Leistungsmarketing

Performance marketing consulting is the work of deciding what paid spend is for, which demand it is pointed at, what it can honestly prove, and where its ceiling sits. Vivaldi is a strategy firm, not a media agency. We do not buy media, manage bidding, build creative or operate ad accounts. We work on what the media is being asked to do, alongside whoever executes it, and saying so early saves a wasted meeting.

• Seit 1999Strategiearbeit zu Marke, Nachfrage und Wachstum
• Über 200veröffentlichte Fallstudien
• 10 Niederlassungenauf vier Kontinenten
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche: Das Beste aus den Bereichen Beratung, Strategie und Innovation
• No media buyingwe are paid to advise, not to place spend

Wenn Unternehmen uns beauftragen

Performance marketing consulting is usually bought by a CMO, a growth lead or a CFO, and almost never because the media is being run badly. The trigger is a number that has stopped behaving.

• Every channel reports improving efficiency and the blended cost of acquiring a customer is still rising. Two true reports that cannot both describe the same business.
• Spend has grown for several years and the marginal return has flattened. More budget buys less, and nobody can say at what point it stops being worth spending.
• Nobody can state what the brand budget buys. So it gets cut first in every planning round, and the harvest gets more expensive the following year.
• The agency is performing well and the results have stopped improving anyway. That is the clearest sign the constraint has moved outside the media plan.
• Finance has started asking whether the conversions were incremental. It is a fair question, and most attribution reporting is not built to answer it.

Why optimizing the media does not raise the ceiling

Paid search, paid social and programmatic are the best instrumented part of marketing and the easiest to mistake for a growth strategy. They convert demand that already exists, at the lowest price the auction allows. That is genuinely valuable and getting it right is real work. It is also bounded. The ceiling on a harvesting system is the demand available to harvest, and no amount of bidding discipline raises it.

So the diagnostic that matters is not return on ad spend. It is what happens to marginal efficiency as spend rises. When each additional unit of budget buys less, most organizations conclude the media has degraded. Usually the demand has. The system has converted the intent available to it and is now paying to interrupt people who were not trying to buy anything. That is a demand-side problem wearing a media costume, and it is why most marketing is about market taking when growth comes from market making.

There is a financial version of the same argument. Preference is not outside the performance system, it is an input to the unit economics inside it: where an auction rewards relevance and click-through, a preferred brand wins more auctions with the same budget and converts a higher share of the clicks it buys. Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data, Unrealized Value, found that strong global brands beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year between 2001 and 2024, and that a dollar invested became $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. A company that funds only the harvest reports improving efficiency on a narrowing base, which is the case brand spend fails to make in financial language.

What our performance marketing consulting services include

Four bodies of work, none of them a media plan. Each can be engaged on its own, and most companies need two or three.

1. Separating demand you created from demand you captured

Most performance reporting measures the demand a system captured and presents it as the demand the company generated. Separating the two changes the allocation conversation more than any bidding change.

• Captured demand reported apart from created demand, so the number answers the question it is read as answering
• Incrementality established against a holdout rather than inferred from an attribution model
• Blended cost per acquired customer set beside the channel figures that look healthier in isolation
• The point on the spend curve where marginal efficiency turns, stated as a number rather than a feeling

2. Two budgets with two different tests

The practical instrument is a split in the profit and loss account, and a refusal to judge either side by the measure that belongs to the other.

• Activating spend judged on marginal cost per incremental conversion
• Building spend judged on movement in the preference premium and on the acquisition cost of the harvest that follows it
• Neither test applied to the other budget, and neither budget allowed to raid the other mid-year

Where the split should sit is an empirical question with a different answer for each business, and any firm quoting a universal ratio is guessing. What is not defensible is a single pot with a single measure, because that always over-funds the side that reports fastest, and the side that reports fastest cannot create demand.

3. Allocation against demand spaces rather than platforms

We set allocation against demand spaces, which describe what customers are trying to get done, rather than against the platforms that happen to be cheapest this quarter. That view comes out of our demand landscape mapping work, and it is what makes a performance budget arguable at board level rather than defensible only inside the marketing function.

4. The measurement model a CFO will accept

A reporting system that only a marketing team believes is not a measurement model, it is a defense. The output here is a set of numbers finance will sign off on and marketing can still act on weekly.

• One definition of acquisition cost used by marketing and finance, with the exclusions written down
• A holdout and experiment calendar, so incrementality is measured on a schedule rather than argued about after a bad quarter
• A reporting line that distinguishes a demand problem from a media problem before the next budget round, not after it

How a performance marketing engagement works

1. Diagnose. Spend, channel and conversion data read against blended acquisition cost, plus interviews with marketing, finance and the agencies that execute. The output is a view of where marginal efficiency turns and whether demand or media is the binding constraint.
2. Decide. The demand spaces the company intends to own, the split between building and activating spend, and the test each side will be judged on. The output is an allocation decision with the exclusions written down.
3. Build. The measurement model, the holdout and experiment design, and the reporting line that marketing and finance will both use. We work with your agencies rather than replacing them.
4. Embed. A sense, reason, act and learn loop built into the planning cycle, so the system improves between campaigns and not only within them, and so the allocation argument can be made again next year without us.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for performance marketing

Three reasons, and the first is the one that disqualifies us for some buyers.

• We are not paid on your spend. A firm compensated as a percentage of media has a structural interest in there being more of it. That is not dishonesty, it is incentive design, and it means advice to spend less is expensive for them to give.
• We work on demand, not only on conversion. Vivaldi has worked on where demand comes from since 1999, which is the question a performance system cannot answer about itself.
• We argue the case in financial language. The deliverable is an allocation a CFO can price, not a deck that asks finance to take brand on faith.

How to evaluate a performance marketing consultant

Das sollten Sie bei jedem Unternehmen auf Ihrer Auswahlliste erfragen – auch bei uns.

• Do you buy the media you are advising on? You should know which side of that incentive you are buying from before the first invoice.
• How do you measure incrementality? If the answer is an attribution model, they are measuring credit for conversions that already happened, not whether those conversions needed paying for.
• What would you tell us to stop funding? A practice that can only reallocate within the harvest cannot diagnose an exhausted demand pool.
• What is your view on the brand and performance split? A confident universal ratio is a warning sign. A method for finding the right one for this business is the answer you want.
• Who signs off on your recommendation? If the work never reaches finance, it will not survive the next planning round.

Strategieberatung, Performance-Agentur oder internes Wachstumsteam?

Verwandte Arbeiten

Performance questions rarely arrive alone. Four connected pieces:

• Customer acquisition if the question is what a customer costs and why, rather than what the paid budget is for.
• Campaign development if the allocation is settled and the constraint is the idea the spend is carrying.
• Social and digital marketing if the question is how the channels themselves should work rather than how much they should receive.
• Marketing strategy if the problem starts before the media plan and the whole plan needs rebuilding.

Diese Arbeit wird von unserer „Brand Acceleration Group“ durchgeführt, die Teil des Bereichs „Marketing Strategy and Acceleration “ bei Vivaldi, dem Strategieberatungsunternehmen, das hinter dem „Demand Landscape“ und dem „ Interaction Field “ steht.

Performance marketing consulting in the US and worldwide

Our work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Performance questions are rarely confined to one market, and the asymmetry between markets is usually the finding rather than the complication: the same budget split that is obviously right where the brand is known can be obviously wrong where it is not, because the preference that lowers the cost of the harvest does not exist there yet. We set the allocation per market and the method once.