Advertising’s Efficiency Problem

Tom Theys is former strategist at Happiness. He previously served as EVP, Global Strategy at FCB and is currently on the board of The Lisbon Festivals.

Two trees grow side by side in the Portuguese countryside. One takes nearly four decades (thirty-eight years, to be precise) before it produces bark fine enough to seal a wine bottle. The other reaches full height in a decade, turns a fast profit, and has been blamed for accelerating some of the country’s deadliest wildfires. One is the cork oak. The other is eucalyptus.

They are also, whether they know it or not, the two dominant business models of modern brand building.

Portugal is home to the sobreiro, the cork oak, one of the slowest-yielding trees in nature. It grows for twenty-five years before its bark can first be harvested. After that, it can only be stripped once every nine to twelve years. The Portuguese have a saying: Quem planta sobreiros, planta-os para os seus netos. Whoever plants a cork oak, plants it for their grandchildren.

Portugal produces more than half the world’s cork and three quarters of the cork used in wine bottles. They have this dominance not despite the slowness.

Because of it.

Now look at what is growing next to the sobreiro. The eucalyptus. Imported for the paper industry and planted for speed, it grows three metres a year, generates revenue within a decade and turns a fast profit on cheap land. From a spreadsheet, it looks like a triumph. From a hillside, it looks like a problem. Eucalyptus monoculture acidifies the soil. Little grows beneath it. It draws water aggressively and gives almost nothing back to the ecosystem around it. And when fire comes, which in Portugal it increasingly does, eucalyptus does not merely burn. It explodes.

Its bark and leaves carry oils that make it extraordinarily flammable. The 2017 wildfires that killed more than a hundred people in Portugal burned hottest and fastest through eucalyptus forest. The trees do not merely fail in a crisis. They accelerate it. Several Portuguese villages are now replanting cork oaks in place of eucalyptus. Not out of nostalgia. Because oak is what survives.

If you work in brand building, you are living inside this dynamic right now.

The eucalyptus brand is everywhere. It arrives fast, on Amazon, TikTok or a DTC channel, with a price point that undercuts the category, a manufacturer no one has heard of and a product listing optimised for the algorithm rather than for meaning. It takes market share quickly. It inflates category penetration numbers. Modern marketing systems are extraordinarily efficient at rewarding visibility and remarkably poor at recognising accumulated trust. Platforms measure clicks in real time. Procurement measures cost reduction quarterly. Investors reward growth before resilience. What it is doing is what eucalyptus does: stripping the soil.

The problem is that categories eventually inherit the consequences of the incentives used to grow them. As low-trust entrants proliferate, the category’s signal-to-noise ratio begins to collapse. Consumers become less certain that higher prices correspond to higher quality. Search costs rise. Return rates increase. Premium incumbents are forced to spend more simply to communicate reliability they previously received almost for free. Consumers who enter a category through cheap, unreliable alternatives rarely become loyal customers. They become sceptical ones. The eucalyptus brand grows fast, and when the algorithm shifts or the reviews sour or the margins collapse, it burns. And the credibility of the category burns with it.

Of course, not every fast-growing brand is destructive. Some businesses move with extraordinary speed and still create enduring value. Zara compressed fashion cycles while building global recognition. Amazon Basics is brutally efficient but strategically coherent. Some eucalyptus eventually becomes oak. The problem is not speed itself. The problem is extraction without reinvestment: taking attention, trust and margin from a category faster than value is returned to it.

The temptation, of course, is to plant both. For two decades, Kimberly-Clark produced Costco's Kirkland diapers — a near-identical product to its own Huggies brand, sold at a fraction of the price. The company spent fifty years building equity in Huggies, then used that same capacity and know-how to manufacture the alternative that undercut it. In 2024, Kimberly-Clark stopped. Not out of principle. Because the soil had been stripped. The company announced it would abandon low-margin private label contracts to focus investment on its own premium brand. Just as Portuguese villages are now replanting oak where eucalyptus once stood, some manufacturers are beginning to recognise what extraction costs. Others have yet to make the calculation.

But what does it look like when a brand refuses the temptation entirely — when it tends only cork oak, without hedging into eucalyptus? The cork oak brand works differently. It grows slowly, with discipline. And it gives back to the ecosystem around it.

The financial world already understands this principle, even if marketing departments often struggle to articulate it. Warren Buffett has held Coca-Cola stock since 1988 and has never sold a share. His central investment principle is the identification of "economic moats", durable competitive advantages that compound over time. The most common source of a wide moat, according to Morningstar's independent research, is brand. Not product, not patents, not logistics. Brand. The S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats, companies that have raised their dividend every year for 25 consecutive years or more, are, without exception, built on deeply embedded brand equity. They have outperformed the broader market over 20 years. With lower volatility.

When I think about how to evaluate whether a brand is becoming cork oak or eucalyptus, two dimensions matter above all others.

The first is equity depth: how much meaning has accumulated in the brand over time? Not awareness, not reach, not share of voice, but meaning. The kind of trust that makes someone reach for a product without consciously deciding to. The cultural weight that allows a brand to maintain a price premium not for a season, but for a decade.

The second is temporal consistency: has the brand tended to that meaning without interruption? Has it maintained a coherent identity through leadership changes, market shifts and the constant temptation to chase whatever is working this quarter? A brand that reinvents itself every three years hasn't been building. It has been restarting.

Plot those two dimensions and a clear picture emerges. Hermès protects scarcity. The Birkin bag has a waiting list measured in years. The brand has never run a sale. Patagonia protects purpose - so clearly and consistently expressed that giving the entire company away to a climate trust felt, to its audience, completely predictable. And then Levi's: founded in 1853, with more than 170 years of history, and yet decades of inconsistent stewardship have left it stranded between premium and commodity, trusted by no one fully, chosen by many for price alone. The oldest brand in most comparison sets. Among the weakest on temporal consistency.

Age is not equity. Equity is tended, not inherited.

Which brings us back to the acorn. Every sobreiro starts as one. And the acorn has two possible futures. You can plant it, tend it, and wait. In twenty-five years you begin to harvest. In a century, you have something irreplaceable. Or you can feed it to pigs. For a moment, the pig will be happy. And that’s where the story ends.

Which raises a more uncomfortable question for the industry itself. If markets increasingly reward speed, optimisation and extraction, what exactly are we choosing to celebrate?

Portugal is already replanting the oak. Not out of nostalgia. Because ecosystems eventually remember what sustains them.

The same is becoming true of brands, businesses and the categories they inhabit. The question is no longer whether ideas can generate attention. Attention has never been easier to buy. The question is which ideas leave something valuable behind. That is the work worth recognising. And increasingly, it is the only work that endures.

Footnote: The Lisbon Festivals (June 9 to 12), under the motto of “Slow Brand Value”, is built around championing enduring creativity and craft: ideas designed not merely to interrupt culture, but to stay within it. Not short-term noise or fleeting visibility, but the enduring value created by ideas that strengthen brands over time. Ideas that shape behaviour, create platforms for future growth and prove that creativity is not only culturally resonant, but commercially transformative. Because while creativity may capture attention, real impact is built over time. In the slow-burning flames of effectiveness.