The modern growth leader faces a peculiar trap: every dollar spent on brand feels like a dollar stolen from performance. CFOs want proof. Boards want attribution. And somewhere along the way, marketing split into two warring tribes—one obsessed with upper-funnel awareness, the other maniacally focused on cost-per-acquisition.
But the leaders running marketing at companies like Wix, Canva, Clay, and Kraken don't think this way at all. They argue the entire framing is broken. Brand versus performance isn't a tradeoff to manage. It's a false dichotomy that only exists because of how teams are structured and how metrics are measured.
Talk to eight CMOs and heads of growth who've collectively overseen billions in spend, and you'll hear the same counterintuitive claim: the best performance marketing is brand marketing. And the best brand work drives immediate acquisition.
The $100M Marketing Budget That Refuses to Choose
Omer Shai has run marketing at Wix for 18 years and manages a nine-figure marketing budget. He's also done six Super Bowl ads—one of the most expensive brand plays in existence. When asked about the split between brand and performance, his answer cuts to the bone:
The way that I'm thinking on brand activities is that it's not an empty, okay? It's not only brand. And when I'm doing acquisition, I'm not doing just acquisition marketing. So when I'm doing brand marketing, I'm thinking the balance between brand and acquisition. And when I'm doing acquisition, I'm thinking about the balance between acquisition and brand.
— Omer Shai, CMO at Wix
Shai doesn't frame Super Bowl spots as awareness plays that live in isolation. He frames them as acquisition drivers with measurable impact. The metric? Traffic spikes from relevant users. If people don't come to the site after a Super Bowl campaign, he considers the investment failed. Marketing, in his view, is not spend—it's investment. And investment demands return.
This philosophy extends far beyond the big moments. Shai builds campaigns that work across the funnel, refusing to separate activities by channel or objective. The two weeks before the Super Bowl spot airs? That's when he floods the zone with PR, creative teasers, and digital activation. The goal is to create a compounding effect where brand visibility feeds acquisition velocity.
At Canva, the structure reflects this same refusal to create silos. Emma Robinson and Christine Segrist lead B2B and consumer marketing, respectively, but they describe themselves as "two parts of a whole." Robinson runs B2B go-to-market and growth. Segrist oversees consumer performance and brand. They spend most of their time working together because the channels overlap and the customer journey doesn't care about org charts.
This really strict binary of B2B and B2C, we just feel like that's a little bit of an outdated notion that people are constantly moving between different spheres of their life. So it's very natural that when we're building programs or we're planning things together or even working with our teams, it's all about just not having those boundaries.
— Christine Segrist, VP Consumer Marketing at Canva
Canva's model is matrixed. They have business units for audiences—consumer, B2B, international—and then centers of excellence for channels. Those channel experts support all the business units, ensuring consistency while still allowing for audience-specific nuance. The result? B2C campaigns inform B2B creative. Performance insights shape brand positioning. Nobody is optimizing in a vacuum.
When Billboards Become Performance Marketing
Bruno Estrella runs growth marketing at Clay, a company that raised over $60 million and competes in the notoriously crowded data enrichment space. His team needed to shift perception—Clay wasn't just another hacky tool for scrappy sales teams. It was enterprise-grade software used by Notion, Intercom, and Ramp.
So Estrella did something most performance marketers would never approve: he spent low hundreds of thousands of dollars on billboards in San Francisco.
The anxiety was real. Billboards are famously hard to attribute. You can't A/B test the creative. You can't track clicks. And yet, Estrella justified the spend by thinking like a performance marketer and a brand builder at the same time.
First, he got hyper-strategic about timing. Instead of running billboards for months with low density, Clay concentrated the entire campaign during Dreamforce—Salesforce's massive annual conference. Every GTM executive in the world descends on San Francisco for that event. Clay mapped the entire customer journey: SFO Airport, Highway 101, downtown walking routes. Then they layered in geo-targeted digital ads and hosted in-person events during the same window.
We could have done like for a longer period of time with less density of billboards, but we chose to be like very strategic on the timing. And let's focus on there as much as possible, right? During that time of the year. And they remapped out all of the touch points that people that are coming to San Francisco would land.
— Bruno Estrella, Head of Growth Marketing at Clay
The result? High-profile CEOs commented publicly. Open opportunities increased. Inbound from enterprise prospects spiked. Estrella couldn't prove 100% ROI, but he could see the signal. And the signal was enough.
