What Performance Marketing Actually Requires

“Performance marketing” is a pretty loaded term. That’s because, depending on who you’re talking to, it can mean a few different things.

To most, performance marketing or growth marketing is marketing tied directly to real business outcomes — think those wonderfully trackable campaigns where each dollar can be traced and measured against a defined KPO like revenue. There’s a version of performance-based marketing that lives in pitch decks and quarterly reviews, where the word shows up in every slide and means something slightly different every time.

And then there’s the real version. That performance marketing has specific requirements, clear prerequisites and ownership, and partnership structures set up to get the work done.

Most brands’ marketing looks closer to the first version than the second, and it can be tricky to know how to change that. We sat down with Bo Rogers, Infinity’s CEO and President, and Brandon Godwin, our VP of Client Strategy, to figure out the details.

Here’s what we learned:

• Performance marketing requires three specific things: A clearly defined KPI, accessible data, and a seat at the table for holistic strategy.
• For many brands, the CMO role has become the Chief Growth Officer role, whether the title has changed or not. C-suite now expects marketing to connect directly to measurable revenue — and that pressure flows downstream pretty fast.
• AI can make campaigns move faster. But faster and better aren’t the same thing. Knowing how to use AI wisely is 1,000% more important than using it everywhere you can all the time.
• Data gaps are common — more common than anyone advertises, in fact. At least in our experience, data access or governance issues limit what campaigns can actually do on a regular basis.
• A fragmented agency structure is a performance risk. When channels are siloed, accountability gets diffused, and nobody really owns outcomes.
• Every brand is moving toward performance marketing, whether they’re ready or not. And because of that, CTV and Reddit are two of the biggest opportunities that more marketing leaders should be taking seriously right now.

Start with this clip to see Bo and Brandon’s take on performance marketing or keep reading to get the highlights.

What performance really needs

[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

Brandon: Performance is one of our big three words at Infinity, along with people and partnership. We all understand it in a general sense, but today we want to dive in and understand it in a more specific sense. Will you explain performance to us in the context of marketing?

Bo: When we think about opportunities to engage as a trusted growth partner to drive performance outcomes, there are a few things that generally line up in those partnerships. The first would be the idea that a client knows exactly the business result or the key performance indicator that they are looking to move as it relates to a marketing investment — a clearly defined goal and objective, or KPI. Number two is that they have their data architecture and infrastructure built in a way where they have easy access to that data, and they can provide us with access and visibility. And then number three is we have a seat at the table to come in and be that holistic performance growth partner — to connect marketing strategies to business goals and objectives that drive those measurable, trackable outcomes through the platforms that we utilize.

Brandon: Marketing has always been driven toward results. How has this idea of performance — and the expectations around it — evolved over the last 10 or 15 years?

Bo: Over the past few years, as digital marketing has emerged and become more and more mainstream — paid search would be a great example — there have been heightened expectations from clients around performance, but also an oversimplification in terms of the understanding of digital marketing: how fast you can set something up, how fast you can drive insights. Where we’re seeing things actually catching up, and more in line than ever on the client side and the agency partner side, is the access to the data — whether that be first-party customer data or revenue sales data. What I would really want to stress, and we do stress to our clients, is that to maximize digital investments — whether that be web, household-level targeted digital, connected television, organic social, paid search, paid social, SEO — we really need to be able to have access to the business data to match that together and analyze it.

Brandon: How have client expectations changed as it relates to performance — specifically the expectations on the modern CMO, the modern VP of marketing?

Bo: We have several clients who, while they sit in a marketing role, the expectation put on them is that really of a business growth officer. You see in the marketplace right now Chief Growth Officer — CGO — becoming more commonplace, and the idea of a CGO role taking the place of a CMO role. I do believe that CFOs and others in the C-suite now see marketing — specifically marketing that has a digital element, whether that be web or paid digital media — they have an expectation that marketing is an investment with a trackable outcome, an ROI, as well as return on ad spend. Another thing that we’re seeing is heightened expectations put on the marketing team — pressure being put on them from their C-suite to perform and outperform with less in-house team members, potentially a reduced marketing budget, but to generate the same performance in a very short amount of time.

Brandon: You’ve mentioned speed probably a half dozen times now — but also the idea of how important setting expectations is. Does the increased speed and velocity create an increased need for expectation setting? Because the expectation is: everything will move faster, I will see success and results faster.

