The Long and the Short of It: What Binet & Field Really Found

Work reviewed. Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), London. Earlier foundation: Binet, L. & Field, P. (2007). Marketing in the Era of Accountability. IPA. Later update: Binet, L. & Field, P. (2018). Effectiveness in Context. IPA. Underlying evidence: the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank (1,000+ proven-ROI case studies).

TL;DR. The Long and the Short of It is the IPA report that gave marketing its most-quoted budget benchmark: spend roughly 60% on long-term brand building and 40% on short-term activation. Its deeper claim is that advertising produces two distinct kinds of effect — fast, rational, sales-driving ones and slow, emotional, equity-building ones — and that most organisations are structurally built to see only the first. It matters because the 60:40 split is the single clearest corrective to the short-termism that quietly hollows out brands.

If you want one source credited for the modern marketing-effectiveness revival, it is this report. Les Binet and Peter Field, working through the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank, took an archive of campaigns whose commercial return had been proven with real data and asked a deceptively simple question: what separates the ones that moved the business from the ones that didn't? Their answer — two effects, two timeframes, one balance — became the backbone of how serious marketers talk about marketing effectiveness. This review covers what they actually found, what they got pushback on, and what to do with it.

What is 'The Long and the Short of It'?

The Long and the Short of It is a 2013 research report commissioned by the IPA and written by Les Binet (then head of effectiveness at adam&eveDDB) and Peter Field (a marketing effectiveness consultant and longtime analyst of the Databank). It builds on the pair's earlier Marketing in the Era of Accountability (2007) and was later extended in Effectiveness in Context (2018).

The "it" in the title is the long term and the short term — two horizons over which advertising pays back. The report's lasting contribution is not a single number but a framework: marketing does two different jobs on two different clocks, and the most successful brands fund both deliberately rather than drifting into one. The famous 60:40 rule — about 60% of budget to long-term brand building, about 40% to short-term activation — is the headline that fell out of that framework. It is worth understanding as the output of the argument, not the argument itself.

The evidence base is the IPA Effectiveness Databank: a curated archive of IPA Effectiveness Award entries, each of which must demonstrate commercial return with rigorous data (typically econometrics, controlled testing, or robust tracking). That is both the source of the work's authority and the source of its limitations — more on which below.

What are the two types of advertising effects?

Strip the report down and the central claim is that advertising creates two separable kinds of commercial effect, and they behave nothing alike.

Short-term effects are what most dashboards are built to see. A price promotion, a direct-response activation, a rational hard-sell message converts existing demand into sales within days or weeks. The return is fast, measurable, and gratifying. It is also small and decays quickly — once the promotion ends, the spike ends with it. Binet and Field associate this pole with rational, persuasive, targeted messaging.

Long-term effects are what most dashboards are built to miss. Emotional, broad-reach brand building grows the baseline — penetration, mental availability, pricing power, share of search — over months and years. The return is larger, slower, and far harder to attribute to any single campaign. This is the pole Binet and Field associate with emotional, distinctive, mass-reach work.

The report's mechanism rests on three linked findings, all drawn from the Databank:

The two effects are real and separable. Advertising produces both a short-term sales spike and a long-term baseline shift. The strongest returns come from generating both — not from maximising either in isolation.
Emotion drives the long term; rationality drives the short term. Campaigns judged as emotionally-led were, in the data, disproportionately associated with profitable, durable growth. Hyper-rational, hard-sell work drove short-term sales but eroded pricing and decayed fast.
Creativity amplifies both. Campaigns that won creative awards were substantially more efficient at driving business results — effectiveness and creativity were allies, not enemies.

The practical upshot: brand building creates the demand and the pricing power; activation harvests it. A brand that only activates slowly runs out of demand to convert. A brand that only builds brand never converts the goodwill into revenue. The 60:40 split is simply the average balance at which the best cases were operating.

The 60:40 split — and when does it bend?

The number everyone quotes is roughly 60% brand building, 40% activation — the centre of gravity among the Databank's highest-performing cases. Binet and Field are careful to call it a benchmark and a starting point, not a universal law, and the 2018 update spends much of its energy explaining when and why it moves.

When the split bends toward more brand building:

Under price-led, promotional pressure. This is the headline finding of Effectiveness in Context (2018). As short-term, price-driven promotion saturates a category, the optimal balance shifts toward brand building to defend pricing power and mental availability. Binet and Field argue the digital-era drift into attribution-optimised activation has made the modern optimum more brand-heavy — meaningfully above the classic 60:40 on the brand side, and further still in heavily price-promoted contexts. They explicitly warned that the environment had moved on from the 2013 average.
For new entrants and small-share brands. A brand with low awareness and weak mental availability needs to build memory structure before it can efficiently harvest it. The balance skews brand-heavy until penetration and recognition are established.
For premium and low-frequency categories. Where purchase is rare, expensive, and emotionally weighted, brand equity does more of the work; activation is a smaller share of the job.
For B2B. Long, considered purchase cycles mean most buyers are out of market at any given moment — the logic of the 95:5 rule (around 95% of B2B buyers not in-market at a point in time). That argues for brand-building to the out-of-market majority rather than activation chasing the ready-to-buy few.

When the split bends toward more activation:

For low-margin, high-frequency, price-led businesses with a genuine, time-limited conversion window, a balance closer to even — or modestly lighter on brand — can be defensible. Even then, Binet and Field caution that the long-term tax of under-investing in brand tends to show up as worsening price elasticity over time.

The honest reading is that 60:40 is a default to deviate from with reasons, not a number to hit blindly. Your category, price point, purchase frequency, and time-in-market all shift it — and the direction of those shifts is, mercifully, something the evidence actually speaks to.

Why do most companies get the balance wrong?

