IMS Launches BrandEquity ROI to Measure Commercial Impact of Brand Advertising

Jan. 28, 2026

Marketing effectiveness consultancy Independent Marketing Sciences (IMS) has launched BrandEquity ROI, an industry-first econometric tool that measures the impact of brand marketing on long term business performance.

Burger King, Bupa and Hovis are amongst the first brands to engage the product to measure the long-term impact of brand advertising on their underlying revenues.

Unlike traditional performance-focussed analytics tools that assess short-term sales uplift, BrandEquity ROI’s modelling and metrics uniquely provide a tangible measure of how much a company’s revenue declines over the ensuing years if brand investment is cut.

BrandEquity ROI specifically incorporates metrics such as brand awareness, sentiment and reputation against business KPIs such as sales and leads, which are in turn tested for their sensitivity to brand media. Doing so identifies where brand advertising has a discernible impact on business goals and which strategies are most likely to drive longer-term growth.

Data from BrandEquity ROI shows that cutting brand spend is a false economy: a company which stops investing in brand activity for five consecutive years will need to invest seven times the amount of money into marketing every year just to get the same sales as a company that stuck with brand investment throughout. BrandEquity ROI also reveals that brand activity delivers 65% of its total value in the years after a campaign ends, highlighting the pitfalls of solely measuring short term marketing impact.

Alex Vass, founder and CEO at IMS, said:

“Performance marketing platforms from Google and Meta provide finance-friendly attribution models that overstate their own impact. Once a brand reaches maturity, we often see budgets cut and funds diverted from brand-building to protect short term margins. This leads to a cycle of decline in the business that is often impossible to revert.”

 

He added:

“BrandEquity ROI protects mature brands from decline by providing CMOs and CFOs with a financial case for sustained brand investment, countering the common pressure to cut brand building marketing tactics. By quantifying long-term brand impact, BrandEquity ROI solves a critical gap in traditional measurement approaches."