The cost of cutting TOFU: Why awareness still fuels ROI in a conversion obsessed world

Across every stage of my career, one thing has remained constant: clients defaulting to last-click metrics as the primary measure of marketing success, often at the expense of what truly drives growth. 

In fast-paced, results-driven markets like the Middle East, it’s not hard to see why. These metrics are clean. They’re immediate. They show what converted, but they rarely explain why it converted, or what built the intent in the first place. 

As budgets tighten and media plans get scrutinised, top-of-funnel (TOFU) activity is often first to go. It’s seen as non-essential. A luxury, not a lever. From where I sit, this approach is short-sighted because TOFU doesn’t just build awareness, it builds the pipeline. 

Top-of-funnel marketing isn’t about chasing vanity metrics. It’s about priming the mind before the moment of decision. 

Before someone clicks or converts, they need to have heard of you, assigned relevance, and mentally linked your brand to the category or problem they’re trying to solve. 

The LinkedIn B2B Institute calls these Category Entry Points (CEPs) and TOFU is where those connections form. 

In a HubSpot case study on Ceros, top-of-funnel content strategies led to a 900% increase in MQLs year over year, proving that the impact of TOFU isn’t always immediate, but it is substantial. That kind of lift doesn’t come from tactics alone.  It comes from a brand being top of mind when the moment is right. 

Performance marketing is only as strong as the brand familiarity beneath it. 

I’ve seen first-hand how over-investing on bottom-funnel tactics, without supporting TOFU or MOFU layers, leads to diminishing returns. CTAs stagnate. Ads start to compete with each other and inevitably, costs creep up. It’s performance in a vacuum. 

The research backs this up. Les Binet and Peter Field have shown for years that the best-performing brands balance long-term brand investment with short-term sales activation. It’s not a trade-off. It’s a strategy. 

And as this Campaign ME article rightly points out, brand and performance aren’t competing forces, they’re two sides of the same growth equation. 

Cutting TOFU might tidy up your reporting dashboard. But it makes your pipeline fragile. 

TOFU works, and not just in theory. 

When Nissan launched the all new Qashqai in the UAE, it deployed a striking 3D anamorphic DOOH campaign featuring a cube installation that appeared to shatter, dramatically revealing the car. 

The results were both measurable, and unignorable: 

• 33,000 people experienced the installation in person 

• The campaign generated 40 million online views 

• Nissan saw a 10 percentage point increase in website visits 

This is what creative, high-impact TOFU activity looks like in action, engaging people both physically and digitally, and feeding directly into downstream metrics. 

• CTV and Radio are emerging as powerful TOFU tools across the GCC, offering both reach and efficiency in brand priming. 

• MMM (Marketing Mix Modelling) s giving us visibility beyond the dashboard, showing the cumulative impact of brand-building efforts over time. 

• Creative consistency across platforms, formats, and moments is what cements brand memory, not just frequency or spend. 

The click is not the beginning of the journey; it’s the result of everything that came before it. As marketers, we need to start further upstream. TOFU builds trust, primes recall and lowers acquisition costs. Strip it out, and you’re asking your performance ads to work without momentum. 

Awareness isn’t a luxury. It’s a long-term investment in conversion readiness. 

The click is not the beginning of the journey; it’s the result of everything that came before it. TOFU is what builds familiarity, trust, and readiness. Without it, you’re performance-marketing into a vacuum. 

Cutting TOFU might simplify your dashboard. But it won’t simplify your pipeline problems.