How to avoid marketing’s compartmentalisation trap

Xaria Cohen and Gareth Price

Les Binet and Peter Field’s seminal paper, ‘Long & The Short of It’, has been integral in establishing the importance of balancing longer-term brand building efforts with shorter-term activation campaigns.

Rules mask nuance

Over the course of the past decade, Binet and Field’s 60:40 rule has captured the imagination of the industry. The notion that 60% of your advertising budget should be spent on ‘brand’ advertising and 40% on ‘activation’ is now established marketing orthodoxy.

However, as OMD UK CSO Charlie Ebdy has highlighted, “there really never was a 60:40 rule”: “Apply it to a brand selected at random, from a category selected at random, and it’s likely that 60% would be the wrong amount of investment for long-term brand-building.” 

As Ebdy notes, “60:40 is an average, which encompasses a...

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