Brand Marketers, Avoid the Trap of Short-Termism
Updated: 5 hours ago
Learn why over-indexing on short-term performance erodes growth, and how to balance brand building and sales activation in your next media budget.
Key Takeaways
1. Short-termism is rising as marketing budgets stall: in WARC's Voice of the Marketer 2026 survey of more than 1,000 marketers, 55% named short-termism among their biggest concerns, up from 25% in 2022, while Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets flat at 7.8% of company revenue.
2. The size of the budget matters more than its efficiency: Les Binet and Will Davies' regression analysis of the IPA Databank found that budget size explains 89% of the variation in net profit, making scale roughly 8x more important than ROI optimization in driving absolute profit growth.
3. The 60:40 brand-to-activation split is a starting benchmark rather than a fixed formula; WARC's guidance points to roughly 30% of spend on equity-led advertising as a minimum floor and treats more than 25% of spend on search as a warning sign of over-reliance on existing demand.
4. Brand and performance deliver the most when planned as one integrated budget, yet a 2026 WARC/ANA survey found only 30% of companies run a single integrated budget with one set of metrics, while 65% keep brand and performance budgets separate.
Table of Contents:
The long and short of it
If you took a marketing class at any point in the last decade, chances are good you've read that reliable staple, The Long and the Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field. Published by the IPA in 2013, the research is now more than a decade old, and its core warning feels more relevant to today's brand campaigns than ever.
As CMOs and brand leaders lock in next year's plans, that relevance is hard to miss. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, cited in WARC's new report Budgets that build brands, shows marketing budgets holding flat at 7.8% of company revenue, with the average budget 18% lower than it was just four years ago. More than 60% of marketers in a WARC/ANA survey have seen budgets flat or down over the past two years and expect the same this year.
When times are tight, it's understandable that marketers feel the pull to close the sale and place disproportionate emphasis on short-term performance metrics. The immediate ROI numbers look attractive, the dashboards update daily, and the CFO likes what they see. But we caution marketers not to lose sight of the long-term brand trajectory. Over-indexing on the short term is a mistake called short-termism, and here's why overcoming it is essential to sustained brand growth.
"Every CMO we work with is being held to revenue, and that pressure is real. But when brands optimize only for what they can attribute this month, they quietly starve the demand that next year's performance depends on. Our job is to bring brand and performance together and prove they work as one system."
TALIA ARNOLD, MANAGING PARTNER, EXVERUS BY BRAINLABS
What is short-termism?
Short-termism is the marketing fallacy of focusing too heavily on acquiring new customers and activating sales, at the expense of building long-term customer retention, loyalty, and brand equity. It rarely looks like a mistake in the moment. It looks like efficiency, right up until acquisition costs creep higher, conversion rates soften, and the brand has fewer people already predisposed to choose it.
In The Long and the Short of It, Binet and Field identified two distinct yet interconnected communication approaches. The "long" refers to brand building over a timeframe of three years or more, while the "short" refers to sales activation within a 12-month horizon.
Several forces steer marketers toward shortsighted strategies:
the rise of digital media suppliers whose reporting rewards immediate response
growing pressure to prove advertising's value in hard numbers, and
a shortage of the statistical skills needed to measure effects that unfold over years rather than weeks.
Budget pressure makes all of it worse.
WARC's research finds that when budgets shrink, marketers are more likely to shift money into performance channels, lean on discounting, and switch to cheaper media. Among marketers expecting budget growth, 51% planned to increase brand investment, compared with just 29% of those expecting a decline.
And concern is climbing fast. In WARC's Voice of the Marketer 2026 survey of more than 1,000 marketers, 55% ranked short-termism among their biggest concerns, up from 25% in 2022. The danger is what WARC calls the "doom loop": when growth slows, brands optimize spend against narrow signals like platform-specific ROAS, which slows growth further and restarts the cycle.
AI-driven ad platforms, which excel at finding and converting in-market buyers, can accelerate that spiral if they become the only play.
The difference between long and short tactics
Identifying what counts as "long" and "short" in real-world media plans can be challenging. Both share the same overarching purpose, which is driving commercial growth, but they operate at different speeds and through different mechanisms.
The short-term, sales activation component shows up in calls to action like visiting a website, purchasing a product, or responding to a limited-time offer. It targets people who are already close to buying, and its effects are big, immediate, and easy to attribute.
