🗞️ In The News

• 🦋 ​Adobe Joins BlueSky: Immediately Regrets it and Leaves (PCMag)

• 🇺🇸 Is The World Entering The ‘Sell America’ Era? (MorningBrew)

• 🤳 BeReal Launches Advertising Platform in US with former TikTok Leading (MarketingDive)

🔗 Large On LinkedIn

• 🛒 Leaked Memo From Shopify CEO on AI Adoption - From Kieran Flanagan (link)

• 🤔 The Essence of Good Strategy: Make Customers Unhappy? - From George Paras (link)

• 🚗 The Worlds Finest Selection of Car Ads - From The Ad Professor (link)

💼 Case Studies: Case Closed

• 🚢 Tariff Freaking Out Consumers: Is That Loyalty Specialists I See on The Horizon? (CXDive)

• 🤑 How Gun Marketers Sell Their Budgets to Leadership (MarketingProfs)

• 🤩 How Hiring a Superstar Can Backfire, and How To Avoid It (HarvardBusinessReview)

• 📈 How To Smash Your Conversion Rate With An Irresistible Offer (ConversionRateExperts)

🧰 You Won’t Blame These Tools

• ✍️ Originality.ai - Ensure your content is original, accurate, and trustworthy before hitting publish using a full editorial toolkit.

• 🎬 ThatNeedle - Get summaries and translations of YouTube videos that helps you decide what’s worth watching.

• 🔐 Polymer - Prevent data breaches with AI-powered security that offers real-time visibility, adaptive controls, and automated remediation.

I’M SORRY SPREADSHEET, WE NEED TO TALK 📊 

Over the past two decades, marketing has been having a steamy, spreadsheet-fuelled affair with performance. And honestly, who could blame it? Clicks are seductive. Conversion rates whisper sweet nothings. ROAS tells you you’re a genius (until it doesn’t - and you realise it’s far worse than you thought).

Digital channels promised us a marketing utopia: perfect targeting, perfect tracking, perfect attribution. And for a while, it really did feel like we’d cracked the code—every dollar in, a few dollars out. The CFOs were happy. The dashboards were glowing. The “brand people” were quietly shuffled to the edge of the all-hands Zoom.

A big part of the performance love story came courtesy of a handful of now-legendary startup myths. Dropbox, PayPal, Uber—they were the cool kids in the growth marketing cafeteria. Referrals, rewards, viral loops! Growth hacks that felt like cheat codes. And we lapped it up.

But here’s what we tend to forget:

• Most of those companies eventually pivoted into serious brand investments

• Some hit the wall (and prayed for an acquisition) when performance lost its juice

• And more than a few crashed and burned, unable to grow out of their CPA addiction

Dropbox? Now a brand-forward, big-budget, B2B collaboration company. Uber? Blanks cities in OOH campaigns. And we’ll get to AirBnB shortly.

The problem wasn’t performance—it was conflating launch tactics with long-term strategy.

We got hooked.

Entire marketing strategies began orbiting performance metrics, often at the expense of long-term brand equity. We weren’t building preference—we were bidding on attention.

And as more competitors entered the same channels, prices rose, effectiveness dropped, and everyone started sounding the same alarm (Meta is ripping us HARD!).

Then came the brand blackout: performance numbers still looked decent in isolation, but something felt… off. Acquisition costs ballooned. Loyalty cratered. Organic traffic plateaued. And suddenly, the question no one wanted to ask became un-ignorable:

What happens when the arbitrage thins out to nothing?

That’s the context into which Airbnb walked—smack into a pandemic, forced to pause spend, only to discover that 90% of their traffic came back anyway. Turns out, a strong brand doesn’t need to pay for every click. And a great product, communicated well, creates its own gravity.

The tragedy here isn’t just that we over-indexed on performance—it’s that we forgot what brand was for. Not just vibes. Not just storytelling. But a strategic moat. Memory structures. Margin protection. Loyalty at scale.

As the musical chairs of performance arbitrage stops, it’s turns out the businesses who've been dancing to just the one tune are flat on their ass.

Let’s make sure that’s not you.

LASERS, CHANDELIERS AND FLASHBULBS. MODEL AND METAPHOR MAGIC 🪄 

Let’s get something straight: this isn’t a turf war. Lasers and chandeliers aren’t rival factions - you don’t get to choose which one is best. They’re tools—used badly or beautifully, depending on how you hold them.

And Brian Chesky’s metaphor is useful not because it’s poetic, but because it’s practical.

Let’s unpack the trio.

🔦 LASERS - THE PRECISION PERFORMANCE WEAPON

Performance marketing is the boardroom darling. Precise. Trackable. Scalable(ish). It’s the marketing equivalent of a sniper rifle—zeroed in on conversion-ready customers.

