The Long and the Short of It
Balancing short and long—this Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) research report ended the brand vs. performance war with evidence.
Marketing split into tribes—brand builders versus performance marketers, long-term versus short-term, creativity versus data. Binet and Field analyzed decades of effectiveness data from the IPA Databank and published their findings as an IPA report. They found both sides were wrong. The most successful brands don't choose. They balance. Brand building creates future demand. Activation captures current demand. You need both, in the right proportion, or you fail. This wasn't a book—it was a research paper that ended the debate with math.
"Marketing works across two timeframes. Brand effects compound slowly and drive long-term growth. Sales activation works fast but decays quickly. The optimal split is roughly 60% brand, 40% activation. Skew too far either way and efficiency collapses."
The Long
- Builds mental availability
- Creates emotional priming
- Reaches broad audiences
- Uses fame and storytelling
- Effects compound over time
- Harder to measure directly
- Drives pricing power
- Reduces price sensitivity
The Short
- Triggers immediate action
- Targets in-market buyers
- Uses rational messages
- Focuses on product/price/promo
- Effects decay rapidly
- Easy to measure directly
- Harvests existing demand
- Closes the sale
Data from the IPA Databank shows the most effective campaigns allocate roughly 60% of budget to brand building and 40% to sales activation. This ratio maximizes both short-term sales and long-term profit growth. Brands that over-index on activation see sales spikes followed by declines. Brands that ignore activation leave money on the table.
Emotional Beats Rational
Campaigns with purely emotional content perform better than rational or mixed approaches. Emotion drives long-term effects. Rational messaging works for activation but doesn't build brands. Feelings create memories. Features don't.
Reach Beats Targeting
Broad reach campaigns outperform narrow targeting for brand building. Mental availability requires reaching people who aren't currently buying. Hyper-targeted activation leaves future buyers unaware of your brand.
Fame Drives Growth
Campaigns that generate fame—cultural conversation, media coverage, social sharing—dramatically outperform campaigns that don't. Fame creates mental availability at scale. Boring efficiency doesn't compound.
Share of Voice Matters
Excess share of voice—spending more on media than your market share would predict—drives growth. Under-spending relative to competitors leads to decline. You can't whisper your way to dominance.
The Decay Problem
Sales activation effects decay within weeks. Brand effects last years. Over-investing in activation creates a treadmill—constant spending for diminishing returns. Brand investment compounds. Activation doesn't.
Creativity Is ROI
Creative effectiveness—measured by awards as a proxy—correlates strongly with business results. Creative campaigns drive 11x more efficiency than non-creative ones. Boring doesn't just fail culturally. It fails financially.
It ends the brand vs. performance debate with evidence. Both sides were half-right. Brand building drives long-term growth but can't be judged on last-click attribution. Performance marketing drives immediate sales but creates no lasting value. Binet and Field show how both work together—and what happens when you ignore either.
It's backed by the largest effectiveness database in marketing. The IPA Databank (maintained by the UK's Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) contains decades of case studies, spanning categories, geographies, and eras. This isn't theory or anecdote. It's pattern recognition across thousands of campaigns. When Binet and Field say something works, they're showing you the data.
It gives you the formula. The 60/40 split. Emotional content for brand, rational for activation. Broad reach for mental availability. Excess share of voice for growth. These aren't suggestions—they're observable patterns. Brands that follow them outperform. Brands that don't, decline.
It explains why short-termism fails. When companies cut brand budgets to fund performance marketing, they see immediate sales lift followed by long-term decline. Brand effects compound slowly—cutting them creates a gap that shows up years later. The book makes the math visible.
Who should read it: CMOs defending brand budgets against CFOs demanding ROI. Performance marketers wondering why growth plateaus. Agencies trying to balance creativity with effectiveness. Anyone allocating budget between brand and activation.
The IPA Effectiveness Awards (1980–Present): The IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) is the UK trade body for advertising agencies. They created the IPA Databank to document marketing effectiveness, requiring entrants to submit rigorous proof of business impact—not just creative awards, but actual business results. Over decades, this database became the world's richest source of real-world marketing data. Binet and Field's work mines this gold—revealing patterns invisible to individual practitioners. "The Long and the Short of It" was published as an IPA report in 2013, making decades of research accessible to practitioners.
The Digital Shift and Short-Termism (2000s–2010s): Digital marketing promised accountability—every click tracked, every conversion measured. CMOs shifted budgets toward performance channels with clear last-click attribution. Brand spending declined. Then growth stalled. Companies couldn't figure out why their efficiency was increasing while their market share was shrinking. Binet and Field explained it: activation without brand building is a death spiral.
The Accountability Era (2010s): By 2013, CFOs controlled marketing budgets. They demanded proof, ROI, attribution. Brand building—hard to measure in quarters—lost funding to performance marketing. The Long and the Short of It arrived as a defense of brand investment, armed with evidence. The book gave CMOs the data they needed to fight back.
Why It Endures: The principles in this report haven't changed because human psychology hasn't changed. Digital channels come and go. Attribution models evolve. But the need to balance mental availability with behavioral activation remains constant. Brands still grow by being famous and easy to buy. The Long and the Short of It quantified what great marketers always knew intuitively—and made it impossible to ignore. The report spawned follow-ups (Media in Focus, The 5 Principles of Growth) and became required reading across the industry.