Long-term brand building, by contrast, aims to create lasting memories and associations that drive enduring changes in behavior, such as building awareness among new consumers or driving consideration for premium products. Its sales effects are smaller in any given week, but they accumulate and decay slowly.
Binet and Field's original IPA analysis, which covered 996 campaigns across 700 brands and 83 categories, made the relationship clear: there are no long-term effects without short-term effects, but long-term effects are not simply the sum of short-term ones.
Activation is vital for efficiency, while brand building drives growth and profit. You need both, and the same research found that campaigns integrating brand and activation channels outperformed campaigns that relied on either alone.
Any media channel can build brand or drive a sale
Misconceptions often arise when marketers assign media exclusively to one approach or the other. Certain channels may lean naturally toward the long or the short, but any medium can serve both purposes effectively. Retail media, often treated as a pure performance tool, can be harnessed for long-term brand-building objectives, and traditionally "brand" channels like Streaming TV and Audio can be held accountable to business outcomes.
What actually determines whether a tactic builds the brand or activates sales is the objective, the creative, the audience, and, critically, how success is measured. In Media in Focus, Binet and Field observed that activation effects are relatively easy to measure because they tend to be big, immediate, and direct, producing the biggest sales responses within six months or less. Any measurement framework built only on short windows will therefore over-credit activation and under-credit brand, which is short-termism hard-coded into the dashboard.
That's why we redefine what KPIs look like for Streaming, Audio, and Experiential media, connecting brand media to the performance outcomes our clients are increasingly held to. In practice, that means balancing tentpole moments for brand-building impact with an always-on presence in high-intent channels like Retail Media and Search, then using brand lift studies, incrementality testing, and media mix modeling to see the full picture rather than the last click.
Finding the right brand/performance split
The well-known 60:40 rule recommends allocating roughly 60% of a marketing budget to brand building and 40% to sales activation. Though certainly oversimplified, it remains a useful guardrail that helps marketers keep their overall goals in perspective and resist short-termism.
It was never meant as a universal constant. In their follow-up research, Effectiveness in Context, Binet and Field examined how the balance shifts across categories, purchase behaviors, and brand types, while concluding that "there is no context in which short-term sales activation is the primary driver of growth".
WARC's guidance adds two practical guardrails:
A sensible floor for equity-led advertising is around 30% of spend; below that, brand building may struggle to reach enough future buyers to matter.
And in most cases, allocating more than 25% of the budget to search is a warning sign of the doom loop, since search largely captures demand that already exists.
For many brands, Analytic Partners' ROI Genome suggests the optimal share for equity building will exceed 50%, and for some it may approach 70%.
Your brand's starting point matters, too. A framework from BERA.ai featured in the report suggests
Stable, successful brands can run close to a 50/50 split
Brands with high familiarity but fading relevance should lean to roughly 60% brand
Brands with passionate fans but limited familiarity should direct 60% to 90% toward brand; and
Brands with high awareness but low interest may need more than 90% of ad spend on brand to revitalize equity.
Why the size of the budget matters more than the split
Short-termism isn't only about how a budget is divided. It's also about how small budgets get when efficiency becomes the goal. In a regression analysis of the IPA Databank, effectiveness experts Les Binet and Will Davies found that 89% of the variation in net profit is driven by the size of the budget, and only 11% by what marketers do to improve the return on that spend. Sheer scale, in other words, is roughly eight times more important than ROI optimization in driving absolute profit growth.
Binet calls this the paradox of efficiency: ROI tends to peak at very low budget levels, well below the profit-maximizing point, so brands that chase the highest ROI number tend to underspend. The scale thresholds are steep. In the UK, Binet's research found it takes 30 million to 60 million exposures to produce a statistically significant sales uplift, and 200 million to 1 billion exposures to deliver award-winning market share growth.
Pulling back in a downturn carries real risk, too. According to Analytic Partners, brands that increased media investment during the last recession realized 17% growth in incremental sales, and 60% of them saw ROI improve. Meanwhile, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research on brands that stopped broad-reach advertising for a year or more found sales declined in the first year and every year after, with smaller brands and already-declining brands falling fastest.
How to protect brand investment in your next media plan
Set the ratio deliberately, not by default. Start from a benchmark like 60:40, then adjust it for your brand's equity, category, and growth stage. The worst split is the one that emerges by accident as brand line items get trimmed quarter by quarter.
