60/40 Brand vs Activation

A budget split, roughly 60% to broad-reach brand building and 40% to short-term activation, associated with the strongest long-term business effect.

Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA (2013)

What it does

Roughly 60% of budget to broad-reach brand building and 40% to short-term activation produces the strongest long-term business effect across the IPA Databank.

When it breaks

The ratio moves by category — the B2B figure is about 46/54, drawn from fewer than 50 cases, and the authors themselves call it tentative and warn against following it precisely. The database skews to large, mature, well-funded brands; a product starting from zero is not in it.

Case

Adidas' global media director Simon Peel told EffWeek 2019 the brand had been running 23% brand to 77% performance, having credited digital with sales that brand activity actually drove. Their analysis found brand activity drove 65% of sales, and 60% of revenue came from first-time buyers rather than the loyalists their CRM spend targeted.

Marketing Week — Adidas on over-investing in digital ↗

Diagram — not yet drawn

Two spend splits with their revenue curves over three years — the short-term-heavy one ahead in year one and behind by year three, with the crossover marked.

In the wild

Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment

What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.

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