Four years after "The Long and the Short of It" (2013), Binet and Field returned to the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank to ask: has digital changed the rules? By 2017 the dataset had grown to roughly 1,400 cases and now included substantial digital-era marketing across multiple categories. The pair conducted a fresh meta-analysis specifically focused on whether the 60/40 rule, the emotional creative finding, and the share-of-voice mechanism still applied in the fragmented digital media landscape. The answer surprised many digital evangelists who had assumed digital marketing required fundamentally different rules. The 60/40 brand-to-activation split still holds. The need for emotional brand-building is, if anything, greater in a fragmented media landscape because mental availability is harder to maintain. But the optimal channel mix has shifted. Digital channels excel at activation. Television (and its successors in online video and streaming) still does most of the heavy lifting for brand-building. Online video, when used at scale, can substitute for television. Programmatic targeting, in many cases, reduces effectiveness by stripping reach. The book is required reading for any marketer who has been told "TV is dead" or "we should be 100 percent digital." The data says neither claim survives contact with the evidence.
Core frameworks
1. The updated 60/40 rule
The 60 percent brand to 40 percent activation split holds in the digital era. The dataset shows no shift toward shorter-term marketing as the optimal strategy. If anything, brand-building has gained importance because mental availability is harder to maintain when media is fragmented and consumer attention is more contested.
The mechanism that the updated analysis surfaced: the digital era has produced more activation channels (paid search, social ads, retargeting, programmatic display, performance influencer marketing) than the 1990s and 2000s had. The greater channel availability has not produced higher optimal activation share. The dataset shows that companies investing more than 50 percent in activation underperformed companies maintaining the 60/40 brand-heavy split on every long-term business metric (profit margin, market share movement, pricing power, customer lifetime value).
The Audi UK case from "The Long and the Short of It" was extended in the 2017 analysis to a broader sample of brands that maintained brand investment through the post-2008 recession and the subsequent decade. The pattern held: brands that maintained brand budgets through 2014 to 2017 outperformed brands that shifted to performance-only on every long-term metric. Specifically, brand-maintained companies showed roughly 3x the market share gains over five years compared to performance-shifted companies in the same categories.
The pressure to shift to digital activation came from a combination of forces: the measurability advantage (digital activation produces immediate measurable ROI in ways that brand-building does not), the procurement pressure (CFOs and CMO-CFO interactions favor measurable spend), and the cultural assumption that "digital is different" (which the data refused to support). Binet and Field's contribution in 2017 was the data refutation of the cultural assumption.
How to operate: maintain the 60/40 brand-to-activation split. Do not let performance-marketing pressure shift you below 50 percent brand without a defensive plan. The defensive plan must include long-term brand health metrics that catch the erosion the quarterly dashboard hides.
If you only remember one thing: digital did not break the 60/40 rule. The rule is the empirical optimum.
2. Reach beats targeting
Targeted digital campaigns, optimized for narrow audiences, consistently under-deliver on long-term effects compared to broad-reach campaigns. The reason: brand-building requires reaching category buyers who are not currently in-market. Targeting strips them out by design.
A worked failure pattern from the 2017 analysis: a financial services brand shifted from broad television to narrow-targeted digital between 2012 and 2015. The shift was driven by short-term acquisition cost optimization; the narrow targeting produced lower cost per acquisition because the targeted segments converted at higher rates than the broad-reach audience. The first-year results validated the shift; CAC fell, and the marketing team celebrated the efficiency gain.
The longer-term results inverted the conclusion. Over the following three years, the brand's organic acquisition (search traffic, brand-name searches, direct site visits) declined steadily. The unaided brand recall measurements dropped. New customers entering the funnel arrived less aware of the brand and required more nurturing to convert. The cost per acquisition eventually rose above the pre-shift baseline because the mental availability that supported the original CAC had eroded. The total marketing cost to maintain customer acquisition rose substantially over the three-year window.
The mechanism: brand-building requires reaching category buyers across the entire purchase consideration cycle, including buyers who are not currently in-market. A buyer who switches financial services providers every five to seven years is not in-market in most years; targeting that strips out non-in-market buyers excludes the substantial population that builds the brand's mental availability for future buying moments. The CAC efficiency of narrow targeting in the short term comes at the cost of long-term mental availability that the brand needs for future cycles.
