Easy to cut, hard to replace

In brief

• Under budget pressure, brand communication is usually cut first, because its impact isn’t reported as quickly as performance channels.
• Ehrenberg-Bass data shows sales of brands that stop advertising entirely fall by an average of 36% within three years, and lost share is more expensive to win back.
• According to WARC’s The Multiplier Effect, balancing brand and performance can raise the revenue return on advertising by 25% to 100%.

Every year around this time, a familiar scene plays out. The last quarter approaches, next year’s plans are on the table, and the budget spreadsheets come out. When the numbers get tight, eyes turn to certain lines first. More often than not, the first to be cut is brand communication.

The reflex is easy to understand. Performance channels send a report every morning: clicks, conversions, cost per sale. The impact of brand investment shows up more slowly and never fits into a single report. A management team under pressure chooses to protect the line that shows results immediately and trim the one that shows them later. On paper, it is a rational decision. The problem is that the paper only shows this year.

The outlook for 2027 adds to the tension. WARC’s global ad forecast, updated in June, expects the advertising market to grow 8.2% in 2027. But the same report carries a warning: if the crisis in the Gulf drags on or deepens, $54.1 billion of ad spend is at risk in 2027 alone. Travel, automotive and food stand out as the most vulnerable sectors in the face of rising production costs and weakening demand. According to WARC’s earlier forecast, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta will capture most of the new ad spend entering the market between 2025 and 2027. In other words, the market is growing, but the money is flowing to the channels that report results fastest.

When uncertainty rises, the first place people look is, again, the lines whose results are immediately visible. The Multiplier Playbook 2026, published by WARC with the ANA in May this year, calls this “the gap between rhetoric and action.” 67% of marketers say senior leadership recognises the importance of brand. Yet only 19% believe brand value is seen as a factor that drives business results. And 62% of respondents say their budgets are flat or shrinking. Brand appears to have won the argument in the meeting room. It has not yet won it in the budget spreadsheet.

The cost of a cut is not visible right away

When you stop brand communication, sales carry on for a while, because past investment has left a reserve in consumers’ minds. But that reserve is not infinite.

Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research based on long-term sales and media data shows this clearly. For brands that stop advertising entirely, sales fall by an average of 16% after one year, 25% after two and 36% after three, compared with the last year they advertised. Another finding is particularly relevant for many brands in Türkiye: the decline is faster for smaller brands and for brands whose sales were already falling before they went dark. The brands most tempted to cut are usually the ones least able to withstand it.

Coming back is not easy either. According to the PIMS analysis in the IPA’s 2008 report Advertising in a Downturn, brands that cut ad spend during a downturn see their market share shrink by around 0.7 points afterwards. Those that increase spend gain 1.6 points of share in the first two years of the recovery. Peter Field explains why plainly: regaining lost visibility during a recovery is far more expensive. The brand is less profitable, media prices have risen, and competitors are all fighting for attention at the same time.

Cutting takes a signature. Replacing takes years.

Brand and performance belong to the same equation

I think this debate is framed wrongly from the start. In budget meetings, brand and performance are often discussed as rivals: every lira given to one is counted as taken from the other. WARC’s The Multiplier Effect study shows the two are not independent. According to the report, treating brand and performance as separate lines pushes them into an artificial competition, and brand investment usually loses. Moving from a performance-heavy approach to a balanced one can raise the revenue return on advertising by 25% to 100%. According to WARC’s David Tiltman, the median uplift is around 90%.

On the ground, the logic is simple. If consumers know a brand, they are more likely to click on it in search results, choose it on a marketplace and buy it with less discounting. Performance channels harvest demand, but much of that demand was created by the brand’s earlier investment. Cut brand communication and the efficiency of performance channels erodes over time. The report that shows it simply arrives a few months late.

Getting this balance right matters even more in Türkiye. E-commerce’s share of total trade rose to 19.3% in 2025. An ever larger share of sales happens on the digital shelf, and that shelf gets more crowded every year. As the cost of standing out on the shelf rises, consumers remembering the brand before they even reach it is more valuable than ever.

Three questions to ask when the budget is on the table

As 2027 plans come to the table in the coming weeks, I believe these three questions need to be asked openly.

First: how much of the budget feeds today’s sales, and how much feeds next year’s demand? A plan that doesn’t know this ratio leaves tomorrow to chance.

Second: are we measuring success channel by channel, or by the total business outcome? Plans in which every channel looks successful in its own report while the brand shrinks overall are not rare at all.

Third: have we accounted for who will pay for today’s cut, and when? This year’s savings often come back as next year’s bill. And that bill is usually paid not by the team that made the cut, but by the team that comes after it.

In difficult times, cost discipline is of course essential; no company can set off with an unrealistic budget. But when choosing what to cut, we need to look not only at this year’s spreadsheet but two or three years ahead. Brand investment is less a cost line than a multiplier that raises the return on performance investment.

The easiest line to delete from a budget is often the hardest one to write back in.