BOOK REVIEW · MEASUREMENT
The Long and the Short of It
In short: the most influential effectiveness research in modern marketing. Binet and Field mined the IPA databank to show that long-term brand building and short-term activation work on different timescales — and that ~60/40 is the budget split that maximizes growth. Short, data-dense, essential.
What it covers.
Drawing on the IPA Effectiveness Databank, the authors separate the short-term sales spike of activation from the slow, compounding effect of brand building, and quantify how to balance them.
- Brand building vs sales activation
- The 60/40 budget-split finding
- Why short-termism erodes growth
- How effects compound over time
- Measuring long-term effects
- The efficiency of emotional campaigns
Who it’s for.
Anyone setting or defending a marketing budget, and every measurement lead who has to reconcile short-term ROAS with long-term brand effects. Indispensable for the brand-vs-performance debate.
Evergreen
- The 60/40 principle
- Separating short and long effects
- The danger of short-termism
- Measuring over the right horizon
Read with a 2026 eye
- Pre-2013 case data
- Digital-attribution context has moved on
Key ideas worth stealing.
The 60/40 split is the single most actionable budget heuristic in marketing — and it is grounded in data, not opinion.
Short-term activation metrics systematically under-credit brand building, which is why measurement that optimizes only for ROAS slowly starves growth.
How it reads.
Concise and chart-heavy — closer to a research report than a trade book. You can read it in an afternoon and argue with it for years.
The RGM verdict.
A short book with an outsized influence — its 60/40 finding is cited in nearly every serious budget discussion. Read it to stop measuring only what is easy (short-term clicks) and start measuring what compounds. Pair with RGM’s incrementality guide.
Their later work (Effectiveness in Context, Media in Focus) refines the splits by category; start here.
Asked & answered.
What is the 60/40 rule?
Binet & Field’s finding that, on average, allocating ~60% of budget to long-term brand building and ~40% to short-term activation maximizes growth — though the ratio shifts by category and goal.
Is The Long and the Short of It still relevant?
Very — the brand-vs-performance balance is more contested than ever in the cookieless era, and this is the foundational evidence for it.
Who are Les Binet and Peter Field?
Two of the most respected marketing-effectiveness researchers, known for analyzing the IPA Effectiveness Databank to quantify what actually drives growth.