Unlocking the collateral benefits of long-term brand building

Opinion – The Indie Leader – AMI 

Woodlands Group’s marketing director, Sam Jenkinson, discusses brand advertising, managing multi-channel campaigns with multiple agencies, and measuring success. AMI member Rebecca O’Malley poses the questions.

Times are difficult for a lot of businesses now, and advertisers may pull back on brand spend as they focus more on performance. What are your thoughts on this?

Each case is different, but in our circumstances, where we are looking for growth in share and in material revenue, there is a solid, valid case for stabilising spend and, in certain areas, increasing it.

If competitors are scaling back, that’s an opportunity that you will benefit from even if you hold your position. But the key is always to find ways to extract more value from your budget and avoid unnecessary spend. If you have a firm understanding of what is working, prioritise that. We’ve seen our awareness and consideration move steadily upwards, and now that we are multichannel, we are getting more return from above-the-line media.

You are an advertiser that has invested in brand advertising over the last five years; can you tell us the effect this has had on your business?

The obvious effects are on brand awareness and consideration, and on engagement through brochure requests and other touchpoints, all of which have matured over time. But there are other aspects too.

Internally, it has improved collaboration and synchronicity across departments; given the scale of the TV investment, everyone is keen to avoid inefficiencies that could jeopardise the return on spend.

Being on TV also helps with recruitment; it gives other departments something tangible to relate to and adds gravitas to the marketing team.

TV opens up more opportunities and makes third parties and potential partners more open to working with us. It’s also helped win over new franchisees to the growing showsite network. People appreciate Tiger as a brand with purpose and weight, and that helps get them on board.

Don’t get me wrong, the main benefit is brand building, and building trust through brand has given us a little extra latitude with customers too, but there are a lot of collateral advantages that often go unnoticed otherwise.

What’s your media mix, and can you give any tips to advertisers thinking of moving out of the performance space, into spending more on strengthening the brand?

It’s a balance between performance and brand; I would suggest that advertisers find their way to that balance. A combination of the two is required 95% of the time.

Brand spend is more of a slow burn; think of it more as an investment than a cost. It improves the efficiency of performance channels and helps insure against competitor bidding over time. Stepping out from digital performance into a brand channel like TV often means moving from a congested arena to an uncontested one. We had TV to ourselves for the first three years, and it’s taken our boldest competitor a further two years to put a serious campaign together.

You work with several agency partners; how do you ensure they all align and complement each other?

We’re lucky by design, as our main partners are both independents and aren’t driven by a higher corporate need.

They don’t make us feel like a commodity or that there is a sales agenda with targets to be met behind everything. At the same time, it’s important to ensure clear areas of responsibility, so there isn’t competition. It helps when people are willing to share and respect each other’s expertise. This leads me to the last, but perhaps most important factor: regular communication, including all-agency update sessions. And to circle back to sharing and respecting expertise, it’s vital to remember that, as the client, we set the example and are on the same level. Otherwise, they’re not partners, but suppliers, and it just becomes transactional.

Measurement and attribution are buzzwords, but they matter for proving media effectiveness. How do you prove the value of your media spend to your FD?

There is no single point of truth, and I actually contend that the business moves forward because of it.

We use a number of metrics from different sources, collected using different methods, to measure how impactful channels are. This allows us to ‘triangulate’ on how effective media has been.

Just as last click should not be the only measure for performance marketing, there isn’t (or at least we have not yet discovered) a cast-iron media effectiveness tool. Attribution models can be quite subjective and get flimsier when applied outside the digital space.

The ultimate KPIs for our finance team are media & marketing spend relative to revenue, and revenue received matching the forecast. Simply put, that’s how to prove value.

Rebecca O’Malley is the managing partner at Vega. AMI members write regularly for The Media Leader in 2026 as part of our Indie Leader series.