What Is Brand Advertising, And Is It Relevant In 2025?

Back in the 1970s, the average person saw around 500 ads per day, according to research. In 2023, that figure has surged to over 5,000 daily ad exposures. This increase reflects just how crowded the advertising world has become.

So the question is fair: with so much competition, is brand advertising still worth it in 2025?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is: yes, if you’re strategic.

The brands that cut through are the ones that understand the real function of brand advertising.

What do you mean by brand advertising?

Brand advertising is the strategic practice of building a company’s identity, visibility, and emotional resonance in the minds of consumers before they’re ready to buy. Its job is to make a business memorable, trustworthy, and culturally relevant, so that when the time comes to choose, your brand is the obvious choice.

This kind of advertising doesn’t push products. Instead, it builds meaning. So, beyond promoting a logo or tagline, brand advertising lets others know the sum total of your brand’s identity, promise, and emotional impact. Done well, it’s what makes Nike more than a shoe company, or Apple more than a collection of tech products. It creates mental shortcuts in a cluttered world. 

The key characteristics of brand advertising include:

• Seeking to connect, not convert–at least not immediately
• Building equity and memory structures that accumulate over time
• Creating consistency across channels
• Telling a bigger story—one that consumers want to align with, rather than touting features or discounts

What is the primary goal of brand advertising?

The primary goal of brand advertising is to drive long-term, profitable growth by making your brand more noticeable, memorable, and preferred.

At a cognitive level, it’s about creating mental availability or the likelihood that someone will recall your brand when making a purchase decision. At a commercial level, it builds brand equity, creates pricing power, reduces churn, and improves the efficiency of your entire marketing ecosystem.

Instead of asking “How do we convert someone today?”, brand advertising asks, “How do we ensure they choose us when the time comes?”

This is especially critical in categories where functional differences between products are minimal. In 2025, when product parity is high and attention is scarce, the brands that win are not always the cheapest or most visible, but the ones that are most remembered.

Why is advertising important for brands?

Even the best product or service can’t sell itself if no one knows it exists, or worse, if no one cares. Advertising helps put your business on the map and in people’s minds.

But since visibility alone is no longer enough and consumers have an infinite choice, brand advertising is what gives your brand shape, voice, and meaning.

Brand advertising helps you:

• Build awareness in crowded markets.
• Establish distinctiveness so they don’t get lost in a sea of similar options.
• Drive growth by reaching new audiences at scale.
• Reinforce consistency, which builds trust and familiarity over time.

Most importantly, brand advertising ensures that you don’t leave consumer perception to chance. It’s an investment in controlling the narrative, shaping reputation, and future-proofing relevance.

What is the difference between product advertising and brand advertising?

Product advertising and brand advertising serve different roles in how companies communicate with customers.

The goal of product advertising is straightforward: sell a specific product. Product advertisements highlight features, benefits, pricing, and offers. It’s like a salesperson who gets straight to the point and asks for the sale. 

A product ad for the iPhone 17, for instance, might focus on the camera, battery life, and how it compares to competitors. It’s about what the product does, why it’s better, and how to get it now.

Brand advertising, on the other hand, plays the long game. It’s less about selling something today and more about building familiarity and trust over time. It helps your brand stick in people’s minds so that when they’re ready to buy, you’re the one they think of first. 

You won’t often see Apple brand ads talking about tech specs. Instead, they evoke creativity, innovation, and a sense of belonging to something bigger than the product itself.

In other words, product advertising drives immediate action, including clicks, sign-ups, and sales. Brand advertising builds long-term value, like recognition, loyalty, and even the ability to charge more. When done right, brand advertising can help you maintain market share and premium pricing even when competitors offer similar (or better) features.

But don’t treat these two as opposites. They can — and should — work together. Brand advertising creates the conditions in which product advertising works more effectively. If someone already knows and trusts your brand, they’re far more likely to respond to your latest promotion or product launch.

What is the difference between brand advertising and performance advertising?

Brand advertising and performance advertising represent two distinct philosophies regarding how marketing should function and what it should accomplish.

Performance advertising is designed to generate a specific, trackable action, such as clicks, conversions, sign-ups, or purchases. It’s powered by data, driven by algorithms, and optimised in real time. Whether it’s a Google search ad, a Facebook lead-gen campaign, or a retargeting ad on YouTube, the goal is to reach the right person at the right moment with the right offer.