When used right, lasers do what they’re built for:

• Correct supply-demand imbalances

• Fill short-term revenue gaps

• Reactivate lapsed audiences

• Prove ROI fast

But the problem starts when brands try to light entire rooms with them. Lasers are great for the corner—hopeless for the whole house. You end up overexposing one spot while everything else stays in shadow.

If a laser hits someone who isn’t in market, they don’t even notice. They don’t feel the warmth, they don’t see anything around them light up.

Picture that guy with the red laser dot on his forehead. He has no idea.

That’s performance on a prospect out of market. Useless.

Well actually it’s even worse than useless.

The more you use lasers, the less effective they become. Performance channels are crowded auction houses. The more bids, the higher the price, the lower the margin. As Chesky puts it, performance marketing is “arbitrage-seeking with eroding advantages.” Like trying to make money flipping sneakers after everyone else finds StockX.

Takeaway: Use lasers tactically, not as your default setting. They’re tools for solving specific problems—not defining your entire strategy.

💡 CHANDELIERS - BRAND MARKETING THAT LIGHTS UP THE ROOM

Chandeliers don’t scream. They glow. They warm. They’re elegant, ambient, omnipresent—and unlike lasers, they don’t need to be pointed directly at you to have an effect.

Brand marketing works the same way. It creates mental availability—awareness, affinity, trust. It tells a story about who your customer is if they choose you.

Chesky called this “accumulating advantage”—the idea that brand efforts, unlike performance clicks, compound over time. Think Nike. Think Apple. Think Airbnb, which now gets 90% of traffic unpaid, because the brand pulls people in. The brand overtime, becomes the synonymous with with the category.

But it’s not just warm fuzzies. Brand also:

• Insulates your CAC from volatility

• Builds preference in commoditised markets

• Enables word of mouth and earned media

• Makes your lasers more effective by increasing conversion rates

Challenge? It’s harder to measure. Brand growth doesn’t follow the straight line of a ROAS report. It’s does plop out the other end of a campaign as neatly attributed sales.

But as we’ll explore later—measurable ≠ valuable.

Takeaway: The best chandeliers are installed early, maintained consistently, and visible from every angle of the room (your category).

📸 FLASHBULBS - BLINDINGLY BRIGHT AND SHORT LIVED

The final player? Flashbulbs. Sudden, intense, and gone in a blink. These are your viral stunts, product launches, Superbowl ads, “Surprise! We have a new a-list ambassador” (for the week) campaigns.

They can create noise. Sometimes even sales. But they don’t last. Like fireworks, they’re more spectacle than structure. And if your strategy relies on flashbulbs? You’re always chasing the next pop.

Airbnb doesn’t rely on flashbulbs—but they use them strategically. A new feature drop. A high-profile partnership. All-in tourism campaign with emotional resonance. Short bursts of light… built on a brand that already glows.

Takeaway: Flashbulbs are seasoning. Not substance. Use them wisely, sparingly, and always anchored to a deeper, glowing brand narrative.

Together, these three forms—laser, chandelier, flashbulb—don’t compete. They complement. The smartest brands don’t choose between them. They choreograph them.

HANG YOUR OWN CHANDELIER (WITHOUT BURNING THE HOUSE DOWN) 🧯 

OK, so you’ve got a laser strapped to your head, a chandelier in one hand, and a flashbulb buzzing ominously in your back pocket. What now?

Here’s how to actually use this framework to build a marketing strategy that doesn’t just sparkle at for a few lousy seconds—but actually works.

1. Audit Your Light Sources 🔬 

Before you do anything, take a brutally honest look at your current marketing mix. Is your budget overwhelmingly skewed to performance? If so, you’re not alone. Most companies with under-pressure growth targets are wired this way. But it’s a sign you’re renting customers, not attracting them.

What to check:

• % of spend on channels like paid search, social, affiliates, retargeting

• Over-reliance on last-click attribution

• CAC trends—are they creeping up each month or quarter?

This is your marketing electricity bill. And if it’s giving you anxiety sweats, don’t ignore it and shove it in the draw. Take a closer look and understand what’s actually happening.

2. Build Your Brand Chandelier 🕯️ 

Ask the big, squishy questions:
Who are we to our customers? What do we mean to them? What problem are we solving—not functionally, but emotionally? What unique aspect of the category can we own, or at least become the most well known for?

Now, design a brand presence that actually answers those questions.

• Define your identity: tone, visuals, values, POV

• Prioritise product/ category education over vague vibes

• Tell consistent, emotionally resonant stories across every touchpoint

• Don’t just target—teach

• Repeat.

