| Tactic | % total |
|---|---|
| Partnerships & official designations (rights deals) | 5.5% |
| Upper-funnel brand campaign (always-on) | 5.5% |
| Upper-funnel moment & product campaigns | 3.0% |
| PR & media relations | 1.0% |
| Tactic | % total |
|---|---|
| Athletes, ambassadors, influencers & seeding | 3.5% |
| Event activations & moment programming | 3.5% |
| YouTube long-form / always-on content | 1.5% |
| Organic social & boosting | 1.0% |
| Blog & editorial | 0.5% |
| Channel | % total | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Paid Search: Non-Brand | 34% | Hold dollars; share declines |
| Paid Social: Acquisition | 16% | Grow |
| Amazon Ads | 13% | Grow |
| Paid Search: Brand | 9% | Trim; test decides |
| Microsoft / Bing | 2% | Relaunch only behind a geo holdout |
| Paid Social: Returning | 1% | Capped pilot |
Performance dollars stay whole in absolute terms. The brand layer is funded by budget growth, not reallocation. Moment activation spends out of performance, not awareness, because a partnership without paid behind it doesn't convert.
Not a 2027 target. Holding performance dollars whole while making performance 40% of the mix implies roughly doubling marketing as a share of revenue. Hitting it by cutting takes revenue out of the business in the year you're trying to grow it.
Commission belongs outside the mix. It's paid on conversion, so it's a cost of sale rather than working media. Keep it as its own reported line. Flat-fee placements and comparison content are media: fund those from awareness. Affiliate currently appears in two pillars on REP's slide, which double-counts it.
Across our portfolio, upper-funnel spend works when it attaches to enthusiasm that already exists, and underperforms when it tries to manufacture enthusiasm from scratch. That is the single best predictor of which of these four tactics returns. There are only two reliable ways to borrow it:
Show up where an enthusiastic audience is already assembled and already distributing. Example: a functional-fitness gear brand embedded at a major championship event. The crowd films, posts and shares, so the event supplies the distribution the brand would otherwise have to buy.
Time a launch or positioning to peak public enthusiasm. Example: a beverage brand that became official partner of a national team ahead of a World Cup, launching an exclusive product into a rising national storyline rather than alongside it.
Split the line. Macro partnerships (Cooper DeJean / Demi Bagby tier) buy reach and credibility, so judge them on awareness lift. Creator content buys ad efficiency, so judge it on paid performance.
Across our portfolio, follower count shows no reliable correlation with paid creative performance outside genuine macro tier, and only 3–5% of ads ever take meaningful spend. You win by testing volume, not by picking well upfront.
Be sober on platform ROAS: our agency-wide analysis shows awareness Video campaigns produce almost no in-platform purchase ROAS. This is justified on lift rather than ROAS, and lift is measurable. We've recorded double-digit brand consideration lift via a formal Brand Lift Study.
Stack: Brand Lift Study (~10 days, $5K+), assisted conversions on a 30-day lookback, geo holdout for the clean causal read.
The case isn't community. Events are where the crowd supplies the distribution, and they pay out twice: as a creative production engine, since one client's activation generated roughly 15 paid concepts from organic content, and as net-new category search demand, which major race series create at a high new-customer rate.
In fitness equipment, a direct competitor is already bidding into that demand. Available today, independent of any physical activation. Needs 4–6 events a year to read a pattern.
PR is where the borrowed-attention rule bites hardest. Nothing in our portfolio shows needle-moving results from traditional media placement on its own. Every PR-adjacent win we can point to rode one of the two mechanisms above: a crowd that was already assembled, or a moment already peaking.
Both of the examples above were sold internally as PR wins. Neither was earned media. One was an event presence; the other a rights designation with a product launch timed to a national storyline.