Spending money on anything – whether a new electric toothbrush or a flat screen TV – means you aren’t spending on something else. Those spending trafe-offs need justification: Was it worth it? Did it make sense for me to buy this instead of that? 

The same trafe-off decisions are always being made in brand advertising, where every dollar spent on a brand campaign is a dollar not spent on direct response or on new distribution channels. So, how do brands justify those decisions? While we can confidently measure the sales impact of investments in direct response and distribution, there is still one huge unanswered question across the industry: what is the revenue impact of brand advertising? Many brands and their campaign partners have attempted to capture this metric through traditional attribution analysis, yet as we’ll unpack, this methodology offers cloudy insights at best and systematically undervalues brand campaigns at worst. 

With this in mind, Upwave’s data science team has developed a unique methodology that enables brands to better understand how brand lift connects to customer lift throughout the path-to-purchase funnel and properly attribute financial return on investment.