Speak the language of capital, not activity. Marketers tend to lose budget battles when they defend brand investment with awareness and impressions. Instead, tie brand to the levers finance already tracks: pricing power, customer acquisition cost, retention and lifetime value, and distribution leverage. Indicative BERA.ai data from more than 30 marketing mix modeling studies found brand equity contributed an average of 15% of baseline revenue, sales that are at risk when brand building stops.
Match measurement windows to the effect you're measuring. Weekly swings in ROAS, CTR, and CPM reflect seasonality, creative fatigue, and platform noise, not strategy, while the signals that predict future revenue, like brand lift and MMM, need a quarter to become directional. At Exverus, we use dual cadence measurement: weekly check-ins for pacing and spend efficiency, and quarterly reviews of brand lift, awareness, and media mix modeling. Make at least one forward-looking metric, such as awareness, consideration, or brand lift, non-negotiable in every quarterly business review.
Commit to creative consistency. Brand effects compound when audiences see a recognizable platform repeatedly over time. Constantly swapping campaign ideas resets that compounding.
Start the conversation before budget season. Short-termism thrives when the CFO only sees last-click ROI. Building a shared investment logic with finance early, with both sides using the same metrics, helps brand investment survive economic cycles.
FAQs
What is short-termism in marketing?
Short-termism is the tendency to over-invest in sales activation and near-term performance metrics, such as clicks, conversions, and immediate ROAS, while under-investing in long-term brand building. It typically produces strong short-term numbers but weakens growth over time as brand awareness and preference erode and customer acquisition becomes more expensive. In WARC's Voice of the Marketer 2026 survey, 55% of marketers ranked short-termism among their biggest concerns.
What is the 60:40 rule in marketing?
The 60:40 rule is a budgeting guideline from Les Binet and Peter Field's IPA research recommending that brands allocate roughly 60% of marketing investment to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term sales activation. It was derived from an analysis of 996 campaigns in the IPA Effectiveness Databank and is best used as a starting benchmark rather than a fixed rule.
Does the 60:40 split apply to every brand?
No. The right balance depends on a brand's category, maturity, and existing equity. A BERA.ai framework featured in WARC's Budgets that build brands report suggests stable, successful brands can run close to 50/50, while brands with high awareness but low interest may need more than 90% of ad spend on brand building to revitalize equity.
What is the minimum share of a marketing budget that should go to brand building?
WARC's guidance suggests a floor of around 30% of spend on equity-led advertising. Below that level, returns tend to drop off significantly because brand-building activity struggles to reach enough future buyers. For many brands, the optimal share is considerably higher, often above 50%.
Does the size of a marketing budget matter more than how efficiently it's spent?
In absolute profit terms, yes. Les Binet and Will Davies' regression analysis of the IPA Databank found that budget size explains 89% of the variation in net profit, while ROI optimization explains only 11%. Because ROI tends to peak at low spend levels, brands that chase the highest ROI number often underspend and leave profit on the table.
How long does brand advertising take to show results?
Brand-building effects build gradually and decay slowly, so they are best evaluated over a year or more. Because most category buyers are not in market at any given time, budget shifts aimed at future buyers may take several quarters to show an effect, which is why short measurement windows tend to undervalue brand investment.
Can performance channels like paid social and search build a brand?
Yes. No channel is inherently limited to brand or performance. Paid social, streaming, programmatic, and retail media can all support long-term brand goals when they are planned with broad-reach objectives, consistent creative, and measurement that looks beyond immediate conversions.
How should brands measure the impact of brand building?
Brands can measure brand building with a combination of brand lift studies, incrementality testing, media mix modeling that accounts for brand equity, and longitudinal brand health tracking. Exverus recommends dual cadence measurement, with weekly reporting for pacing and spend efficiency and quarterly reporting for brand lift, awareness, and MMM. Linking shifts in brand equity to baseline revenue then helps translate brand performance into terms the CFO already uses.
Should brands cut brand advertising during an economic downturn?
Cutting brand investment can protect short-term margins, but the evidence points to long-term costs. Analytic Partners found brands that increased media investment during the last recession saw 17% growth in incremental sales, and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research shows sales decline every year a brand stays dark, with smaller brands falling fastest.
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AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.