How to operate: prioritize reach in brand campaigns. Resist over-targeting. Light buyers and non-buyers are the growth pool that future cycles depend on. The CAC-optimized narrow targeting is appropriate for activation campaigns but not for brand-building campaigns.
If you only remember one thing: targeting strips reach. Brand-building needs reach. The two are in tension; resolve the tension toward reach for brand work.
3. Video as the brand-building workhorse
Television remains the most efficient brand-building channel where audiences still aggregate. Online video (YouTube, social video, streaming) can substitute when used at scale. Static digital channels (display, paid search) do not build brand efficiently. They are activation channels.
The 2017 analysis quantified the channel hierarchy for brand-building effectiveness. Television scored highest, followed closely by cinema and out-of-home where the brand-building effect is mediated through the audio and visual storytelling that builds emotional association. Online video (specifically YouTube pre-roll and skippable formats at scale) scored comparably to television when the spend reached a meaningful fraction of category buyers (roughly 50 percent reach of the target audience over the campaign window). Static digital (display banners, paid search text ads, social text and image posts) scored substantially lower for brand-building effects, though these channels remain effective for activation.
A worked case from the dataset: a beverage brand included YouTube in its video strategy at meaningful spend levels (roughly 30 percent of total media spend on YouTube alongside television) and saw brand-building efficiency comparable to a pure-television campaign at the same total spend. A comparable competitor that allocated equivalent budget to display banners and paid search saw substantially weaker brand-building effects on equivalent measurement windows. Same total spend; different brand-building outcomes based on channel choice.
The implication for digital-first companies: brand-building still requires video at scale. A direct-to-consumer brand that wants to build durable mental availability cannot do so through display retargeting and paid search alone, regardless of how efficient those channels appear in CAC terms. The channel mix must include video at meaningful spend levels to produce the long-term brand effects that compound into pricing power and retention.
How to operate: treat online video as the brand-building substitute for television when scale is achievable. Do not treat display or search as brand channels regardless of how the digital media planning frameworks categorize them.
If you only remember one thing: video at scale builds brand. Static digital activates. The two are different jobs.
4. The emotional creative premium widens in digital
Emotional creative outperforms rational creative by an even wider margin in the digital era. Sharable, memorable, distinctive creative spreads further; rational direct-response creative dies in the algorithm.
The 2017 analysis updated the original 2013 emotional creative finding with digital-era data. In the pre-digital era, emotional campaigns produced roughly 2x the long-term business effects of rational campaigns. In the digital era, the multiplier had widened to approximately 3x for the highest-rated emotional campaigns. The mechanism: the digital era added an earned-media multiplier on top of the brand-building effect. Emotional creative gets shared, gets covered, gets parodied, gets remixed; the cumulative reach extends well beyond paid amplification. Rational creative does not produce the same earned amplification because rational arguments are not memorable or shareable in the same way.
The Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign (2010) is the dataset's canonical example of the digital-era emotional creative multiplier. The original campaign was a series of television advertisements featuring Isaiah Mustafa delivering absurd monologues that subverted traditional masculine product advertising. The campaign cost approximately $1 million in production and roughly $10 million in initial media spend. The earned media that followed (YouTube views, news coverage, social media discussion, viewer-generated parodies, the "Old Spice Guy" response video campaign in 2010) produced cumulative reach worth tens of millions of additional dollars in equivalent paid media value. The brand's sales lifted substantially in the following quarters and Old Spice's brand health metrics improved durably.
The contrast: rational direct-response campaigns running in the same period produced measurable short-term sales but no earned amplification. The campaigns ran their paid media and stopped. Emotional campaigns continued producing impressions for months or years after the paid window ended.
How to operate: brief for emotional, distinctive, shareable creative in brand campaigns. The premium for emotional work is larger in digital than in legacy media; the multiplier compounds in the algorithm.
If you only remember one thing: emotional creative compounds in digital. Rational creative does not earn the algorithm.
5. Multi-channel beats single-channel
The dataset shows that campaigns running across more channels outperform single-channel campaigns at the same total budget, by roughly 50 percent. The mechanism: different channels reach different audiences at different moments, and the combined coverage multiplies effects.
