Can you imagine hitting your highest growth targets in business to date, but at the same time the business still feels shaky?
This familiar pattern we see plays out when growth is driven almost entirely on a handful of bestsellers scaled by performance marketing alone. But when you take those bestsellers out of stock, there’s nothing left holding new customer relationships together, because there’s been little focus on building affinity with the actual brand.
Performance marketing is genuinely good at what it does, and traditional agencies running it are built to find what converts and scale it. But the brief they’re given is usually “drive revenue,” not “drive revenue whilst building a brand that new people come back to,” and the gap between these two is where a lot of brands begin to lose ground.
What happens next is that ads are optimised for broader appeal, and your brand starts to look and feel like every other brand in the category. And when you sand down the edges to appeal to everyone, your meaning drifts away too. Differentiation helps you find your tribe, and drive preference, and preference is what drives margin, so the P&L over time will begin to tell this story too.
So how are other brands solving this? It begins with ads, because that's where most brands either build equity or slowly erode it.
Distinctive Brand Assets
What brand-led creative looks like in paid channels is now concrete and evidence-based (even for UGC). And what brand-led ads look like, are creative with distinctive brand cues from colors, characters, sonic cues or logos, deployed in the first 1.5–3 seconds of every brand asset.
Too often, performance ads prioritize conversion at the expense of brand identity and brand messaging and voice, and every UGC creative looks identical to every other brand. So how do you make a UGC clip “look, feel and sound like you”? The answer is in the brief, and it’s a playbook most traditional agencies haven’t needed to learn until now.
Awareness Building Brand Ads to Build Affinity
Your paid media ecosystem also needs creative ad sets built specifically to find your tribe (not to convert them, just yet), and this is where a lot of brands fall short without realising it.
In industries like beauty, so often we see pain-point creative where the ad names the skincare problem and presents the product. But these are conversion ads for the bottom of the funnel. They convert people who are already feeling the problem acutely enough to self-identify in two seconds of scroll. Yet it’s frequently the only creative running at the top of funnel too, which means the brand is asking people who’ve never heard of them to recognise a problem before they’ve ever been introduced to who’s solving it.
True awareness creative does something different and leads with brand beliefs. The first play is brand point-of-view creative, where ads say what you stand for, what you believe about the category, or what you’re consciously pushing against, and product takes a back seat to perspective.
The second taps into the world your ideal customer already lives in, without naming a problem at all. It’s less about “here’s what we solve” and more about “here’s who we’re for”.
True awareness ads aren't asking for a sale. The intention is building familiarity and recognition, the start of “I want to follow this brand” rather than “I need this product now.”
What Happens After the Click
Ad creative is only the first layer. Paid media builds familiarity and finds your tribe, but it’s the activations and community work happening behind the scenes, later amplified online, that turn that familiarity into real affinity. A community member who feels celebrated and seen becomes the advocate whose word of mouth does what no ad budget can buy.
Outcomes like this take a different kind of marketing calendar, one built around community campaigns, brand stories, brand-aligned collaborations, and hero brand campaigns, that sit alongside product launches and promo campaigns. The ads open the door and the broader calendar behind them is what gives people a reason to stay. Growth marketing and brand building marketing work together, and we’re now helping brands do both, so if themes in this article resonate, get in touch if you'd like to talk it through.
Author: Effie Asafu-Adjaye
Effie Asafu-Adjaye is the Founder of Beautiful Sparks. Beautiful Sparks helps beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands become known, loved and remembered through sharp positioning, strategic storytelling, and campaigns that connect with the right customers. Read more about Effie here and on Linkedin.
