How we think · The Long View
A serious advertising budget should have a memory.
Most marketing is planned one campaign, channel and quarter at a time.
That accounts for plenty of activity. It doesn’t always add up to growth.
The Long View is one connected plan that builds demand, captures it, and gets more effective as the market gets to know you.
Not another media engine. A growth system with a memory.
Talk to us about The Long ViewThe frame
Your brand is an asset. Advertising is how you build it.
A strong brand lives in people’s heads: recognised quickly, remembered easily, considered when they’re ready to buy.
Those memories make you easier to notice, trust and choose. So we treat advertising as an investment in an asset, not a cost that vanishes when the campaign ends.
The balance sheet sees
Goodwill.A logo. A line in the accounts.
The market sees
Memory.Instant recognition on a crowded shelf. The brand that comes to mind when somebody reaches for the category.
The balance sheet might call it goodwill.
The market calls it knowing who you are.
“Mental and physical availability, and the brand’s distinctive iconography are assets that can be sold. They are brand equity.”
Prof. Byron Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
01. Start with the growth ambition.
Don't ask what percentage of revenue to spend. Ask what share of the market you intend to earn.
Benchmarks are a useful sanity check. They can’t tell you what your ambition needs.
Better questions:
- How large is the opportunity?
- How strong are the competitors?
- How much category attention do they command?
- How quickly are we trying to grow?
To hold position, brands usually need a share of voice in line with their market share. To grow, they usually need more.
Evidence
Share growth tracks excess share of voice, though the return varies by category, brand size and creative quality.
Hold 10% of the market but run 20% of the category's advertising, and you have +10 ESOV. An illustration, not a forecast.
Source: Binet & Field, IPA Databank 1998–2008 consumer cases, via The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing; Media in Focus, IPA.
02. Be present before people are ready to buy.
Buyers enter the market on their timetable, not your campaign calendar.
Most of your future buyers aren’t buying today.
Advertising’s job is to be remembered when they are. Go quiet between bursts and memory fades, and those buyers go to whoever stayed present.
Always-on doesn’t mean the same volume every week. It means staying present, with moments of real intensity.
Consistency builds memory. Intensity creates moments. A good plan needs both.
Source: Dawes, “Advertising effectiveness and the 95-5 rule”, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2021.
03. Growth comes from more buyers.
You can't loyalty-card your way to scale.
Existing customers matter. But growth mostly comes from reaching more people, including light, occasional and future buyers.
Bigger brands tend to have more loyal customers because they’re bigger, not because they’ve found a different kind of customer.
Evidence
IPA analysis finds stronger business effects from campaigns aimed at new customers than from those aimed only at existing ones.
- Existing customers: 0.6 very large business effects per campaign
- New customers: 1.7 very large business effects per campaign
- Whole market: 1.8 very large business effects per campaign
Source: Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, Figs. 18 and 21.
04. Brand and activation do different jobs.
Promotions rent this week's sales. Brand advertising helps own next year's.
Activation converts demand that already exists: a price, an offer, a search result, a shelf.
Brand advertising builds the demand activation converts. It works more slowly and lasts longer.
Ask activation to do both jobs and budget drifts towards whatever sits closest to the sale, until there are fewer new buyers left to convert. The right balance differs for every business.
Fund tomorrow's demand while converting today's.
- Consumer average
- FMCG
- Retail
- Financial services
Source: IPA Databank, via Binet & Field, The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, Fig. 6; The Long and the Short of It, IPA.
05. Emotion is commercial.
People rarely calculate their way to a brand.
Most choices involve less deliberation than we’d like to think. People notice what’s distinctive, remember what made them feel something, and reach for what feels familiar.
So creativity isn’t the opposite of effectiveness. It’s how advertising earns attention and memory.
Evidence
In the IPA Databank, long-running emotional campaigns outperform rational ones on profit.
- Rational: 23% reporting very large profit growth
- Emotional: 43% reporting very large profit growth
Source: Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, Fig. 53.
Creatively awarded campaigns were 11 times as efficient at driving market-share growth as non-awarded ones.
Source: Binet & Field, The Link Between Creativity and Effectiveness, Thinkbox/IPA, Fig. 06.
06. Fame changes the economics.
Being known by more people makes every channel work harder.
Fame isn’t celebrity. It’s being easy to recall in the market you need to win.
A famous brand starts every buying situation ahead. Its search results get clicked, its shelf gets noticed, and its ads don’t arrive from a stranger.
Brand builds familiarity. Performance converts it. Distinctive creative connects the two.
- SalesFame campaigns: 55%Other campaigns: 47%
- ProfitFame campaigns: 35%Other campaigns: 21%
- PenetrationFame campaigns: 34%Other campaigns: 28%
- Market shareFame campaigns: 32%Other campaigns: 29%
- LoyaltyFame campaigns: 14%Other campaigns: 9%
- Price sensitivityFame campaigns: 8%Other campaigns: 3%
Source: Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, Fig. 60.
One brief. One memory. One commercial plan.
This isn’t a case for spending more on brand. It’s one commercial brief held across the year, instead of campaigns that keep starting over.
That brief connects:
- The commercial growth ambition.
- The customers the business must reach.
- The behaviour that needs to change.
- The role of brand and activation.
- The creative platform people should come to recognise.
- The channels best suited to each job.
- The evidence required to make the next investment decision.
Plans, budgets and creative can all change.
But the brand does not return to zero every quarter.
What The Long View produces.
A commercial growth brief
One shared view of the growth problem, the opportunity and the behaviour that matters.
An investment architecture
A clear role for brand, activation, performance and testing, tied to commercial priorities.
A durable creative platform
One recognisable idea that can evolve across channels and years without wearing out.
A connected media plan
Media chosen for the job, not for an agency department.
A measurement framework
Short-term response read alongside penetration, new customers, branded search, sales and share.
Better decisions over time
A plan that remembers what it learned and makes each campaign part of something bigger.
Build the year. Not just the next campaign.
We start with the business, not a media answer.
We look at your ambition, position, customers and past investment, then find where the next dollar is most likely to create value.
Sometimes that’s more brand. Often it’s better creative, stronger activation or sharper use of what’s already in market.
Your data. Our view. In writing. In two weeks.
Evidence base
The Long View draws on established effectiveness research, including Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA Databank work and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research on penetration and mental availability.
We treat it as principles, not formulas. Your category and economics shape the final call.
- Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, 2013
- Binet & Field, Media in Focus, IPA
- Binet & Field, The Link Between Creativity and Effectiveness, Thinkbox/IPA
- Binet & Field, The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, B2B Institute/IPA, 2019
- Romaniuk, Sharp, Dawes & Faghidno, How B2B Brands Grow, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2021
- Sharp, How Brands Grow, OUP, 2010
- The IPA Databank leans towards award-entered, successful work. Treat ratios as guides, not targets.