Field and Binet: the 60/40 rule

Two marketing effectiveness researchers analysed a large database of nearly a thousand advertising campaigns, measuring what actually worked over both the short and long term. Their conclusion, which became influential, was that the most effective balance of spending was roughly sixty percent on long-term brand building, the emotional, broad-reach work that pays off slowly, and forty percent on short-term activation, the direct, measurable work that drives sales right now. The problem this addresses is that activation is easy to measure this quarter, while brand building pays off over years and is hard to attribute, so under pressure companies keep shifting money toward the measurable short-term side and quietly starve the long-term side. It is important to be clear that the sixty-forty figure is an average drawn from case data, not a precise law. Binet and Field said so themselves in a later report, Effectiveness in Context, which used updated databank analysis to show the optimal mix shifting with brand type and market conditions. The direction is the durable lesson, not the exact ratio.

The measurable, short-term side of any effort tends to win the argument for resources, because you can point to its results this quarter, while the slow-building, long-term side gets starved precisely because its payoff is hard to see and attribute now. This is a general trap, not just a marketing one. Whenever some work pays off immediately and measurably and other work pays off slowly and diffusely, the immediate kind will steadily capture more of the budget and attention, and the long-term kind will be underfunded, even when it matters more over years. The specific ratio is debatable, but the pull toward the measurable and away from the slow-building is real and worth resisting deliberately. A related argument about where growth comes from in the first place is penetration beats loyalty.

Source: Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, 2013. An industry databank analysis rather than a controlled study. Their own later work qualifies the ratio: Effectiveness in Context, IPA, 2018, shows the optimal split differs by brand type and context. The IPA keeps an index of their published work from 2007 onward.

The Long and the Short of It

Les Binet and Peter Field, 2013

The original report, published by the IPA and built on their databank of campaign case studies. Shorter and drier than a trade book, and it shows you the data the 60/40 ratio came from rather than asking you to take it on trust.