Les Binet on Marketing Effectiveness: The 60/40 Rule, Share of Search, and The Long and Short of It

Les Binet is the Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB and one of the most important researchers in commercial marketing science. His work — conducted primarily through the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) effectiveness programme in the UK — has produced the most comprehensive, empirically grounded evidence base on how marketing works that exists in the public domain.

Unlike academic marketing research, Binet's work is built on commercial effectiveness cases — actual campaigns, actual budgets, actual business results, submitted to the IPA Effectiveness Awards by agencies and brands. The IPA databank contains over 2,000 such cases, collected across forty years and covering nearly every category and market type. Binet's research mines this database to find patterns about what makes marketing effective across time, budget level, and business context.

The findings have three major contributions that every CMO should be able to use. Here is each one, what it says, and how to apply it commercially.

Contribution 1: The Long and Short of It — the 60/40 framework

Binet's most widely cited work, co-authored with Peter Field, is The Long and Short of It (IPA, 2013), which analysed what proportion of marketing investment should go to long-term brand building versus short-term activation to optimise commercial performance over a five-year horizon.

The core finding: across the IPA databank, the budget split that produces the best long-term profit results — not the best short-term conversion rate, but the highest sustained profit across five years — is approximately 60% brand investment to 40% activation.

This is not a fixed rule. Binet is explicit that the optimal ratio varies by category, brand size, market position, and business model. B2B businesses, subscription businesses, and categories with long purchase cycles tend to run better at ratios closer to 50/50 or even 45/55. FMCG categories with high purchase frequency often perform at 65/35 or higher. The 60/40 is the average across a broad sample, not a universal prescription.

What is universal is the structural principle behind the number: brand investment and activation serve different commercial functions and operate on different time horizons. They should be budgeted separately, not as a single "marketing" line, because the trade-offs between them are different and the appropriate instruments for measuring each are different.

Why the optimal short-term split is the wrong long-term split

The uncomfortable implication of the 60/40 research: the budget allocation that maximises returns over five years looks like it is underperforming in the first year. Brand investment at 60% produces less immediately measurable revenue contribution than performance at 60% would. The activation-heavy split wins the short-term measurement — and loses the long-term competition.

This is the structural reason why marketing budgets drift activation-heavy over time. Monthly reporting rewards what works this month. The brand investment that is producing its highest returns in month eighteen does not appear in month three's dashboard. The CFO sees activation returns clearly and brand returns invisibly — and cuts what is invisible.

Binet's data provides the counter-argument: over a five-year horizon, the activation-heavy business consistently underperforms the brand-investment-balanced business in total profit, even accounting for the better short-term returns. The cost of under-investing in brand compounds. The CMO who can make this argument with the IPA data as evidence is in a stronger position than the one who makes it with conviction alone.

Contribution 2: Share of search as a leading indicator

Binet's second major contribution — developed more recently than the 60/40 work — is the introduction of share of search as a practical proxy for brand salience and a leading indicator of market share.

Share of search measures, for a given category or competitor set, what proportion of total branded search volume includes your brand name. If the category generates 100,000 branded searches per month and 23,000 of them include your brand name, your share of search is 23%.

The finding that makes this commercially important: share of search changes precede share of market changes by approximately six months, consistently across the categories Binet has studied. A brand whose share of search is rising is gaining mental availability that will translate into market share before the financial data confirms it. A brand whose share of search is declining is losing mental availability — and the revenue pressure will arrive before the P&L shows it.

For the CMO, this converts brand salience from an unmeasurable soft metric into a free, trackable, leading indicator of commercial performance. Share of search is available via Google Search Console (your own branded queries) and Google Trends (relative search interest across the competitor set). No tracking budget required. Monthly resolution. Six-month lead on the market share data.

This matters most in a specific conversation: defending brand investment before the financial results arrive. The CMO who can say "share of search is up 4 points over the past six months, and based on the six-month lag pattern, we expect that to translate into market share movement in Q2" is making a forward-looking commercial argument with evidence. The CMO who says "brand investment works over time, be patient" is not.

Contribution 3: The case against short-termism

Binet and Field's ongoing research, updated regularly through the IPA effectiveness programme, documents a third finding that has become increasingly important as digital performance marketing has made short-term metrics more visible: the marketing industry has been systematically shifting toward short-term activation at the expense of long-term brand building, and this shift is measurably reducing marketing effectiveness at scale.

The mechanism: digital attribution tools make short-term conversion metrics easier to measure and more visible than long-term brand effects. Budget decisions that should be based on long-term profit contribution are instead made based on what is visible in the next 30-day attribution window. Over time, this produces a systematic under-investment in brand across the industry — with the predictable consequence that marketing efficiency is declining as brand equity erodes and the cost of each incremental customer rises.

This finding is relevant for the CMO in two ways. First, it provides a structural explanation for the performance ceiling that many growth-stage businesses hit after two to four years of performance-dominant marketing — the ceiling is not a channel optimisation problem, it is a brand investment deficit problem. Second, it gives the CMO a credible research-backed argument for brand investment that is grounded in industry-wide evidence, not just internal projection.

How Binet's work relates to Ehrenberg-Bass

Binet and Byron Sharp's research programmes are complementary but different. Sharp's Ehrenberg-Bass work describes the empirical laws of buyer behaviour — how markets are structured, how buyers behave, what drives brand growth. Binet and Field's IPA work describes how marketing investment produces commercial outcomes — what the right budget structure is, how long effects take to arrive, what leading indicators track them.

The two programmes reach compatible conclusions from different starting points. Sharp says brands grow through penetration and mental availability, which requires broad-reach brand communication. Binet says the budget allocation that produces long-term profit requires 60% brand investment, and brand effects operate on a twelve-to-eighteen-month lag. The two together explain both why brand investment is strategically necessary and how it needs to be structured and measured.

For the CMO who wants to cite research in a board conversation, the combination is the strongest available: Sharp provides the mechanism (how brand effects work), Binet provides the evidence (what investment level produces optimal results) and the instruments (share of search as a leading indicator). Neither works as well alone as both work together.

What to read

If you want to go to the source material:

• The Long and Short of It — Binet and Field, IPA (2013). The original 60/40 analysis. Available from the IPA directly.
• Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era — Binet and Field, IPA (2017). Updated analysis including digital channels.
• Effectiveness in Context — Binet and Field, IPA (2018). Category-level calibration of the 60/40 ratio.
• Les Binet's share of search paper, available via the IPA and referenced in multiple presentations at the ISBA and APG conferences — search "Les Binet share of search" for the most current version.

The papers are practitioner-facing, not academic — they are written to be used in strategy and budget conversations, not to pass peer review. That makes them more readable and more directly applicable than most research of equivalent rigour.