Demand creation vs. demand capture
Definition
Two jobs a marketing budget can do. Capture harvests demand that already exists, from people searching and comparing today; creation builds want in people who had not started looking.
How you recognize it
Sort your channels by the state of the person on the other end. Search and retargeting capture: the person typed a need or visited yesterday, and the ad’s job is to be present when the decision is made. Most brand and category work creates: it puts a problem and a name into heads months before a purchase, and its results arrive late and resist attribution. Capture pays back fast and measures cleanly, which is why budgets drift toward it. The constraint is arithmetic: a budget that only captures grows as fast as the pool of existing demand, and shrinks with it. Creation is how the pool itself gets bigger.
What to watch for
Split your budget into the two jobs and read the shares. No correct ratio exists to import, but a split where nearly everything captures means growth is capped at the size of the current pool. Watch acquisition cost on capture channels at constant spend; a rising cost with flat budget means the pool is thinning, and more capture budget cannot fix that. And check which ruler judges the creation work: brand spend measured on last-click ROAS loses every budget round to retargeting, so I tend to judge it instead on branded search volume and new-customer share, read over quarters.
The question you ask
“What share of this budget creates new demand?”