Bo: What’s the old adage? You can have two of the three — you can have it fast, you can have it good, or you can have it cheap. And I do think that the evolution of technology — executives want all three, and AI, and the content in the marketplace around AI, is driving that narrative. We are all in on AI. We are doing a lot of things with AI natively within our tech stack. AI can move things at a higher velocity, but does that necessarily yield higher performance? I think a lot of times there’s tension there. Just because something goes faster doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to yield higher performance. I’d say more often than not, that puts more strain on the opportunity for having outsized performance.

Three goals to hit

A few things sounds manageable, right? Well…

In practice, all three conditions Bo described — a clearly defined KPI, accessible data, and a real seat at the table — are rarely fully in place before a campaign launches. Usually one is missing (sometimes two).

• For example, the KPI piece sounds simple until “grow leads” and “increase revenue” are standing in for actual, agreed-upon numbers
• Having accessible data should be straightforward, but achieving it can be a monumental task in and of itself if you aren’t already prepped for it
• The seat at the table often gets downgraded in importance the moment a brand parcels out its channels to three different agencies, with nobody accountable for the full outcome

So achieving these three goals can be trickier than it seems.

Meanwhile, the CMO pressure Bo described oftentimes hits marketing officers from all directions at once. CFOs want ROI, CEOs want growth, and PE-backed clients want speed. The result of that mixture of different-but-also-equally-important demands is a marketing leader who has to do more with less, faster than before, and not always with the data infrastructure that would make it possible.

That challenge is precisely why honest conversations early in a partnership — about what’s measurable, what’s possible, what the roadmap to getting there looks like — are worth more than any tactic on the plan.

The case for holistic marketing

[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

Brandon: I would say without exception, any client we work with expects outcomes, expects results — across the board. But if I grouped the kinds of situations we find ourselves in into two groups — one set of marketing leaders looks for a partner per channel or has multiple partners across a bevy of channels. Another group wants a partner that’s going to help own outcomes across channels and wants more of that holistic sense. Why do you think some marketing leaders prefer the multiple-partner approach? And what are the potential downsides?

Bo: When we engage with a potential partner or current partner, what we strive to do every single time is put ourselves in their shoes — if I was them, what would I want somebody to be doing for me? As I’ve had these conversations with clients, thinking about what their partner makeup looks like, do they go with one fully integrated shop like us, or bring in partners in multiple disciplines? Based off what I know, in the vast majority of situations, I would want to find a trusted partner that knew and understood the entire holistic, full-funnel marketing plan and roadmap.

I would recommend that because the marketplace is so fragmented today across traditional, digital, paid, owned, and earned content. So much is changing so quickly. I believe it puts so much pressure on a CMO or an internal marketing team to manage multiple partners when all of those efforts are connected to one outcome that they’re expecting to get achieved.

And often what they will say — this is the most common thing — is, “We don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket.” And I would say, if you really understand the performance you want to drive, you need to find a trusted partner that you can be mutually accountable to, because it’s all connected — from web and SEO to content generation to paid media, offline and online, to direct mail, to optimizing your website for conversions.

Your creative, your messaging, your brand — it’s so interconnected. It’s tough to separate it apart. So if something’s not performing, instead of going and holding your one partner accountable for a solution, you’ve got to go to two, three, four, or five different partners. And the expectations from the C-suite don’t afford you that time. I’m not saying it can’t be done with two, three, or four partners. I’m just saying if it was me and it was my job to drive performance, I would find a partner that I could trust deeply. And then we go get it done together.

The biggest risk is not having a holistic plan. There are multiple paths to getting there. The biggest risk is being fragmented, being uncoordinated.

Multiple partners is a performance risk

The instinct Bo describes makes sense — “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is pretty conventional wisdom in business and in egg gathering. Spread the risk, keep your options open.

The problem is that marketing doesn’t actually work that way.

When channels are owned by different agencies, a few things tend to happen:

• Accountability gets diffused. If paid search is underperforming, is it the search agency’s targeting, the content agency’s landing pages, or the brand’s offer? With three partners in the room, that question rarely gets a clean answer (or a fast one, for that matter).
• Budget becomes territorial. Each partner has an incentive to protect and grow their slice of the fiscal pie. That makes it harder to make the cross-channel moves that drive performance, or to shift dollars from a channel that’s plateaued to one with more upside.
• The holistic strategy never fully exists. Somebody has to own the full-funnel view. If no single partner has that seat, it often defaults to the internal marketing team, which is the same team that’s already under pressure to do more with less.

