DMA HK: Beame's Samson Fong on redefining 'true performance'

Despite a bullish outlook from APAC CMOs and projected ad spend growth of 5.8% in 2025, the focus remains squarely on performance, according to Dentsu's latest Ad Spend Report. With 38% of marketers ranking demand growth as their top priority, the pressure for short-term results threatens to sideline long-term brand building investments.

Don't miss: Brand building still deprioritised as CMOs eye growth in 2025

In this climate of short-termism, the definition of "performance" itself is being contested.

In conversation with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Samson Fong, regional head of marketing, Beame said “true performance” is about growing the business in a way that lasts. “We're talking about real revenue, profit, and customers who stick around for the long haul (their lifetime value, or LTV). For a marketer, that means our real job is to make customers happy and keep them coming back.” 

Platform-reported metrics such as CTR, CPC, and ROAS aren't the performance itself, Fong explained. “In fact, they're more like the gauges on a dashboard. They're essential for telling you what's going on under the hood, and they function in two primary ways – as proxies for interest and guiding budget allocation.” 

“A high CTR is a good sign that your ad is grabbing attention, while a low bounce rate suggests your website is delivering on that ad's promise. These metrics are what we use day-to-day to decide which ads to fund, which to rethink, and which channels are giving us the most bang for our buck,” he added. 

A significant difference between “true performance” and platform metrics is that the latter tells marketers how efficiently they're running their ads, while true performance tells them how effective their overall strategy is. “The real goal isn't just to have a good week on the dashboard, but to build a valuable business over the long term.”  

Biggest blind spot in performance marketing 

The biggest blind spot in performance marketing comes from its greatest strength: its focus on tracking, according to Fong. “We can get so obsessed with what we can measure that we forget about all the important things we can't track, which is a huge part of how people decide to buy something.” 

As a result, this creates two main issues, including the “dark funnel”, he said. “This is all the stuff that happens behind the scenes—a friend recommending your product over dinner, someone hearing about you on a podcast, or seeing a post in a private community. Standard tracking misses all of this, yet last-click attribution will give 100% of the credit to the final ad they clicked, ignoring what sparked their interest.” 

Another element that often gets overlooked in performance marketing is brand building efforts, he said. “You can't put a tracking pixel on trust or brand recognition. The long-term value of a sponsorship or a billboard is immense but doesn't fit neatly into a performance marketing dashboard.” 

How can businesses get a clearer picture? 

To balance brand building efforts with performance, Fong said brands should speak to their customers. “It sounds simple, but it's incredibly powerful. Go beyond the numbers and use simple post-purchase surveys to ask, ‘How did you first hear about us?’ The answers will often surprise you and reveal the impact of your untrackable efforts.” 

He also suggested brands use smarter measurement tools. This means moving past the default "last-click" attribution. Tools like incrementality testing (lift studies) help you see the true, causal impact of your ads, while Media Mix Modeling (MMM) can give you a bird's-eye view of how all your marketing efforts, online and off, are working together. 

Fong illustrated this with a classic marketer's story: bidding on your own brand name in search ads. “On paper, these campaigns look like a wild success. The CTR is unbelievably high, conversion rates are fantastic, and the ROAS makes you look like a genius.” 

The catch? The actual impact on the business is often zero—a perfect example of cannibalisation, he added. “The people searching your brand name were already coming to your website. They were high-intent, ready-to-buy customers who would have clicked the free organic search result just below the ad. You're just paying to get in front of a customer you already had.” 

The big lesson is learning the difference between capturing demand and creating it. “The true goal of marketing is incrementality—making sales happen that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Brand search campaigns rarely create new demand.” 

To prove this, Fong’s team ran a simple test. “We turned the brand ads off in one city and left them everywhere else. “The result? Sales in that city didn't drop at all; people just clicked the free organic link instead. That freed up a chunk of the budget we could then use on campaigns to find genuinely new customers, which made a real difference to the business.” 

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