The Brand Fund Frameworks Worth Stealing for 2027
Every franchise marketer I know has a version of the same August story. You open a blank spreadsheet, you know what's coming in, and you have to make a case — to your franchisees, to your FAC, sometimes to yourself — for how you're going to spend money that isn't really yours.
That's the thing about brand fund budgeting that nobody outside franchising quite understands. You're not fighting the CEO for incremental dollars. You're stewarding a pool of franchisee contributions, and your job is to spend it better than they could spend it themselves. That responsibility either sharpens you or it paralyzes you.
I sat down with Adam Terranova, Senior Director of Marketing at Authority Brands, and Brooke Janousek, Fractional CMO for IV Nutrition, to talk through how they actually approach brand fund budgeting. Both of them have managed more brand funds than most marketers will see in a career. And both of them did something worth paying attention to: they built frameworks.
Start with what you call it
Before a single dollar gets allocated, Adam has a strong opinion on naming. "If it's an advertising fund, think about the franchisees — how much advertising are you doing for me?" The name sets the expectation. Call it an ad fund and you'll spend the next year defending why salary and technology fees are in there. Call it a brand fund and you've already told a different story about what it's for. Brooke is equally direct: "You're fighting an uphill battle if you call it the National Advertising Fund."
It sounds like a small thing. It isn't.
The PESO framework as a budgeting and communication tool
Adam organizes every dollar through PESO — Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned. He's been using it since he first learned it at the Franchise Consumer Marketing Conference thirteen years ago, and he presented a version of it again this year. The reason it keeps working isn't that it's new. It's that it gives franchise marketers a shared language with their franchisees.
He starts with Owned assets — website, reputation management, listings — before spending a cent on paid advertising. "I usually start with how do I get my house in line with our owned assets. Once I start doing that, that's where I'm able to work my way upwards towards paid advertising." The framework also makes end-of-year reporting defensible. When a franchisee asks why their contribution went toward technology fees instead of ads, PESO is the answer — not a defense, an explanation.
For emerging brands with limited funds, this matters even more. In Adam's experience, newer brands are often working exclusively in the Owned bucket for the first year or two — building the assets franchisees can actually use before spending on reach.
The 60/30/10 split
Brooke's framework is simpler and immediately portable. Sixty percent goes to tried-and-true channels she knows will work. Thirty percent goes to emerging opportunities she wants to test. Ten percent is contingency — held back specifically for the thing she doesn't know is coming yet.
"Great, now it's here and now I want to try it and thank goodness I saved some of that money for that."
In the last eighteen months, that contingency line has covered AI agents, platform pivots, and mid-year Google changes that nobody budgeted for in January. The marketers who didn't hold something back got caught flat-footed. The ones who did had room to move.
The must-haves at every budget size
Both Adam and Brooke land in roughly the same place on what belongs in the brand fund regardless of system size: website hosting, reputation management, and listings. These aren't optional — they're the foundation everything else sits on. Brooke adds AI agents to that list now, specifically because of what they produce beyond the conversation itself. "The insights that we're gaining to create content for our own channels — you can't put a price tag on it."
Adam's practical addition: bundle where you can. "So many vendors are so close in what they offer from a pricing standpoint" — reputation management and listings in one platform, at a better price, is a meaningful efficiency in a fixed budget.
What franchisees are actually asking for
When franchisees push for more SEO investment, Adam reframes what they're really asking. They want organic leads. They want to know their percentage of sales is generating pipeline. Understanding that reframe opens up the conversation — it lets a marketer think broader than a single channel and get ahead of what's coming next in search, LLMs, and GEO.
Brooke's most practical takeaway from this conversation: LLMs aren't just scraping your website. They're scraping every platform you own. Her current tactic is having franchisees record 30-second FAQ videos — answers to questions the AI agent has already surfaced from real customer conversations — and posting them across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and the website simultaneously. "Now you're getting five different places for the LLMs to cite versus one."
The thing both of them said to stop doing
When I asked what franchise marketing teams should stop doing right now, Brooke didn't hesitate: stop trying to predict what's going to happen next. "Never in my life have I had to just roll with the punches so much as I do right now." Adam echoed it: flexibility is what's going to separate the brands that win in 2027 from the ones that don't.
That's harder than it sounds when you're working with a fixed budget and franchisees who want certainty. But the 60/30/10 model and the PESO framework both build flexibility in by design — not as an afterthought.
The question worth asking before you open that spreadsheet this fall: does your current budget structure give you room to move when something changes in October? Because something will.
This post was inspired by a conversation with Adam Terranova, Senior Director of Marketing, Authority Brands and Brooke Janousek, Fractional CMO, IV Nutrition, recorded for the Franchise Marketing Spotlight in June 2026.
Listen to the full conversation here.