This is the mindset shift: brand work can be instrumented. Performance work can build long-term equity. The question isn't which bucket a campaign falls into. The question is whether it's designed to do both.
Why the Separation Exists (and Who Benefits from It)
So if the dichotomy is false, why does it persist?
Mayur Gupta—CMO at Kraken and former growth lead at Spotify—has a blunt take. The industry created the separation, and it's done more harm than good.
Whoever came up with the branding of brand and performance marketing made the biggest mistake and did the biggest injustice.
— Mayur Gupta, CMO at Kraken
Gupta argues the split exists because of incentive structures and measurement limitations, not because of any real strategic truth. Performance teams get rewarded for short-term conversions. Brand teams get rewarded for awareness and sentiment. CFOs approve budgets based on attribution models that favor last-click metrics. And so the cycle perpetuates.
But Gupta's experience at Spotify taught him something different: the magic of a growth engine is in the quality of the insight feeding it, not the categorization of the spend. At Spotify, his team dug into user psychology to understand why someone chose Spotify over Apple Music or Amazon. They discovered that Spotify's black background resonated more with active listeners who wanted discovery and control. That insight didn't live in a "brand" or "performance" silo. It informed product design, messaging, creative, and acquisition strategy all at once.
Mallory Contois, VP of Growth at Maven and former head of community at Mercury, echoes this. At Mercury, she ran what she calls "the lowest budget team" because her mandate was organic growth and word-of-mouth. She didn't buy ads. She didn't sponsor flashy events. She showed up as a human being in the founder ecosystem and built trust.
My goal was always organic growth and word-of-mouth-led growth. And I don't philosophically buy into the more money you spend on events and things like that, the more people will talk about them. I just think that's just not true.
— Mallory Contois, VP of Growth at Maven
Contois's work was brand-building in the truest sense—creating emotional connection and trust. But it directly drove acquisition and retention. Her refusal to spend didn't make the work less valuable. It made the results more durable.
Where the Experts Disagree: Time Horizons and Measurement
Not everyone agrees on how to measure this integrated approach. The disagreement isn't about whether brand and performance should work together—it's about when you should expect returns and how you prove value.
Omer Shai at Wix is explicit: he wants to see traffic spikes from relevant users. If a campaign doesn't bring people to the site, it failed. Period. He's willing to wait beyond the day of the campaign, but the expectation is clear. Marketing is investment, and investment must show return in measurable user behavior.
Mayur Gupta at Kraken takes a longer view. He talks about thriving amidst "healthy chaos" and running at 100 miles per hour even when you can only see 10 meters ahead. His confidence comes from knowing that at the 8-meter mark, you'll see the next 10. For Gupta, the time horizon is less rigid. The insight quality matters more than the immediate conversion.
João Gonçalves, former head of growth and marketing at QuintoAndar and OLX Brazil, built massive teams during hyper-growth phases—from 3 people in marketing to 70 in growth at QuintoAndar. He emphasizes coherence across the funnel. Most companies, he argues, do well at the top (brand) or the bottom (conversion), but the middle falls apart. The lack of integration is where things break.
Gonçalves invested heavily in both brand and performance. He filmed over 60 TV commercials for Bom Negócio featuring celebrities like Maradona. He also built sophisticated instrumentation for analytics, CRM, and email marketing to drive engagement. The two weren't separate budgets. They were interdependent parts of a coherent funnel.
Sean Collins, lifecycle marketing lead at Bilt Rewards, adds another wrinkle. He argues that the role of lifecycle and CRM depends entirely on your business model. For some products, email is just "billboard marketing"—a reminder that you exist. For others, it's critical education and engagement. The key is understanding the natural use case and accelerating it, not forcing users into a funnel that doesn't match their behavior.
I think we often hear lifecycle and immediately pick a few channels. We say email, SMS, push, boom, there you go. And it's like, well, I mean, to me it's integrated marketing that's focused on the natural use case and like those exact questions of how can we accelerate the use case if it's a non-predictable, non-recurring type chart.
— Sean Collins, Lifecycle Marketing Lead at Bilt Rewards
Collins doesn't separate brand from lifecycle. He sees them as part of the same question: how do you keep customers engaged during downtimes when they're not ready to purchase? That's brand work. It's also performance work. The channel is just the delivery mechanism.
The Operational Reality: How to Actually Do This
If the goal is integration, the structure has to support it. And structure is where most companies fail.
