Stranger Tings: Above vs Below the Line in Modern Marketing
Stranger Tings: Above the Line, Below the Line… And the Marketing Upside Down
Marketing loves a good binary.
Brand vs performance.
Short-term vs long-term.
Above the line vs below the line.
But in the real world — in global brands, property marketplaces, travel giants, hospitality groups, and high-growth scale-ups — those lines blur fast. I’ve seen it throughout my career across D2C, marketplaces, CRM-heavy businesses, and multi-market transformations: the moment ATL and BTL stop talking, everything slips into a strange little place I like to call… the Upside Down.
That weird marketing dimension where logic bends, budgets warp, and teams work incredibly hard without moving very far.
Let’s take a walk.
Above the Line: The World of Meaning, Memory, and Momentum
ATL is the world most customers encounter first.
It’s the feeling around a brand — the part that builds trust, salience and emotional availability long before someone ever clicks “Book Now” or “Enquire.”
Across the between, international travel brands and property services, ATL has always been the driver of three things every high-performing business needs:
Memory: people remember you when they’re ready to act.
Meaning: customers feel something about you.
Momentum: markets move in your favour because your brand carries weight.
ATL is the world of scale. It’s the world of creating demand before you try to capture it.
And yet…
Below the Line: The World Where The Work Gets Real
BTL is where intent happens.
CRM, PPC, email, paid social, content, retention journeys, lifecycle value — the mechanics that turn awareness into decisions and decisions into revenue.
Having led CRM, performance and digital experience across global brands and D2C environments, here’s what I know: BTL is where you discover if the brand promise actually holds up.
It’s where customers:
click,
hesitate,
bounce,
return,
convert,
complain,
recommend,
or completely forget you exist.
BTL is not the little sibling of ATL.
It’s the validation of ATL.
And that’s where things often go very… Stranger Tings.
Where It All Goes Upside Down
The real chaos starts when ATL and BTL drift apart.
When a beautiful brand campaign goes live, yet the CRM tone is from a different universe.
When performance ads optimise for the wrong intent because the brand story wasn’t clear.
When the ATL team drives fame while the BTL team fights fires.
When leadership demands long-term brand equity and short-term ROI — in the same sentence.
This is the Upside Down of marketing:
a place where both worlds are technically working… but none of it is connected.
I’ve walked into companies mid-transformation where ATL, BTL, CRM, ecommerce and brand had become planets in different orbits.
Not maliciously — just through growth, speed, pressure, org reshuffles, or “we’ll fix it after peak season.”
The result?
Money spent.
Teams exhausted.
Customers confused.
The Line Is Gone — But The Thinking Still Matters
In modern marketing you don’t choose ATL or BTL.
You operate through the line — blending emotional storytelling with data-driven precision.
The smartest brands I’ve worked with treat ATL and BTL like two lungs:
different functions, same body, same oxygen.
ATL gives a brand meaning.
BTL gives it commercial intelligence.
Together, they create growth that compounds.
This isn’t theory — it’s lived experience from hospitality, property, marketplaces, and international businesses where a unified engine has driven double-digit improvements in acquisition, retention and revenue.
When the line disappears, alignment becomes everything.
Why This Matters Right Now
Because customer behaviour is now multi-dimensional.
They see your ATL message while watching Netflix, search your brand five seconds later, get retargeted the next morning, read Trustpilot at lunch, click your PPC ad at 5pm, and finally convert from an email at 10pm.
The line between ATL and BTL isn’t just blurring — it’s collapsing. Customers switch channels dozens of times before they convert, and each jump is a moment where brands either reinforce trust… or lose it completely. My old CEO at Pass the Keys, Alex (ex-McKinsey), put it perfectly: “People don’t convert when they’re ready — they convert when you’ve been consistently present.” In a world of fragmented attention, shrinking loyalty and AI-driven choice, brands that don’t integrate above-the-line meaning with below-the-line intent simply disappear from the customer’s memory. Being visible isn’t enough anymore. You have to be coherent.
Above → Below → Above → Below.
In seconds.
If you’re inconsistent, unclear or disjointed at any point in that loop…
you lose them.
In a competitive landscape — travel, property, hospitality, retail, D2C, SaaS — you don’t often get a second chance.
My Takeaway After 20+ Years
Marketing is no longer about choosing a side of the line.
It’s about building systems, teams and stories that connect all sides of it — brand, CRM, content, performance, digital experience — into one coherent customer journey.
A journey that feels right-side-up.
Because when ATL and BTL are aligned:
brand becomes more efficient
performance becomes more profitable
CRM becomes more human
content becomes more effective
teams become more focused
and customers feel the difference instantly
That’s when marketing escapes the Upside Down and actually drives momentum.
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