Chandeliers aren’t built overnight. But they’re what makes your house a home. (And keeps people coming back, even when the performance budget takes a nap.)

3. Use Lasers With Surgical Precision 🎯 

Performance marketing’s not the villain. It’s just been terribly cast in the lead role it should have never had. It belongs in a supporting part, like Joe Pesci to Deniro—not the other way around. Performance is magic when deployed to solve specific, short-term challenges:

• Filling urgent gaps in supply or demand

• Rebalancing regional or product-specific funnels

• Capturing intent-rich customers already searching for a solution

Set clear guardrails:

• Cap your performance budget as a percentage of total spend. It can never be the whole bag. Never.

• Measure incrementality, not just ROAS

• Avoid confusing correlation with causation—organic uplift ≠ paid effectiveness

4. Flashbulbs = Strategic Sparkles, Not Your Whole Strategy ✨ 

Launches, events, stunts? Fun. But don’t mistake them for brand building.

Liquid death are awesome on LinkedIn, but they’re still a teeny-tiny slice of the packaged water market.

Use flashbulbs to:

• Announce something new

• Generate PR or social virality

• Reinforce an existing brand message in an unexpected way

Then get out. Nothing ages faster than a flashbulb campaign with nowhere to go.

5. Track the Right Kind of Brightness 🕶️ 

You can’t manage what you don’t measure—but you can over-measure the wrong thing.

Shift your metrics:

• From: last-click ROAS → To: marketing mix modelling, customer lifetime value

• From: CTR → To: brand lift, unaided recall, share of search

• From: vanity metrics (reach, views, impressions) → To: mental availability and future demand

You’re not just counting who walked in today. You’re investing in who remembers you tomorrow.

BUT DAMMIT I LOVE ME SOME ROAS 😅 

Let’s be honest: if you’re running a business with tight margins, impatient investors, and targets that resemble Everest in fiscal form—performance marketing feels safe. It’s immediate. It’s trackable. And in the short term, it works.

So, what’s the problem?

Well… that safety? It’s an illusion. It’s a temporary comfort - ignoring the long term problem underneath.

But still, let’s address the elephant(s) in the room.

“Brand is vague. We need hard numbers.”

True—brand marketing is harder to measure. It’s slow. It doesn’t always play nicely with dashboards. But that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. It just means you need better tools.

Brand impact shows up in:

• Declining CAC over time

• Increased organic traffic and word of mouth

• Higher customer retention

• Greater pricing power

It’s the stuff that doesn’t scream—but quietly builds a moat around your business.

“We just don’t have the budget for brand.”

Another fair concern, especially for smaller businesses. But this isn’t about spending more—it’s about spending smarter.

Even with modest budgets, you can:

• Shift messaging to focus on education and emotional resonance

• Invest in content that builds trust and memorability

• Use earned media, partnerships, and community as chandelier amplifiers

Think of it less as a separate budget—and more as a lens through which all your marketing decisions should pass.

“If it’s not measurable, how do we justify it to the board?”

Boards love numbers. But they also love margin. Resilience. Lower churn. The secret is reframing brand as a strategic asset and growth driver—not a ‘nice-to-have’ creative project.

Chesky nailed it: “The single reason you invest in brand is to make more money.”

If you position your brand work as a margin-multiplier and future demand generator—not just a vibes exercise—you’ll find it’s much easier to get buy-in. Especially when the alternative is rising media costs and customer apathy.

Balanced marketing isn’t some romantic notion—it’s a hedge against volatility. Lasers are useful, but they won’t light up your path forever. And relying on them alone? That’s not strategy. That’s just… expensive guesswork with a pixel budget.

SO, IS ANYONE HOME? 🤷 

Airbnb didn’t abandon performance marketing. They didn’t throw out the spreadsheets, exile the analysts, or replace their PPC manager with Jasper the beret-wearing brand poet. They rebalanced. They reframed. They recognised that a strong brand makes every other marketing dollar work harder.

The lesson? Lasers drive precision. Chandeliers build preference. Flashbulbs dazzle (briefly). The real magic is in knowing when—and how—to use each one.

If you’re stuck in a performance loop, here’s your permission slip: you can stop treating marketing like a maths exam. Yes, numbers matter. But so does memory. Emotion. Meaning. The stuff that makes people choose you even when you’re not bidding for them.

Because when more and more of your competitors are all shouting the same thing into the same funnel… sometimes the quiet glow of a chandelier is what makes someone notice and stay.

So, what’s lighting up your marketing right now?
And more importantly—what do you want your customers to see when they look around the room?

If you enjoyed this edition, please forward it to a friend who’s looking to level-up their marketing game - they’ll love you for it (and I will too) ⏭️ 💌

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Troy Muir | The Ladder