Raaz Herzberg, CMO at Wiz, joined as one of the first 10 employees and helped scale the company to a multi-billion-dollar ARR business. Wiz reached millions in ARR before hiring a single salesperson. The product had such strong product-market fit that customers pulled it through. But Herzberg didn't treat that as a reason to ignore brand. From day one, Wiz emphasized time-to-value—customers saw value in 15 minutes, not months. That speed became part of the brand promise and the growth engine.
Herzberg's philosophy? Never feel complacent. Never assume you know more than you do. And always stay paranoid. That mindset applies to brand and performance alike. Every deal, every campaign, every customer conversation is a chance to fail. So you prepare obsessively, even for things you've done a thousand times.
At Canva, Robinson and Segrist describe their team structure as "heavily matrixed." It requires collaboration, but it works because Canva's culture values cross-functional work. They use Canva itself to share strategy documents and creative briefs, ensuring everyone has visibility. The business units (consumer, B2B, international) own outcomes. The channel teams (performance, brand, product marketing) provide expertise. Nobody optimizes in isolation.
Estrella at Clay runs a similar model. His team has four core bets for growth. Each bet has resources, risks, early signals, and investment levels attached. He tracks progress against those bets, not against arbitrary channel budgets. If a billboard campaign is one of the bets, it gets measured against the same rigor as a paid search campaign.
This operational discipline is what separates integrated marketing from vague platitudes about "brand and performance working together." It's not enough to say the two should align. You have to design org structures, measurement frameworks, and planning processes that make alignment the default, not the exception.
The Metric That Actually Matters
If you stop separating brand and performance, what do you measure?
Omer Shai has an answer: time return on investment. Not just ROI, but time-weighted ROI. How long does it take for a dollar spent to come back? And how does that compare across different types of investment?
Shai manages his $100 million marketing budget with extreme granularity. He doesn't think in terms of brand budgets and performance budgets. He thinks in terms of activities that drive relevant users to the site at a cost and speed that makes sense for the business. Some activities pay back quickly. Some take longer but build compounding value. The goal is to understand both and optimize the portfolio.
Mayur Gupta adds another dimension: insight quality. The best growth engines aren't fueled by more experiments or bigger budgets. They're fueled by better insights. At Spotify, his team didn't just test creative. They tested hypotheses about human psychology. Why do people choose one product over another? What emotional triggers drive decision-making? Those insights shaped everything from product design to media strategy.
Gonçalves at QuintoAndar built a similar approach. His team invested in analytics early and won awards for instrumentation. They could track user behavior across the entire funnel, from first touch to conversion to retention. That visibility made it possible to see where brand spend was driving performance outcomes and where performance tactics were building brand equity.
The common thread? These leaders don't measure brand and performance separately because they don't think of them separately. They measure business outcomes—relevant users, revenue, retention—and they track what drives those outcomes, regardless of what bucket the spend came from.
What This Means for the Next Generation of Growth Leaders
The implications are clear for anyone running marketing or growth today.
First, stop organizing teams around the brand/performance divide. Structure around audiences, outcomes, or stages of the customer journey. Create centers of excellence for channels, but don't let those teams operate in isolation. Force collaboration. Make it uncomfortable to optimize without considering the full funnel.
Second, change how you measure. Attribution models that favor last-click are lying to you. They overvalue performance and undervalue brand. Build measurement frameworks that account for time, compounding effects, and contribution across touchpoints. If you can't prove ROI on a brand campaign, the problem might be your measurement, not the campaign.
Third, hire people who think in systems, not channels. The best marketers don't see themselves as "brand people" or "performance people." They see themselves as growth people who use every tool available. They're comfortable running billboards and optimizing email subject lines. They think in terms of insights, experiments, and outcomes.
Fourth, be willing to make bets that don't fit neatly into your attribution model. Estrella's billboard campaign at Clay couldn't be tracked with precision, but the qualitative and directional signals were strong enough to justify the spend. Not everything needs a pixel to prove its value.
And fifth, remember that the best brand work is product work. Gupta talks about making your product your strongest marketing channel. Herzberg at Wiz built a product that delivered value in 15 minutes, and that speed became the core of the brand. Contois at Mercury built community by showing up as a human being, not by running ads. The most durable brand equity comes from delivering value, not from buying awareness.
The false tradeoff between brand and performance persists because it's easy. It's easy to organize around. It's easy to measure. It's easy to assign blame when things don't work.
But the leaders building the most iconic companies don't take the easy path. They refuse to choose. They build systems that integrate. They measure what matters. And they spend every dollar like it has to do two jobs at once—because it does.