity or proving incrementality, Agility gives you the tools and marketing science to grow with certainty.

Get started with Agility today.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does brand advertising enhance credibility?

Brand advertising builds credibility through consistent presence and emotional connection. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 80% of consumers trust the brands they use. Repeated, high-quality exposure creates familiarity, and familiarity breeds trust. Kantar's research shows emotionally resonant advertising is four times more powerful in driving long-term brand equity.

What are the benefits of brand advertising for growing businesses?

Brand advertising accelerates market share gains by building the mental availability that drives future demand. Harvard Business Review found that emotionally connected customers are 52% more valuable. For growing businesses, brand advertising reduces long-term acquisition costs, supports premium pricing, and creates a competitive moat that performance marketing alone cannot build.