Back in 2013, Les Binet and Peter Field published The Long and the Short of It, a seminal piece of research that drew on the IPA Databank of case studies to argue that the most effective advertising strategies are geared 60% towards long-term brand building and 40% towards short-term activation.
The intervening period, however, has seen the meteoric rise of social media and brands being pulled towards short-term activations that are easily measureable. At IPA Effweek (London, October 2018), Peter Field re-affirmed that “brand building is the primary driver of long-term growth”. That starts to happen about about...