Why 'brand marketing' is a misleading label

Pranav Piyush is the CEO of Paramark, a marketing measurement platform. Prior to founding Paramark, he was VP Marketing at BILL, VP Growth at Pilot.com and VP Growth at Magento during its acquisition by Adobe. After 10+ years in marketing and growth, he has strong opinions on why most marketers are getting measurement wrong.

In this episode, we talk about why the brand vs performance marketing distinction is a false dichotomy, how to measure channels that don’t produce a click, the exact experiment framework Pranav is running at Paramark right now, and much more.

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We discuss:

* Why complacency killed brand marketing, and what a book from 1923 about broomstick-selling has to do with it

* Pranav’s case for why brand marketing is a false concept

* The two metrics every new CMO should align on with their CEO and CFO in month #1

* Why he believes that for 90% of companies their win rate wouldn’t change if product marketing, enablement, and customer marketing all stopped tomorrow

* Pranav’s “10 experiments in year 1” playbook

* How Paramark is geo-testing Google competitor ads in New York only - at a small scale

* Pranav’s approach to LinkedIn founder branding

* Why Pranav’s posts get “only” 20-50 likes but he’s getting inbound from public companies and AI hyperscalers who never liked a single post

* The signal that your organic LinkedIn has hit its ceiling and it’s time to go paid

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Connect with Pranav

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranavp/

Paramark: https://paramark.com/

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Mentions

Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (1923): https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Advertising-Claude-C-Hopkins/dp/1453821082

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io/

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My personal takeaways:

* Pranav on why brand is suddenly “back”: it’s not that brand became more important, it’s that digital channels saturated. When Google and Meta were growing from zero to billions of users, you could ride those channels’ growth without great creative. Now user growth is tapped out, CPMs are climbing, and the only differentiator left is - again - creative, storytelling, and emotion.

* “Brand marketing” as a category is basically just “stuff that’s hard to measure” and Pranav hates that definition. It’s a self-fulfilling vicious cycle, because your measurement framework defines what counts as brand vs. performance, not anything inherent about the channel. A direct mail campaign in the 1920s selling broomsticks through artistic positioning was simultaneously brand AND performance marketing.

* The two metrics a CMO should report on: search volume (Google + LLMs + everywhere else people type your name into a search bar) and hand raisers (demo requests, sign ups etc). Everything else is noise

* For a new CMO’s first year: plan 10 real experiments, expect 7-8 to fail, and the 1-2 winners will fuel your growth. But the key detail is what counts as an experiment. It’s not think that could bring a 5% optimization gain, he means bets that could drive 50-100% growth. And where do you get ideas for those bets? Research your audience’s media consumption habits. Literally ask them: what’s on your phone home screen, what’s the last podcast you shared, what TV show are you watching? That tells you where to show up.

* Pranav’s geo-testing experiment shows you can do incrementality at small scale. They’re launching competitor Google search ads only in New York, keeping every other state as a control. If New York traffic spikes and Texas stays flat, the only variable was the search ads

* Pranav gets around 20-50 likes on his LinkedIn posts. It’s good, but far from viral. Others in his space get 10x that. He doesn’t care. Why? Public companies are booking demos. Heads of Paid Media are DMing him after his podcast episodes. An AI hyperscaler reached out who had never liked a single post. Views and likes are not the measure of success when you’re selling into enterprise. If your ICP is CMOs spending $20M-$100M+ on marketing, those people are not impressed by fluffy “10 cool ChatGPT prompts” content. They’re trying to improve their conversations with their CFO. It’s obvious when you say it, but you need to match your content to the buyer, not the algorithm. Then use thought leadership ads to amplify reach beyond your organic network.

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