“Performance Marketing” is just advertising (with a dashboard)

3rd July, 2025

Somewhere along the way, the word “marketing” got hijacked.

What used to be a broad, strategic, and often creative discipline has been reduced to a euphemism for “running ads”.

Platforms like Google and Meta now refer to their ad-buying interfaces as “marketing platforms”. Their APIs for placing bids and buying reach are called “marketing APIs”. Their dashboards don’t talk about audiences or brand equity or product-market fit – they talk about impressions, conversions, and budgets.

Let’s be clear: that isn’t marketing. That’s advertising.

Definitions matter

Marketing is the umbrella. It’s the process of understanding a market, identifying needs, shaping products and services, crafting narratives, developing positioning, building awareness, nurturing relationships, and, yes, sometimes advertising.

Advertising is just one tool in that kit. A tactic, not a strategy.

When we conflate the two – when we allow platforms, execs, or even colleagues to use the terms interchangeably – we diminish the role, value, and impact of everything else marketing encompasses.

And that’s not just a semantic issue. It’s strategic.

The corruption is convenient

It’s not hard to see why the platforms are happy with the conflation.

If “doing marketing” becomes synonymous with “spending money on ads,” then Google wins. Meta wins. Amazon wins. Their dashboards are your strategy. Your budget is their revenue. And your success is only ever as good as your last CPA.

This model suits shareholders. It suits CFOs. It suits growth-hacking culture.

But it doesn’t serve brands. It doesn’t build long-term relationships. It doesn’t create distinctiveness, loyalty, or emotional connection. It just buys a moment of attention.

The cost of conflation

We’ve seen what happens when marketing is reduced to paid media:

Organic strategies are deprioritised.
Brand-building becomes a luxury.
Long-term vision gets replaced by short-term optimisation.
Teams chase metrics that are easy to measure, rather than outcomes that matter.

This affects how organisations invest, hire, and behave. It affects how products are launched, how content is created, and how success is measured.

It’s why SEO gets pigeonholed as a performance channel, rather than a strategic enabler of discoverability and trust. It’s why storytelling gets cut from the budget. It’s why customer insight becomes an afterthought.

Let’s talk about “performance marketing”

One of the most egregious examples of this conflation is the term “performance marketing”. It sounds scientific. Rigorous. Respectable. But it’s just another euphemism for “paid ads with attribution”.

It implies that other forms of marketing don’t perform – that unless you can track every click, every conversion, every penny, it’s not real. Not valuable.

But performance isn’t the same as impact. Brand builds memory. Storytelling builds trust. Relationships build retention. These things matter – and they don’t always fit neatly into a last-click attribution model.

By elevating “performance marketing” as the gold standard, we ignore the slow-burn power of brand, the compounding effects of reputation, and the strategic foundation that real marketing is built on.

Reclaiming the language

If we want to fix this – if we care about the value and future of marketing – we need to start by taking back the word.

Marketing isn’t media buying. It’s not campaign management. It’s not an algorithmic bidding war.

It’s the craft of creating something valuable, positioning it well, and connecting it meaningfully with the people who need it.

That includes product. That includes experience. That includes strategy. That includes search, content, and comms.

If we let the platforms define the boundaries of our work, we’ll never get out from under their thumb.

Common objections (and why they’re wrong)

Let’s address the inevitable pushback – especially from those who live and breathe “performance marketing” dashboards.

“Performance is marketing. If it doesn’t drive results, what’s the point?”

Performance is an outcome, not a methodology. Measuring success is vital – but defining marketing solely by what’s measurable is a category error. Plenty of valuable marketing outcomes (loyalty, awareness, word-of-mouth, brand preference) don’t show up neatly in a ROAS spreadsheet. You can’t optimise for what you refuse to see.

“Advertising is marketing – that’s how we reach people”

Reach without resonance is a waste of budget. Ads are an execution channel, not the sum of the strategy. Marketing decides what you say, how you say it, and to whom – advertising is how that gets distributed. Mistaking the media for the message is exactly the problem.

“Brand is a luxury. Performance pays the bills”

Short-term efficiency often comes at the cost of long-term growth. Brands that only feed the bottom of the funnel eventually dry up the top. Performance may pay this quarter’s bills – but without brand, there’s no demand next quarter. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and – but strategy must lead.

“Attribution is better than guessing”

Measurement matters – but so does understanding what your metrics don’t capture. Most attribution models are flawed, biased towards last-click, and blind to influence that happens before a user even enters a funnel. Relying purely on what’s trackable creates a narrow view that privileges immediate action over lasting impact.

Advertising isn’t a marketing strategy

If your “marketing strategy” is just an ad budget and a spreadsheet, you don’t have a marketing strategy.

You’re just renting attention.

And what happens when the price goes up?

Worse – what happens when the performance stops?