Sample frameDay 048·Marketing · Investment

Good morning. Some marketing pays this week. Some pays for a decade — and it's rarely the spend you're measuring.

Marketing.

The 60/40 Rule

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Of every dollar you spent on marketing last quarter, how much went to activity whose effect had fully decayed before the quarter even closed — and if you can't answer that, or the honest answer is almost all of it, why is next quarter's budget built exactly the same way?

The idea

In 2013 the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising published The Long and the Short of It, in which Les Binet — then head of effectiveness at adam&eveDDB — and marketing consultant Peter Field analysed nearly a thousand campaigns from the IPA's effectiveness databank. Their finding was that marketing does two different jobs on two different clocks. Sales activation — targeted, rational, call-to-action work — produces immediate, measurable spikes that decay within months. Brand building — broad-reach, emotional, memory-making work — shows little this quarter but compounds for years, and it is what drives long-term growth and pricing power. Their average optimum: roughly 60 per cent brand, 40 per cent activation. The trap is that activation is measurable this week and brand is not, so budgets drift towards whatever the dashboard can prove — and most operators end up running the split in reverse while believing they are being rigorous.

The framework

01
Sort every line into its real job — response now, or memory later.
Go through the marketing budget line by line and classify each item by the job it was designed to do: activation produces a response now — performance ads, promotions, retargeting, any email with an offer in it — while brand builds memory in people who aren't buying yet, through broad reach, consistent distinctive assets and emotion. Most line items are honest about which they are; the dishonesty creeps in at the roll-up, where everything gets called 'growth'. Where a line claims to do both, classify it by what its success metric actually measures — a line judged on click-through is activation, whatever the creative looks like.
02
Fund the slow clock deliberately — that's the 60.
Brand spend looks like waste on a weekly dashboard because its effects arrive as base sales, pricing power and falling price sensitivity over years, not as attributable conversions on Friday. Binet and Field's evidence puts the average optimum at roughly 60 per cent brand — a starting point rather than a law, since the right ratio shifts with category and brand maturity — but almost nobody errs on the high side. If your split is drifting, it will drift towards activation, because that is the direction the dashboard applauds.
03
Judge each half on its own clock.
The fastest way to kill brand investment is to measure it with activation's tools: on last-click ROI, brand will lose to retargeting every single week, and the budget will follow. Give activation its weekly response metrics, and give brand slower instruments — awareness, mental availability, the trend in base sales, what happens to volume when you hold price — reviewed quarterly and annually. The discipline is refusing to put the two on the same dashboard, because a shared dashboard is a decision to defund the slow half.
04
Hold the ratio when the quarter turns soft.
The moment of failure is predictable: a weak quarter arrives, activation's measurability makes cutting brand feel like rigour, and the decay is invisible for long enough that the decision looks vindicated. But the cost shows up in the base a year or two later, when the spikes have nothing to spike from. Decide the ratio in calm conditions, write down the conditions under which you would break it, and treat any unplanned drift towards activation as a warning rather than a win.

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