What is the long-term brand effect?

Brand advertising works on two horizons. In the weeks after a TV or video campaign, sales rise and the lift fades; that is the medium-term effect, and adstock captures it. Over months and years, a brand that keeps investing becomes easier to choose, which shows up as a slowly rising baseline rather than as a spike after any single campaign. That slow lift is the long-term brand effect.

A sales-focused marketing mix model measures the short and medium term well. TV is not invisible to it: TV's pull-through on search and social in the following weeks shows up as TV's effect, and the model moves budget toward TV when the data supports it. What a sales model does not see is the brand effect that lands a year later as a higher baseline, because by then it is indistinguishable from trend.

The honest statement is the one that builds trust: the short-term cost of prioritizing long-term channels can be made explicit ("this choice costs you roughly this much per acquired customer now"), which is a sharper conversation than a vague brand number.

Two ways, today and in testing. Today, customers who know a channel has effects beyond what the sales model measures lock it at the planned level, often TV, and let the model optimize the other channels around it, with the cost of that constraint shown in the scenario. The model's view and the team's belief about brand are both on the table.

In testing, Odins has a brand extension of the model that gives each channel a brand stock and two returns, an immediate one and a long-run one, with the weighting between the horizons set by a discount rate rather than an arbitrary slider. It is grounded in Ehrenberg-Bass and the WARC multiplier work, has been shown to customers as a beta, and is not yet a standard output of every model.

• Adstock: The carryover effect: the part of this week's advertising that lands in the weeks that follow.
• Baseline (base sales): The sales that would have happened without paid marketing. Everything the model credits to a channel is measured above it.
• Channel contribution: What each channel added to sales above the baseline over a period. The decomposition behind every ROAS figure.
• Budget optimization: Finding the split and the total where the next unit works hardest, under the constraints the business has.

Go one level deeper: Brand effects in the model. Measuring the long-term effect of brand building. Or go back to all terms in the glossary.