The 60/40 split: how to actually budget brand vs demand
Binet & Field's two decades of IPA data settled the argument. Spend 60% on long-term brand, 40% on short-term activation. Most B2B is inverted.
“Activation wins the quarter. Brand wins the next ten. The split tells you which numbers you're optimising for.”
The Binet & Field finding
Les Binet and Peter Field, working with the IPA effectiveness database, analysed hundreds of award-winning campaigns to ask a deceptively simple question: what's the optimal split between long-term brand-building and short-term sales activation? Their answer, refined across multiple editions of 'The Long and the Short of It,' lands near 60% brand, 40% activation for B2C and around 46% brand for B2B — both materially higher than what most CFOs approve.
60% brand, 40% demand — the long-run optimum from two decades of IPA effectiveness data.
Why most B2B teams break the ratio
Activation is legible. It moves on a dashboard inside ninety days, which is how finance prefers to think. Brand is illegible on the same timescale — it compounds quietly over years, then shows up as cheaper CAC, faster sales cycles, and higher win-rates that nobody can attribute to any one campaign. So budget keeps drifting toward the activation side until the brand stops producing the gravity that made activation work in the first place.
Fixing the split without losing your job
You don't need to flip the budget overnight. You need a defensible line in the planning deck: at least a third of the marketing budget is ring-fenced for long-term brand work — founder narrative, distinctive assets, editorial, category POVs — and the activation half is measured on assisted conversions, not last-click. The teams who hold that line outgrow the teams who don't, every time.
