Two small words can do big damage. ‘Performance marketing’ gives marketers and C-suites the wrong idea about return on investment and needs to be retired.
Somewhere during the digital gold rush, a new term crept into the profession: performance marketing. No one knows exactly who coined it. Probably not a serious marketer or an academic. Some people point to Google. Some to a digital agency. One day we may find out.
But there’s one thing we know for sure: the term ‘performance marketing’ has caused more damage to a profession that already struggles with being taken seriously by the C-suite. That’s no small feat, given the competitive set includes ‘growth hacking’, ‘full-stack marketer’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘the metaverse’.
Meta’s CMO Alex Schultz hit the nail on its head, speaking to Marketing Week last week: “There is no such thing as performance marketing. All marketing performs.” When platforms have to explain Marketing 101 back to marketers, something has gone badly wrong.
Today, whole generations of marketers use the term in job ads, job titles and boardroom decks. Inside organisations, it spreads like gospel.
The idea of performance marketing was well intended. A label for pay-for-performance. Money moves only when something happens. A click. A lead. A sale. Paying for outcomes sounds sensible. It’s what we do in restaurants. We pay after the meal. I suppose that makes it performance dining.
But performance marketing overpromises, underdelivers and confuses many of marketing’s most important stakeholders. ‘It’s demoralising’: Meta’s CMO on retiring the term ‘performance marketing’
Here’s my list of the top reasons why:
The problems with ‘performance’
First, the obvious. Performance marketing implies – quietly but powerfully – that other marketing does not perform. People think in binaries. Above-the-line and below-the-line. Short-term and long-term. Brand and activation. Now performance and… what exactly? Non-performance? To quote Meta’s Schulz once more: “It’s just demoralising to call one performance and one brand.” Once you introduce ‘marketing that performs’, you automatically create marketing that doesn’t. That implication insults the entire discipline.
Second, performance marketing doesn’t always perform. It creates the illusion that you only pay for results. But those ‘results’ often mean clicks or click-through rates. Vanity metrics. And everybody knows: a quick search for ‘ad fraud’ shows how easily those numbers get inflated by bots. Compare click data in a social campaign with the traffic that actually lands on your site. The gap tells its own story. This isn’t an attack on digital media. Digital is powerful. Let’s just stay honest.
Third, the term accelerates corporate short-termism. For quick-win-hunting C-suites, performance marketing sounds like a lever you can pull on demand. Buy success. Soothe the quarter. Once learned, the habit sticks. Meta, Google and co reinforce the belief. Automation promises to ‘do the marketing for you’. CFOs love the idea. Why wouldn’t they? It sounds measurable, controllable and safe.
Fourth, the term quietly undermines long-term brand building. I just came back from a long tour of conference talks and university lectures. In the breaks, from Chicago to Tokyo, the same debate. How to convince CEOs that long-term brand building matters? Here’s the irony. The same marketers who pitch ‘safe’ performance budgets today are often the ones emailing CEOs Les Binet and Peter Field’s ‘The Long and the Short of It’ report tomorrow, complaining about underinvestment in brand. Well, you get what you ask for.
Fifth, the performance claim is vastly overstated. Everybody knows even hard outcomes like conversions rarely trace cleanly back to a single campaign. Someone sees an ad. Later they search. Then they click. Sophisticated attribution exists. Almost no one applies it rigorously. Yet performance marketing implies a direct causal line that rarely holds true.
Finally, the belief locks companies into a vicious spending loop. Budgets flow disproportionately into digital. Returns decay. Meanwhile, you see more outdoor ads for Google and Meta’s performance platforms than for many consumer brands. A generation taught that performance marketing equals ‘right’ marketing follows the script. Bob Liodice, CEO of the American Association of Advertisers, once put a number on it: only 25% of digital media investment reaches target audiences. More than $20bn in marketing waste. So much for performance.
I could add more reasons. But I made my point. There is no sensible justification for the term ‘performance marketing’.
This isn’t a critique of the many good people who carry the performance management title. Many didn’t choose it. Titles get assigned. Job ads get written. Careers get built inside the language available at the time. Performance marketing spread because it sounded modern, measurable and safe. A hype cycle did the rest.
At home, we stopped doing Christmas presents years ago. The hunt for the perfect gift got out of hand. This year, I have one wish. A large box under the tree. Neatly wrapped. On the label: “Performance Marketing.”
I pull the ribbon. The lid lifts. And the whole thing collapses into dust. When it settles, only one word remains: Marketing.
Merry Christmas.
