Marketing today has become extraordinarily good at measuring outcomes. We can track clicks, optimise cost per acquisition, segment audiences into increasingly precise groups, and understand consumer behaviour in ways marketers from previous generations could only dream of.None of this is a bad thing.Performance marketing and data-led decision-making have transformed businesses. They have brought accountability to marketing spend, helped brands scale faster, and enabled teams to prove ROI with greater confidence than ever before.But I wonder if we have slowly drifted too far in one direction.In our race to optimise every touchpoint, every impression, and every conversion, we may be depriving consumers of something marketing once did exceptionally well: discovery. The wonder of encountering something that stops you mid-scroll, mid-commute, mid-whatever — and makes you feel something.We may be optimising ourselves into forgettable marketing.Some of the most memorable ads many of us grew up with in Ghana were not memorable because they were perfectly optimised. They stayed with us because they entertained us, connected emotionally, and became part of our shared culture.Think about the Sunlight soap commercial that aired before Talking Point — a soothing song, warm visuals, and a reach that somehow extended across West African living rooms at the same time. Think about the Key Soap Medofo Pa ad, where you slowly realised the man wasn’t praising his wife — he was praising a bar of soap. Think about Ghana’s very first animated advert, produced by USAID and Zingaro Productions to educate children about drug abuse — and that line, “Hey!! Akodaa wo ko he,” which somehow outlasted almost every paid campaign of its era.Think about Obrafour and Tic Tac — two of Ghana’s biggest hiplife acts at the height of their powers — collaborating on a track specifically for Ashfoam mattresses. Today, we would call that influencer marketing. Back then, it was just good instinct: no follower count audits, no engagement rate briefs, no performance dashboards measuring reach. Just the straightforward logic of placing a brand inside a cultural moment people already cared about, carried by voices they already trusted. Unforced. Unscripted. Effective. The global industry would spend another decade “discovering” that mechanic, building entire platforms and agencies around it, and debating its authenticity. Ashfoam had already figured it out in Ghana with two rappers and a mattress. Influencer marketing has been with us all along — we just did not have a slide deck for it yet. Then there is the MTN MoMo “Me Nsa Aka” advert — Madam Rita Tetteh Nhyiraba, not a celebrity, not a public figure, just an ordinary Ghanaian woman receiving a mobile money transfer and saying simply, “Me Nsa Aka o, Me Nsa Aka” — I have received it. That Fante phrase became so embedded in Ghanaian everyday life that it launched an entire digital financial services category into the mainstream. MTN MoMo eventually gifted her a two-bedroom house. A brand building a house for someone because one ad line did more for the product than years of marketing spend could. That is cultural resonance with a return on investment no spreadsheet can fully capture. And then the Tigo network quality campaign, where the late Ruffy Samuel Quansah climbed rooftops, car tops, and eventually a coconut tree, all to reach his “Honey Kuchi Kuchi” — an ad so beloved it eventually inspired a feature film.Years later, most people who grew up in that era still remember these campaigns almost word for word.Did they drive measurable business results? I cannot say with certainty.But what I can say is this: people remember them. And in a world where attention is increasingly fragmented, memory itself has become a competitive advantage.Research increasingly confirms what many of us in the industry have been quietly sensing. Performance marketing and brand building are not opposing forces — they are complementary ones. Performance marketing captures existing demand. Brand building creates future demand. The problem emerges when marketers become so dependent on short-term metrics that they optimise only for what is immediately measurable and neglect everything else.The irony is that over-optimising for efficiency can eventually become inefficient. Brands that rely almost entirely on lower-funnel performance activity often experience diminishing returns over time: rising customer acquisition costs, weakening long-term growth, and a consumer base that never grows beyond the people who were already going to buy anyway.You end up speaking only to the converted, and never building the mental real estate that makes a brand feel inevitable to everyone else.The answer is not to abandon data and return to winging it. The answer is balance.Context matters here, and it is worth being honest about what has changed. Back when there was one national television station holding the attention of every household, a brand could afford to tell a slow, warm, emotional story. The environment did half the work — captive audience, shared context, collective experience. That is why the Sunlight ad could reach Accra and Lagos with the same jingle at the same moment.That world is gone. Today’s consumer is splitting attention across television, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, radio, outdoor, and whatever platform launched last month. Brands are competing against everything. When you snooze, you lose — that pressure is real and it is not going away.So the instinct to optimise is understandable. The mistake is to let that instinct become the only instinct.Data should tell us who to speak to and where to find them.Creativity should determine how we make them feel.The industry has even developed a term for the integration of both: brandformance — a strategic approach that combines the rigour of performance marketing with the longer ambition of brand building, designed to strengthen awareness and deliver measurable results at the same time. It is gaining serious traction globally, and it reflects a growing recognition that the choice between brand and performance was always a false one.Because people rarely remember the most optimised ad in their feed. They remember the ad that made them laugh unexpectedly. The one that made them pause. The one that made them feel seen. The one they randomly recall on a Tuesday afternoon years later because something in life reminded them of it.The Sunlight ads did not just sell soap across West Africa. They sold a feeling that people are still carrying 30 years later. The Tigo ad did not just promote network quality. It gave Ghana a phrase that outlived the brand. Madam Rita Tetteh did not just appear in a mobile money commercial. She put a Fante phrase into everyday Ghanaian life and helped build a financial services category from the ground up. And Obrafour and Tic Tac did not just shift mattresses. They proved that the most effective influencer marketing is the kind that does not feel like marketing at all — and they proved it long before the industry gave the concept a name.As marketers, perhaps the question should not simply be: Will this perform?Perhaps we should also ask: Will anyone remember it?Sometimes the most valuable metric isn’t the click that happened today. It’s the memory that stays tomorrow.Author, Raphael Beinamwin is a Business Unit Director, rfgPHD Ghana Limited • Omnicom Media GrouprfgPHD Ghana is a media planning and strategy agency based in Accra, operating within the global Omnicom Media Group network.