The finding almost nobody acts on

Speaking at Google Marketing Live in Sydney in June 2026, Binet put it about as bluntly as he ever has. His research found that the main driver of profit isn't return on investment - it's the size of the budget, by a factor of eight or nine to one. His data shows that budget is nine times more important than ROI, and that suggests that the most important decision in marketing is actually how much to spend.

The same research asked CMOs what they believed, and they said ROI mattered roughly twice as much as budget. So, the people setting the spend hold the inverse view to Binet, and every dashboard they look at each morning confirms that view.

That's the trap. A measurement system that reliably rewards the wrong instinct.

You can hit a brilliant ROI by shrinking

This is the bit that gets missed when ROI is treated as the scoreboard. ROI is a ratio, and the fastest way to improve a ratio is to shrink the denominator. Cut everything except the spend aimed at people who were probably going to buy anyway, and your efficiency numbers will look superb while the business quietly gets smaller.

There's hard evidence that this is exactly what happens. Blake, Nosko and Tadelis ran a large-scale field experiment at eBay, published by NBER in 2014 and later in Econometrica, that switched off paid search across parts of the US. Branded keyword ads showed no measurable short-term benefit whatsoever; people searching for eBay found eBay. On non-branded terms new and infrequent users did respond, but most of the money was going to existing frequent buyers who didn't, and average returns came out negative.

Their wider conclusion should unsettle anyone reading an attribution report: conventional measurement substantially overstates paid search effectiveness, because clicks and purchases are correlated anyway. A lot of advertising isn't causing the sale - instead, it’s standing next to it and taking the credit.

James Hurman, renowned effectiveness expert and co-founder of our favourite brand health providers, Tracksuit, spoke plainly about the findings fromTracksuit’s Awareness Advantage report: "there is no correlation between click-through rate and commercial performance. We're here to drive sales and growth."

He said it. The click isn't the outcome. We’ve just learnt to see it as one.

Thirteen years of being told, and barely a shift

Binet and Field's 60:40 split between brand building and activation has been public since 2013. Their 2018 update, Effectiveness in Context, barely moved, landing at 62:38. Binet was still recommending roughly 60:40 brand to performance from a stage in June 2026.

Meanwhile Peter Field's IPA report The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness, launched at Cannes in June 2019, looked at nearly 600 case studies from 1996 to 2018 and found the efficiency advantage of creatively awarded work had collapsed. Between 1996 and 2008 it was roughly twelve times that of non-awarded campaigns. By the 2006 to 2018 window, it had fallen below four times. Field put the cause down to short-termism rather than any change in how creativity works.

In May 2026 the IPA published Go Big or Go Home, by Binet and Will Davis of Medialab, arguing that small thinking is killing advertising. Three culprits: short-termism, narrow performance metrics, underinvestment. The same three. Binet's line was that the industry needs to create emotion at scale and make things people remember all their lives.

Thirteen years. Same finding. Same non-response.

What actually breaks, in order

Let’s look at the business case to demonstrate how the damage plays out.

Pricing power first is the first to go, and quietly. Brands built on distinctiveness and meaning can hold a price. Brands built on the last click compete on the offer, because the offer is the only reason anyone came. That shows up as margin erosion long before it shows up in a brand tracker.

Then, future customers go. Performance media, by design, spends where intent already exists. It cannot reach the far larger group who aren't in the market this quarter but will be next year, because nobody is building the memory those people will need.

Back to our friends at Tracksuit, and as James Hurman puts it: "Marketing has two jobs to do. One is to convert the demand that's in the market right now, and the other is to build future demand". That’s the people who aren't in the category today but will be next year.

Unfortunately, performance media can only do the first job.

You lose your defence third, and this is the one that really hurts. When the budget conversation comes and the only evidence you own is efficiency evidence, the honest answer to "what happens if we cut it" is that efficiency will improve. So it gets cut. That's how a marketing function talks itself out of the room.

What changes when the brand strategy comes first

Every one of those failures is a positioning failure before it's a media failure. You can’t brief distinctive work from a proposition that says the same thing as your competitors.

You can’t defend a long-term budget without an argument about what the brand is, and you can't set the right split between brand and performance until someone has decided what the brand is actually meant to be doing.

When you work with us, we ask: what does this brand stand for, who is it genuinely for, and what would make someone choose it when nothing is discounted? When we get that right, the decisions get easier and the creative briefs get sharper because there’s something true to be interesting about. Budget conversations change shape, because you're defending a position rather than an Excel line, and the metrics stop running the strategy.

If you recognise the pause at the top of this piece, that's usually the tell. We'd be glad to have the conversation and a cuppa.