TikTok marketing science chief Rory Dolan says performance media costs are soaring while conversions flatline. He has the data to prove it.

After mapping TikTok platform activity with Tracksuit’s brand tracking data, Dolan has one key message – invest in brand to boost conversion and beat biddable auction inflation: “Advertisers with 60 per cent-plus awareness have a 2.86 times increase in their baseline conversion rate versus advertisers that are 20 per cent below,” he says, rendering brand versus performance arguments redundant, if not suicidal. Full funnel execution is king, says Dolan, because building future demand means easier, cheaper conversions at scale: “Brand is fundamentally a performance tactic.”

Tracksuit co-founder James Hurman literally wrote the book on that principle. He penned Future Demand after one of his own DTC businesses, initially hockey-sticking via Facebook ads, experienced the performance media ‘Easter Island Effect’. Acquisition dried up, performance costs spiralled, the economics tanked. Without priming new customers, “brands use all of their resources, then they have nothing left, and then they die”, warns Hurman.

The idea that brand campaigns have to be broad, multichannel and expensive is a myth, says TikTok’s Dolan. “Brand can be built by targeting subgroups of your target audience consistently over time. So this can actually be achieved with small amounts of investment.” The awareness sweet spot for small brands, per the research, is 37 per cent. “We see very strong business impacts as a result of that early on.”

Even “big performance-focused advertisers” are hitting the same growth ceiling “which is very expensive to bypass by performance [spend]”, says Dolan. “These are businesses that maybe three years ago wouldn't have touched brand [investment] because of the inability to track their short-term ROI. They're now seeing the impact of that.”

Dolan says TikTok’s research underlines that increasing performance spend will not build brand – but brand spend will boost both brand and performance outcomes.

For those facing hard budget choices and sceptical CFOs, Dolan suggests leaving performance media to bots and spending more time and money on brand: “That seems to be the big sweet spot at the moment – automating the performance and focusing on driving these multipliers.”

But first, get brand tracking sorted.