The Long and the Short of It. Les Binet and Peter Field (2013)

What it argues

That marketing does two different jobs which are routinely treated as one.

Activation produces a quick sales response that fades. It works on people already in market and its effects are visible inside a quarter.

Brand building works slowly, on people who are not currently buying, and compounds. Its effects are invisible in the short term, which is why it gets cut.

Campaigns doing both outperformed campaigns doing either alone, and the study reported an approximate optimal split of around 60 per cent brand building to 40 per cent activation in the consumer cases, with a different balance in business-to-business.

What it gets right

The evidence base, which is the IPA Effectiveness Databank, roughly a thousand cases of commercially reported campaign results. That is a larger and more commercially grounded dataset than almost anything else in the field.

More importantly it explains a specific organisational failure. Activation looks accountable and brand building does not, so measurement systems reward the half that fades. The book gives a finance-literate argument for the half that compounds, which is why it changed budgets when earlier arguments for brand had not.

What to be careful about

The 60/40 is an average, not a prescription. It varies by category, by brand size and by whether you are growing or defending. Applying it to your own business without checking is exactly the kind of unexamined rule-following the book argues against.

The databank selects on success. Cases enter because an agency submitted them to an effectiveness award. Failures are underrepresented. That does not invalidate the direction of the findings and it should temper confidence in the precision of the coefficients.

It measured paid media in an era when that was most of the voice. The framework still holds. Computing share of voice honestly is harder now.

Who should read it, and who should not

Read it if you are arguing for brand budget with a finance function. It is the most useful document in existence for that conversation.

Read it if your marketing is entirely performance-driven and the returns have been flattening.

Do not quote the 60/40 without reading the qualifications around it, which is how most people encounter it.

The soundbite

One half of marketing produces a spike you can see and the other produces a slope you cannot, and the measurement system only rewards the spike.

If you run the company rather than the marketing

This is the book that explains why your marketing reporting is structurally misleading, and it is not misleading because anybody is being dishonest.

Activation effects show up fast and attribute cleanly. Brand effects show up slowly, through people who never clicked anything, at a moment nobody observes. So any dashboard built on attribution will systematically overstate the half that fades and understate the half that compounds. Then the budget follows the dashboard.

The practical consequence: when you cut marketing in a difficult quarter, the numbers will appear to vindicate you for several quarters. The cost arrives later, as a slow decline in how readily buyers think of you, and by then it is attributed to the market.

What I would ask for is not the 60/40 split, which is an average from other people’s businesses. It is a single page showing what proportion of your spend is aimed at people ready to buy now, and what proportion at people who will be ready later. Most companies have never produced that page and are surprised by the answer.