There's a question I find myself asking when I discover a new brand for the first time that appears to be flying: how much of this is paid for?

Not in a cynical way. More from a diagnostic lens. Because for an early stage brand, the answer usually tells you everything about how well it's actually been built.

The ones that have done the work tend to carry a different relationship with advertising from the start. Their presence has weight before the spend arrives. Word of mouth is already doing something a media budget would struggle to manufacture. That doesn't mean they never advertise. But when you see a young brand running heavy paid activity across every channel simultaneously and it still feels thin, that's usually the tell. The advertising is filling a gap that marketing should have closed.

That gap exists because advertising and marketing get treated as the same thing. They aren't close.

Marketing is the thinking. It's the positioning. The spaces you choose to show up in and the ones you deliberately avoid. It's everything that makes someone seek you out before you've asked them to. Advertising is just one tool within that arsenal. A useful one, sometimes a necessary one, but a tool nonetheless. For a brand still finding its footing, using it as a substitute for the thinking is where things get expensive and hollow very quickly.

Advertising can amplify but it cannot originate. When it's asked to, the results tend to look the same. High production value, low memorability. A campaign that generates impressions but not much else. Creative that exists in isolation from everything the brand actually stands for because the brand hasn't figured out what it stands for yet.

I've sat in enough rooms where the brief is essentially ‘we need more awareness’. And the instinct is always to go straight to paid media. But for a brand without an established foundation, awareness built on advertising alone is fragile. It lasts as long as the budget does.

Once a brand has genuinely earned its shape, the equation shifts. Paid becomes a legitimate amplifier. Some of the best marketing out there sits behind serious spend. But that only works because the thinking came first.

That's what the early stage gets wrong most often. Not the creative. Not the targeting. The sequence.

Shot of the good stuff.