The first in an interview series where Jo Caruana of Finesse Group sits down with the people whose expertise makes good storytelling go further. These are the brilliant marketing minds working in the areas right alongside what we do at Finesse – and every conversation is a chance to steal something you can use.
By Jo Caruana, Founder & CEO, Finesse Group | StoryBrand Certified Guide
Barry Fearn is the CEO of Lane Group, a creative and media agency in Edinburgh. He works with all sorts, from challenger brands to independent companies, but they’ve got one thing in common: they want to grow. What struck me in our chat was that both of us are seeing the exact same trend, just from opposite sides of the table.
One idea that particularly stood out to me – especially since I think it catches a lot of growing businesses out – Barry’s “glass ceiling” theory. The short version of it is that performance marketing is almost always where a brand starts (and rightly so), but there’s a point where it stops taking you any further.
Why everyone starts with performance (and why that’s the right call)
If you’ve launched a brand in the last few years, there’s a good chance you started with Google, Meta and maybe even Amazon. And you’re in the right place. Barry says around 70%–80% of all new advertising money flows directly into those big self-serve platforms.
They’re easy to set up, you can start small and tracking your budget has never been simpler. That makes it the right first move and, as Barry puts it, it’s a great way to learn how those channels work while you start growing your customer base.
Barry describes these channels as “nascent”, though – because TV, radio and out-of-home have been around for generations, while digital hasn’t. The UK advertising industry is still growing, but that growth is happening mostly inside these newer platforms. That’s where the new money goes. Which is fine; until your growth on that channel flattens out.
The glass ceiling
Barry’s “glass ceiling” theory goes like this:
- A brand starts with performance
- It works
- So they put more into it
- Growth follows, for a while
- Then, something changes and it doesn’t anymore
“You get to a point where you need more than that to keep it growing,” Barry explains.
Performance channels are brilliant at capturing people who are already looking for you, or already scrolling past you. Once you’ve reached the consumers who are ready to buy, adding more money doesn’t find new ones – it just means paying more to reach the same faces, with a whole world of potential customers sitting outside that pool. As Barry observes, not everyone is on social media, and not everyone will buy from you online if they’ve never heard of your brand. So you always need a mix of online and offline strategies.
From our conversation, this is what stuck with me most: we spend so much chasing the younger, online audience that it’s easy to forget where the real spending power lies. Barry points out that over 80% of the country’s wealth belongs to the more mature generation – a generation that consumes media completely differently. If your entire strategy lives inside Google and Meta, there’s a huge slice of the market you’re never speaking to.
Over 80% of the country’s wealth belongs to the more mature generation – a generation that consumes media completely differently.
Barry sees this all the time – growing businesses focus on performance channels only, then wonder why growth has stalled. The channels are working fine. You’ve just reached the edge of what they can do alone.
The exception that proves the point
This isn’t a piece arguing that performance marketing is a trap to avoid. Barry was quick to add there’s no such thing as right or wrong here, and he’s watched brands grow from almost nothing to millions on the back of paid social exclusively.
Barry’s own team has worked with Fairfax & Favor, a high-end leather goods brand (boots and handbags, aimed largely at affluent women) that started up only 12 or 13 years ago. Their growth has been remarkable, and it’s come almost entirely from paid social done brilliantly, with a bit of Google sweeping up alongside it. They’ve never really invested in traditional above-the-line channels, and it hasn’t held them back one bit.
Performance-only can work, then – although as Barry notes, maybe one day even they will hit the ceiling; they’re just not there yet. There’s a limit built into it, however, and the brands that keep growing are usually the ones that prepare for it.
So what’s the right mix?
If performance gets you started but eventually stalls, the obvious question is, what should the balance be? In answer to the question, Barry points me to The Long and the Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field – a book built on years of studies into what drives growth. Their conclusion, broadly, is a (roughly) 60/40 split:
- 60% of your budget on brand-building
- 40% on performance
This is interesting because it’s almost the reverse of how most growing businesses instinctively spend. (Curious to know if that’s true for you?)
The reason it works comes down to what Barry calls the amplification effect. The more channels you run, the harder each one works. Someone spots your poster on the commute, hears your brand on a podcast, then finally clicks the Google ad they’d have scrolled past a month ago. The point is that no single channel takes all the credit, but the whole mix does the lifting. Or, in Barry’s words, “the more channels you buy, the better the amplification effect is going to perform overall.”
The more channels you run, the harder each one works. No single channel takes all the credit, but the whole mix does the lifting.
That’s the real argument against pouring everything into one place. A single channel, however good, can’t do what several channels do together.
Plan it, don’t just buy it
So, if the answer is a mix, where does a growing business start? Barry’s advice is simple: don’t go it alone, and don’t just buy a deal.
He draws a sharp line between media planning and media buying – and it’s a distinction a lot of businesses miss. Buying is calling up a channel and purchasing some space. Planning is working out which combination of channels will work for your goals and how they’ll fit together. One is a transaction, the other is a strategy.
Media planning > Media buying
Strategising a holistic combination of channels vs Simply buying space
This matters more than ever because the ground under performance channels isn’t yours. Some useful questions Barry raised for us all to think about: what happens if Google changes its algorithm? What happens if Meta ups its costs? If your brand awareness is low and one channel is doing all the work, you’ve got nowhere to go but to pay more. A broader mix is what protects you from that.
We’re seeing this at Finesse too, as more and more clients come to us for PR and content because they want to own a little of the narrative themselves through the content they put out. Yes, you already own your social channels, but you’re always somewhat at the mercy of how the algorithms change. At the same time, having other people (in the form of reputable brands, media and journalists) talk about you, rather than only talking about yourself, is a powerful thing to have in the mix, and is where PR comes in.
Barry’s last piece of advice is that whoever you take advice from, you should make sure it’s backed by data, science and fact, “not just gut”. That’s what the brands that grow do – they see the ceiling as it approaches and plan around it, well before they get there.
Working out where performance stops and brand-building should start is exactly the kind of thing worth planning for rather than guessing. Finesse Group helps founders and leadership teams build a media mix that keeps growing past the ceiling. Book a free 30-minute consultation with Jo to talk through what that looks like for your business.
