At a time when marketing teams are under increasing pressure to justify every dollar spent, the gap between brand marketing and performance marketing is narrowing. What used to be considered two distinct disciplines, upper-funnel storytelling and lower-funnel conversion, are now in constant conversation. But how can marketers truly unite both approaches to build long-term brand equity without sacrificing short-term returns?
That’s the question at the heart of the latest episode of Seedtag’s AdTech Heroes podcast. Host Dal Singh sits down with Louise Owen, Chief Performance Officer at UM, for a candid discussion about how brand and performance teams can align around a shared goal: delivering results that matter.
From Louise’s unconventional career path in engineering to her experience leading strategies across multiple global markets, the conversation moves seamlessly between frameworks, culture, and measurement. The takeaway? Full-funnel marketing success doesn’t come from choosing between brand marketing and performance marketing. It comes from understanding how they work together.
“Brands are asked to demonstrate performance… especially for above-the-line channels where measurement takes time.”, Louise Owen, Chief Performance Officer at UM
- From Engineering to AdTech: A Global Perspective
- Why Now: The Need for a Chief Performance Officer
- How Brand Marketing and Performance Marketing Drive Each Other
- Audience Understanding Comes First
- Local Nuances, Global Lessons
- Can Brand and Performance Teams Drive Full-Funnel Success?
- Measurement and the Road Ahead
- What It Means for Marketers Today
From Engineering to AdTech: A Global Perspective
Louise’s path into media was far from linear. With a background in civil and industrial engineering, she initially focused on data analysis and optimization. That technical foundation eventually led her into search trading, where she became curious not just about how campaigns were being optimized, but why.
That curiosity fueled a career that took her to GroupM roles in the US, Colombia, Singapore, Australia, and France, before ultimately bringing her to London. The result is a uniquely global perspective on how media strategies evolve across different markets and what holds them together.
“I was always interested in how things fit together,” Louise explains. “Understanding the mechanics of media was only part of the job. I wanted to know what was driving decisions across the full brand and campaign lifecycle.”
Why Now: The Need for a Chief Performance Officer
So why introduce a Chief Performance Officer role at a network known for its branding strength? As Louise puts it, “Brands are asked to demonstrate performance… especially for above-the-line channels where measurement takes time.”
With financial pressures mounting and marketing budgets under scrutiny, CMOs are being asked to show real, measurable impact across every channel. And while branding efforts might deliver over the long term, stakeholders want visibility now. That tension is what her role aims to address, and bridging the gap between strategic vision and operational impact.
Her work focuses on helping brands understand how to mature digitally, regardless of whether they identify as performance-driven or brand-led. That means showing how each part of a media plan contributes to outcomes and how collaboration between teams can sharpen both sides of the funnel.
How Brand Marketing and Performance Marketing Drive Each Other
For Louise, the divide between brand marketing and performance marketing is largely an internal construct. “To consumers, every touchpoint is a brand experience,” she says. Whether it’s a product video, a display ad, or a sponsored post on social media, each moment contributes to perception and engagement.
This shift is forcing teams to rethink silos. Tools like unified planning platforms and shared audience insights are helping brands take a more integrated approach - one where strategy, audience segmentation, and measurement are designed from the ground up to serve both awareness and conversion goals.
She offers a simple example: search. While often viewed as a performance channel, it also serves as a visibility tool. Being discoverable at the right moment reflects how well a brand has established itself. A strong brand presence enhances search results. A clear search signal helps refine brand messaging. The two are inseparable.
This integration is about more than campaign design. It’s also about shifting measurement goals. Rather than segmenting success by tactic, brands are now starting to ask broader questions: Which audiences are engaging? What content is resonating? Where is value being created?
Audience Understanding Comes First
Behind every successful full-funnel campaign is one central factor: knowing your audience. Louise emphasizes that aligning on target segments (real, reachable, addressable audiences) is what allows brand and performance teams to work in sync.
It starts with the basics: Who are you trying to reach? What are their behaviors, their needs, their intentions? This is where intent-based marketing powered by data plays a crucial role. Louise points out that brand planners and performance marketers often use different data sets, which can create disconnects in messaging and targeting. Integrating those perspectives allows for smarter segmentation, more relevant messaging, and better outcomes.
Retail media, she notes, is one of the spaces where this convergence is playing out most clearly. By combining emotional engagement with direct access to purchase behaviors, retail environments offer a snapshot of how upper and lower funnel dynamics are colliding in real time.
Local Nuances, Global Lessons
Having worked across five continents, Louise has a deep appreciation for local nuance. In countries like Australia, for example, centralized infrastructure and detailed consumer research enable advanced cross-channel campaigns. In contrast, regions with more complex supply chains or data regulations require more adaptive planning.
She highlights the challenges global brands face when trying to unify their ad tech and martech stacks across regions. What works in the UK may not translate to Poland or India, due to legal constraints, supply chain issues, or market fragmentation. Yet these differences are also opportunities and are consistently pushing brands to rethink how and where they collect data, how they define success, and how they adapt creative to local needs.
Can Brand and Performance Teams Drive Full-Funnel Success?
The answer, for Louise, is an emphatic yes but only if organizations are willing to shift how they work, not just how they plan.
She shares examples of brands using performance data to improve brand targeting, and vice versa. One case involved a brand with overlapping audiences across multiple products. By examining performance insights, that is how people engaged with different campaigns and moved between products, then the brand was able to reallocate spend, refine messaging, and reduce internal duplication.
Instead of managing campaigns in isolation, they began planning them as part of a shared ecosystem, where performance results could inform brand direction and brand signals could optimize conversion.
It’s this kind of feedback loop that Louise sees as essential to future success. And it’s why she believes that AI, if deployed correctly, could finally unlock better measurement across the board, offering real-time insights that reflect how audiences actually behave, not just how they’re expected to.
Measurement and the Road Ahead
One of Louise’s biggest hopes for the industry is smarter, more customizable measurement. As she notes, legacy approaches like marketing mix models often struggle to keep up with fast-changing digital behavior. She believes AI will play a major role in evolving these systems while helping brands understand which channels actually drive growth, and why.
She’s also candid about the role that data infrastructure plays. Too often, companies are held back by fragmented systems and years of unstructured information. If she could go back in time and give brands one piece of advice, it would be to unify their data from the beginning.
“Unification of data and signals is really what powers insights,” she says. “You need a clean dataset to build scenarios and make good decisions.”
What It Means for Marketers Today
Ultimately, Louise’s insights point to a simple but often overlooked truth: real marketing impact comes from alignment. When brand marketing vs performance marketing is seen as a choice, teams work in opposition. But when they’re aligned, from segmentation to creative to measurement, the result is smarter campaigns, more relevant experiences, and stronger business outcomes.
The challenge now is less about building new capabilities and more about connecting existing ones. For marketers, that means investing in shared tools, fostering cross-team collaboration, and reframing measurement in terms of real-world results.
Brand marketing vs performance marketing isn’t a debate. It’s a relationship. And as Louise makes clear in this conversation, the most successful brands are the ones that treat it that way.
Listen to the Full Episode
Want to dive deeper into this conversation? Listen to Louise Owen on AdTech Heroes: When Branding Meets Performance: Insights from Kinesso and hear how brands can unite storytelling and strategy for full-funnel success.
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