The 2017 analysis quantified the multi-channel premium across the IPA dataset. Campaigns that ran across four or more channels (such as television plus YouTube plus radio plus out-of-home plus paid search) produced approximately 1.5x the business effects of campaigns concentrated in a single channel at the same total spend. The effect held across categories, time periods, and budget sizes. The mechanism is that consumer attention is fragmented across channels; reaching the same consumer through multiple channels at different moments produces stronger memory encoding than concentrating spend in one channel where the consumer might miss the message entirely.
A worked example from the dataset: a consumer goods brand allocating $5 million across television, YouTube, radio, and out-of-home produced measurably stronger brand-health and sales effects than a comparable competitor concentrating $5 million in television alone. The cross-channel exposure produced complementary memory encoding that the single-channel exposure could not match. Television built the visual and audio brand memory; radio reinforced the audio and verbal brand cues; YouTube added searchable digital footprint; out-of-home added geographic and visual reminder cues. Each channel contributed something the others could not.
The implication for budget planning: the multi-channel premium argues against the common practice of "concentrating spend for impact" in a single channel. The data suggests that distributing spend across complementary channels produces stronger total impact than concentration. The concentration argument applies within a channel (running fewer larger campaigns rather than many smaller ones in television) but not across channels (running television only rather than television plus YouTube plus radio).
How to operate: plan multi-channel campaigns from the start. A single channel at $1 million underperforms five channels at $200,000 each, all else equal. The total budget should be allocated across channels deliberately rather than concentrated for apparent impact.
If you only remember one thing: multi-channel beats single-channel at the same spend. Plan for breadth, not concentration.
Actionable takeaways
- Maintain the 60/40 brand-to-activation split. Do not let performance-marketing pressure shift you below 50 percent brand without a defensive plan.
- Prioritize reach in brand campaigns. Resist over-targeting. Light buyers and non-buyers are the growth pool.
- Treat online video as the brand-building substitute for TV when scale is achievable. Do not treat display or search as brand channels.
- Brief for emotional, distinctive, shareable creative in brand campaigns. The premium for emotional work is larger in digital than in legacy media.
- Plan multi-channel campaigns from the start. A single channel at $1 million underperforms five channels at $200,000 each, all else equal.
What this book is NOT about
This report does not give you tactical guidance on running specific digital channels. It will not teach you how to bid on Google Ads, how to structure a Facebook campaign, or how to choose creators for an influencer program. It is a strategic-allocation document, not a tactical playbook.
Two specific misreads to avoid. First, "TV is not dead" does not mean "TV is sufficient." The framework argues that television (and its successors in online video and streaming) remains the most efficient brand-building channel where audiences aggregate, not that television alone is the right strategy. The multi-channel finding requires multiple channels including television; the channel mix is the framework, not television specifically. Second, "reach beats targeting" does not mean "all targeting is bad." Targeting remains appropriate for activation campaigns where the goal is conversion of in-market buyers. The framework specifically rejects narrow targeting for brand-building campaigns where the goal is mental availability among the broader category buyer population, including non-in-market buyers.
Field updates since publication: the 2017 report was followed by Binet and Field's "The Effectiveness Code" (2020) which added the creative effectiveness multiplier finding. The trilogy together (2013, 2017, 2020) represents the most empirically rigorous treatment of marketing effectiveness available. The most credible contemporary critique: the IPA Databank skews toward UK markets and toward established consumer brands. Some categories (B2B SaaS, creator economy, two-sided marketplaces) are underrepresented and the findings may translate imperfectly. The structural arguments (60/40 split, reach beats targeting, emotional creative compounds) translate across categories; the specific channel mix optimizations require category-specific testing.
If you need ammunition to defend brand budget against a digital-only strategy, this is the most-cited source. If you need tactical guidance, look to channel-specific resources.
Want more?
Read the full IPA report: https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/media-in-focus-marketing-effectiveness-in-the-digital-era/
The full report runs about 60 pages with original charts and case studies. The summary above captures the operator-relevant findings. Read the original if you want the methodology, the specific dataset breakdowns, or the original charts to cite in a strategy presentation. Pair with "The Long and the Short of It" (2013) for the foundational argument and "The Effectiveness Code" (2020) for the followup synthesis.