Brand meets performance in the new age of shopping

In today’s fragmented shopping landscape, marketers face a fundamental challenge: how to drive measurable results while building lasting brand equity. It turns out the answer might not lie in choosing between brand-building and performance marketing—but rather, in seamlessly integrating both.

New research from Amazon Ads suggests that by going beyond age and demographic labels to emphasize the qualities that truly unite consumers—including their values, interests, and behaviors—brands can create more resonant campaigns that help drive both short-term performance and long-term growth. We sat down with Britt Gannon, Vice President of Advertising Creative, Trust, and Support at Amazon Ads, to explore these findings—and how marketers can leverage them to forge stronger, more meaningful connections with customers across the funnel.
Q: You started your career not in marketing, but social work. Does your background in this area impact the way you approach business—and if so, how?

Britt Gannon: I see my background across social work, software engineering, and advertising as deeply complementary. Regardless of the industry, everything starts and ends with people. If you listen to people well and routinely challenge your own assumptions, you build the right software and user experience.

If you’re building a brand, marketing that brand based on the human values it represents is the most effective way to ensure lasting resonance with your desired customer. Listening well and designing human-centered solutions are valuable and fungible skills that I deploy each day.

Q: Why is brand equity still important in today’s performance-driven landscape?

Gannon: It’s true there is great pressure on marketers to deliver quick results and prove ROI. The current pressures on performance do not negate the importance of brand-building—it’s quite the opposite, in fact. Strong brand equity can generate more revenue simply from recognition, as consumers perceive the products of well-known brands as better than those of lesser-known ones.

Further, research shows that companies that thoughtfully merge brand and performance strategies are the ones that see improved results at every stage of the marketing funnel. At Amazon Ads, we’ve also seen that dynamic play out through our experiences working with brands of all sizes and industries.

Q: That brings us to the new study from Amazon Ads, which makes the case that demographics can only tell you so much about consumers. What does that insight tell us about the changing roles of brand and performance media? And how does it impact the creative mandate for a modern brand campaign?

Gannon: According to the data, 72% of the consumers surveyed say their interests, hobbies, and passions define them more than their age. And 59% of surveyed consumers think brands try too hard to appeal to certain age groups.

These findings are a testament to why brands need to move away from less-effective, coarse-grained approaches to more nuanced ones. From a brand perspective, that means crafting messages and visuals that feel relevant and compelling based on consumers’ interests and values. And it also reinforces the importance of avoiding stereotypes and assumptions about age groups and other demographic labels in your marketing.

Q: Practically speaking, how can brands gain viable clues about what customers care about? And how can those insights be used to help optimize creative?

Gannon: By understanding where and how your customers spend their time, you can dial into the key issues, cultural influences, and values that may help inform their shopping choices. At Amazon Ads, we’re able to help brands smartly infer what their customers care about by tapping into Amazon’s trillions of proprietary streaming, shopping, and browsing signals. Taken together, these signals can give brands a more holistic picture of what kinds of affinities their customers have in order to create more relevant advertising.

With the research showing that audiences are 2.3 times more unified by watching livestreams than simply by sharing a generation, it would be reasonable to infer that audiences who use community-based livestreaming services are likely to value belonging among people with shared niche interests, whereas consumers who frequently read or watch documentaries value personal development and education.

Our AI-driven creative solutions allow brands to develop campaigns that appeal to consumers’ different interests, hobbies, and values at scale in seconds, creating versions that allow them to test and tailor messaging to subsets of customers.

Q: What was the most important finding or insight you took away from this research in your role as a marketing executive? And how do you plan to apply it?

Gannon: Traditionally, high-quality creative and innovative brand marketing are seen as expensive, time-consuming, and inaccessible. But they don’t have to be. Through a better understanding of the many factors that impact consumer-brand relationships (beyond just demographics), you can optimize your creative at every stage of the funnel, without a tremendous investment.

Rapid advancements in AI-driven technology are revolutionizing the ability to produce high-resolution creative, including streaming video, and tailor it—with a fraction of the cost and time—while still remaining trustworthy and authentic to a brand. In my role at Amazon Ads, that means I need to help educate organizations on how to use these tools to build value-driven brand equity at each stage of the funnel. They should never miss an opportunity to drive lasting results.

Disclosure: This article was produced in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal Custom Content Studio and originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

About the expert

Britt Gannon serves as Vice President of Amazon Advertising Creative, Trust and Support, where she leads a multifaceted organization dedicated to empowering brand marketers' success. In her current role, she oversees the Managed Services and Brand Innovation Lab organizations, which create and manage distinctive co-branded experiences, while also directing the Advertising Trust division responsible for developing critical policies and moderation technology that ensure regulatory compliance and optimal customer experiences. Under her leadership, the organization has expanded its scope to include comprehensive Advertising Self-Service support products, ADSP Programmatic Solutions Consultancy, and innovative full-funnel advertising solutions for advertisers of all sizes. A seasoned technology leader with nearly two decades at Amazon, Britt joined the company in 2005 and has led numerous products and programs across multiple business units, including the development of US Automotive shopping on Amazon which launched in 2024.