Bo’s point isn’t that working with multiple agencies is always wrong. It’s that the performance you’re chasing — measurable, connected, full-funnel performance — is inherently harder to achieve when the people responsible for driving it aren’t working from the same plan.

The future of performance marketing

[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

Brandon: I would describe you as a futuristic leader — I think it’s a strength of yours. As you think about the future of performance marketing, what do you think about?

Bo: All brands will ultimately become performance marketing brands. There are brands today that are operating their business in ways that they weren’t five years ago.

Walmart’s a good example — as a retailer that for their entire history, you go into Walmart to make a purchase. But they’re forecasting in the next five years or so that 40% of their revenue will be generated through their online properties, such as Walmart.com.

Brands that figure out how to engage with their customers and provide a transaction opportunity online are going to continue to flourish. In this modern marketing era, as digital opportunities become more and more prevalent and within arm’s length to activate, we just expect that trend — the Amazon trend, the Walmart trend — that more and more businesses are going to go to e-commerce transactions to ultimately flourish into performance marketing brands where you invest X and you can predict a yield of Y.

Brandon: With all the conversations you’re having, everything you’re seeing — is there an opportunity out there that you think more marketing leaders should be taking advantage of?

Bo: Over the past few years, connected TV consumption has increased exponentially. If I’m a brand out in the marketplace looking to drive awareness, but also drive quality down my sales funnel, I am absolutely using connected TV.

When we’ve deployed connected TV and done some tests of exposure versus non-exposure, we consistently see that connected television drives incremental outcomes at the bottom of the funnel through organic and paid search. So I absolutely would be using connected TV to drive performance in today’s market.

The other thing we’re seeing is developing a strategy for Reddit. Reddit consumption and usage has increased over the past several years at a faster rate than any other user-generated platform on the internet, and there are now new tools for marketers and advertisers to use within Reddit — a few more brand safety parameters that are put in place.

But Reddit feeds LLM algorithms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude — so sort of off-page SEO, Reddit has a lot of weight. Reddit is another place where there’s user-generated content and conversations going on, and brands have an opportunity to engage and have open dialogue as they’re being discussed amongst potential customers.

Performance pressure is getting higher

The Walmart number — 40% of revenue flowing online within five years — is just one example of something that’s playing out across practically every industry: home services, broadband, healthcare, you name it. Audience interactions, including transactions, are packing their real-world bags and moving online more than ever before.

Naturally, that’s putting even more pressure on performance marketing and on businesses that don’t think of themselves as e-commerce brands.

But, according to our crystal ball, they will. And those brands whose CMOs have been:

• Building their data infrastructure
• Honing their attribution models
• Ironing out their partner structures

— Are the brands who are going to be ahead compared to the ones still figuring it out.

As for where the underutilized opportunities sit today, Bo pointed to two:

• Connected TV is potentially a lot more powerful than you think. Our own exposure vs. non-exposure testing has shown CTV consistently driving incremental outcomes at the bottom of the funnel, specifically through organic and paid search lift. If you’re not running it, you’re more than likely leaving search performance on the table.
• Reddit has grown faster than any other user-generated platform in recent years, recently went public, and opened up advertising capabilities that weren’t available 12 months ago. But even more important, Reddit feeds the LLM algorithms behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. That means conversations happening on Reddit today shape how AI describes your category tomorrow. It’s the same dynamic we’ve covered in our breakdowns of answer engine optimization and how social content shapes AI search answers.

If you want to score some quick points and set your brand up for success in the quarters to come, you’ll pay attention to these two performance marketing channels.

The bottom line

Everyone wants performance results, but not everyone’s built to get them — yet.

To change that, you need to focus on data maturity, take a close look at your partnership structure, and have harder conversations about what performance marketing really means for your business at the beginning of a relationship instead of the end. Once you have a conversation about what’s measurable, what’s possible, and what’s realistic, you can start the real work. That’s the work our performance marketing team does every day — connecting strategy, media, creative, and analytics to a single set of numbers.

Ready to have that conversation? Let’s talk.

Related articles

What's next

October 2, 2026 • 9 min read

Why User-Generated Content Shapes How AI Describes Your Brand

Brand Strategy

Digital Marketing

Social Media

September 1, 2026 • 12 min read

Your Brand Book Is Killing Your Team’s Creativity — Here’s What to Do About It

Brand Strategy

Creative

Back to all articles