Here is the report's sharpest practical point, and the reason it resonated beyond the UK effectiveness crowd: organisations do not arrive at 60:40 by default. They drift away from it.

Left to their own devices, marketing budgets slide toward activation. The reasons are structural rather than mysterious:

Activation is measurable this quarter; brand is not. Last-click attribution and platform ROAS credit the short term and starve the long term. If your dashboard only sees direct-response activity, your "effective" mix will, by construction, become 100% performance.
Finance rewards what it can see. A return that lands inside a quarter is reassuring to a CFO; a baseline shift that compounds over three years is invisible in the monthly review. Measurement cadence quietly determines budget balance.
Activation feels productive. Clicks, conversions, and cost-per-acquisition are satisfying. Baseline growth is not. Teams optimise what gives them feedback.

Binet and Field's later writing tracks a long-run decline in reported long-term marketing ROI alongside rising short-term ROI — a pattern they read as the industry trading durable profitability for measurable efficiency. The 60:40 split is, in this light, a corrective force pulling budgets back toward the work that actually grows the business. Most companies get the balance wrong because the system they've built to measure marketing is biased to see only half of it.

How do you apply it — and audit your own split?

This is where a research review earns its keep. The report is not a sermon; it is a lens. Here is how to hold it up to your own operation:

Classify spend by objective, not channel. Tag every pound by what it is trying to achieve — long-term brand building or short-term activation — not by where it sits. A six-second bumper with a price cut is activation even if it runs on a "brand" channel.
Calculate your actual current split. Most teams are surprised by the gap between what they think they spend on brand and what the ledger says. Run the brand-vs-activation ratio as a board-level metric every quarter.
Start from 60:40, then adjust with reasons. Move toward more brand if you face price pressure, weak mental availability, new-entrant status, or a multi-year horizon. Move toward activation only if you have a genuine, time-limited conversion case — and even then, watch your price elasticity.
Pair short-term and long-term metrics. Report activation ROAS alongside share of search, penetration, and pricing power so the board can see both halves of the return. A healthy split is impossible to defend if only one half is ever measured.
Design measurement to see the long term. Use marketing mix modelling, holdout geos, and incrementality testing to separate marketing-driven demand from demand that would have arrived anyway. "It's too hard to measure brand" stopped being true some years ago.
Protect brand in downturns. The evidence is consistent that brands holding brand investment through recessions gain share from those that cut — the cheapest growth most companies will ever turn down.

The discipline the report forces is not "spend 60% on brand." It is the refusal to let the measurability of the short term quietly cannibalise the profitability of the long term.

What did Binet & Field get pushback on?

A research review that skipped the criticism would not be doing its job. The Binet and Field work is widely respected, but it is not unchallenged, and four lines of pushback recur:

1. The Databank is not a random sample. It is built from IPA Effectiveness Award entries — campaigns whose owners believed them effective enough to enter, paid to do so, and (often) won. That introduces survivorship and selection bias. The findings describe what works among well-measured, well-resourced, disproportionately UK campaigns, not a representative draw of all marketing. Binet and Field acknowledge this; it does not invalidate the patterns, but it bounds how far you should generalise.

2. 60:40 became a meme, and memes lose their conditions. The number has been quoted stripped of the caveats Binet and Field attached to it. They never claimed it was universal; Effectiveness in Context (2018) exists largely to correct the over-literal reading. Treating 60:40 as a target rather than a context-sensitive benchmark is a misreading the authors have publicly cautioned against.

3. Channel ≠ job-to-be-done. Critics (and some digital-native practitioners) argue the brand/activation distinction is too often mapped onto channels — "TV is brand, digital is activation." Binet and Field's framework is about objectives and effects, not media, and they have pushed back on the conflation. But in practice the shorthand has encouraged exactly the lazy mapping they warn against.

4. It is one tradition among several. The Binet and Field framework sits alongside the Ehrenberg-Bass tradition (Sharp, Romaniuk) rather than inside it. Where Binet and Field focus on the balance of brand and activation and the role of emotion and creativity, Sharp's How Brands Grow focuses on the mechanism — penetration, mental availability, distinctive assets, the double jeopardy pattern. The two are largely complementary, but they operate at different levels, and a few sharp exchanges (notably over differentiation and loyalty) remind us that "the evidence" is not a single, settled voice.

None of this diminishes the work. It does mean the 60:40 split is a hypothesis to test against your own data — informed by the best-available benchmark, not enslaved to it.

Key takeaways

The Long and the Short of It (Binet & Field, IPA, 2013) established the 60:40 rule: roughly 60% brand building, 40% activation as the centre of gravity among the most effective campaigns in the IPA Databank.
Its real contribution is the two-effects framework — fast, rational, activation effects versus slow, emotional, brand effects — and the argument that most organisations are built to see only the first.
Emotion drives the long term; rationality drives the short term, and creativity amplifies both.
The split bends with context: toward more brand under price pressure, for new entrants, premium, and B2B; toward activation only for genuinely time-limited, price-led conversion cases.
It is a benchmark, not a law — drawn from a non-random, award-skewed, UK-heavy archive, and meant to be tested against your own marketing ROI data.

The 60:40 Rule — the glossary entry for the headline number
Marketing Effectiveness — the discipline this work anchors
Marketing ROI — measuring the return the report argues for
Mental Availability — the mechanism behind long-term brand effects
Share of Search — a long-term metric to pair with short-term ROAS

About the authors

Les Binet and Peter Field analysed the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank — over a thousand case studies with proven commercial returns — to produce the findings in this report. Binet was Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB; Field is an independent marketing consultant. Their collaboration spans Marketing in the Era of Accountability (2007), The Long and the Short of It (2013) and Effectiveness in Context (2018), all published by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.