Avinash Udeshi, Chief Operating Officer, Motivate Val Morgan.In today’s world of dashboards, attribution windows, and performance marketing obsessing over return on ad spend (ROAS), it’s tempting to view brand building as a luxury — a kind of ‘nice to have’ when growth is already assured. But nothing could be further from reality.
The Multiplier Effect report from WARC and its partners puts it plainly:strong brand equity acts not as a cost, but as a potent accelerant to performance-driven campaigns.
Marketers who neglect this foundational work risk entering what the report calls the “performance doom loop,” in which incremental gains from performance channels keep shrinking over time. In contrast, when you invest in your brand and performance in tandem, the uplift is striking. The report cites cases where a balanced model increased overall revenue return on investment (ROI) by up to 90 per cent.
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This isn’t academic fluff. At many organisations today, the board demands immediate returns. Yet the stories of durable brands always point back to consistent emotional investment — those makes-the-heart-beat brand moments that remind people what you stand for, not just what you sell.
The enduring strength of traditional media
Brand building needs reach, trust, and emotion — qualities that traditional media have spent decades perfecting. Television, audio, print, outdoor, and cinema remain some of the most effective ways to make people feel something real about a brand. These channels reach audiences at scale, but more importantly, they do so in environments of attention and credibility.
Traditional forms of media have what digital ones rarely offer: presence. A radio spot that plays uninterrupted during a morning drive, a full-page print ad that demands a reader’s pause, or a 30-second cinema placement before a major release — each earns its moment. These experiences invite engagement rather than chase it. They create memory structures that no performance metric can quantify.
This is an argument for efficiency, not nostalgia. Emotional storytelling in trusted environments delivers a multiplier effect on sales and long-term brand equity, proven repeatedly by global effectiveness research. The most powerful brands know that awareness is not waste — it is the groundwork on which all conversions depend.
Cinema: The modern classic
Within that mix, cinema stands out as a uniquely modern classic — a traditional medium that has evolved without losing what originally made it powerful.
As highlighted in our article, Showmanship and Salesmanship: Why Cinema Is Key to Long-Term Brand Growth, advertisers who balance brand building and performance not only see a 90 percent higher revenue ROI, but those performance-only campaigns face a “performance penalty” of around 40 percent.
The reason is simple. As Sir John Hegarty frames it, “cinema belongs to showmanship, not salesmanship.” Cinema reaches people when they are most open to feeling: in the dark, phone-free, immersed in story. The big screen commands focus, emotion, and scale.
And as neuroscientific studies have repeatedly highlighted, cinema advertising outperforms other environments across attention, emotion, and memory metrics — the foundations of effective brand recall.
Today’s cinema advertising also bridges the gap between emotion and accountability. With MVM’s measurement CinePlan and CineMeasure linking on-screen ad exposure to admissions/impressions, cinema is no longer just powerful; it is provable.
Cinema doesn’t compete with other media. It amplifies them. It gives your brand the silence, the scale, and the storytelling canvas that no other platform can. As brands rethink the balance between the short and the long, cinema stands ready — not as a luxury, but as a necessity for those who want to build what lasts.
By Avinash Udeshi, Chief Operating Officer, Motivate Val Morgan