Brand advertising, in contrast, is not concerned with whether someone converts today. Instead, it’s focused on making sure your brand is recognised, remembered, and trusted when the customer eventually enters a buying cycle. It builds the foundation that makes performance campaigns more effective, because people are far more likely to click on or buy from a brand they’ve heard of and have a positive association with.

Here’s a simple way to think about it:

• Performance advertising captures demand.
• Brand advertising creates demand.

And while performance advertising is easier to measure—thanks to real-time dashboards and attribution models—brand advertising delivers different kinds of ROI: increased market share, pricing power, reduced churn, and more efficient customer acquisition over time.

Brand and performance advertising work best together. In fact, experts have agreed that campaigns that combine both approaches tend to outperform those that rely solely on one approach. Brand advertising builds mental availability. Performance advertising activates it.

What is an example of a brand advertisement?

A classic example of brand advertising is Apple’s “Think Different” campaign.

Launched in 1997, this campaign didn’t showcase product specs or pricing. It didn’t try to sell a Mac. Instead, it celebrated icons like Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and Amelia Earhart—people who “changed the world” by challenging the status quo. The ad’s closing line, “Think Different,” became not just a slogan but a statement of identity.

What made it powerful? It didn’t promote a product. It promoted a worldview. Apple aligned itself with creativity, innovation, and non-conformity, not just features or benefits. The campaign repositioned the brand at a time when Apple was struggling and laid the emotional groundwork for everything that followed, from the iPod to the iPhone.

That’s brand advertising: creating an emotional and cultural connection that makes a company more than a logo; it becomes part of how people see themselves.

In today’s terms, think of campaigns like:

• Nike’s “You Can’t Stop Us” – A montage of split-screen athletic moments reinforcing themes of perseverance and unity, with zero product placement.
• Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” – Personalised labels inviting emotional engagement.
• Dove’s “Real Beauty” – A long-running brand platform that redefined beauty standards and sparked global conversation.

Each of these campaigns has one thing in common: they’re not selling the product; they’re selling the brand experience. And in doing so, they create long-lasting mental availability, trust, and loyalty that no discount or feature list can replicate.

How to make a brand advertisement

Again, creating a brand advertisement isn’t just about designing the most beautiful visuals or writing the most clever tagline. It’s also about crafting a message that builds mental availability and emotional connection—message that sticks in people’s minds long after the ad ends.

Here are our tips:

Find your brand’s unfair advantage. 

What can you own that competitors can’t easily copy? Patagonia owns environmental activism because the CEO “[gave] his company away — to planet Earth”. Liquid Death owns punk rock energy drinks because they literally put water in beer cans. 

Your advantage might be your founder’s story, your manufacturing process, or your company culture.

Steal from unexpected places.

The best brand ads borrow from outside their category. Old Spice borrowed from action movies. Dollar Shave Club borrowed from comedy sketches. Oatly borrowed from indie magazine aesthetics. 

What genre, art form, or cultural movement could you appropriate?

Pick a specific enemy.

Instead of being for everyone, be against something specific. Avis was against being number one. Uber was against waiting for taxis. Tesla was against boring cars. 

Having a clear enemy makes your brand position instantly understandable.

Use insider knowledge.

Turn your industry expertise into brand advantage. Michelin created restaurant guides to make people drive more. Red Bull created extreme sports content because they understood their audience’s lifestyle. 

What do you know about your industry that customers don’t?

Make your limitations your strengths. 

Small budget? Make lo-fi, authentic content. Boring product? Embrace the mundane (like how Dull Men’s Club celebrated ordinary interests). Regional brand? Become fiercely local. Constraints often create the most memorable brand expressions.

Build your own media property.

Instead of just buying ads, create something people actually want to consume. Nike has Nike Training Club. Home Depot has DIY workshops. HubSpot has marketing blogs. Own a piece of media in your space.

Prototype like a startup.

Make cheap, fast tests before big campaigns. Film rough versions on your phone. Test concepts on social media first. The best brand ideas often start scrappy.

When you’re done playing small…

When you’re ready to stop blending in and start building a brand people actually remember, we’re around. We work with podcasts, out-of-home, YouTube, and all the other channels for advertising.

No pressure. Brand building happens when you’re ready for it, not when someone’s pushing you into it. But when that time comes, give us a shout. We get it, and we’re pretty good at this stuff.