This publication is the eagerly anticipated update of Marketing in the Era of Accountability, examining the impact of timescales of effect, exploring the tension between long and short-term strategies for brands and businesses as well as providing evidence-based recommendations on how best to approach investment in advertising. Les Binet and Peter Field return to explore a vital new area: how campaign results develop over time. This report focuses on a growing tension that exists between short-term response activity and long-term brand-building. Increasingly, there is a tendency to use very short-term online metrics as primary performance measures and this has dangerous implications for long-term success. Anyone involved in the complex world of multi-channel campaign development and evaluation needs to have a clear understanding of how short-term and long-term effects are different.

The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies

Business & Money

Les Binet

Peter Field

Marketing & Sales

Institute of Practitioners in Advertising

Media in Focus, written by Les Binet and Peter Field, takes the changing media landscape as its focus and addresses, among others, the issues of: Does mass marketing still work? Is tight targeting now the most efficient approach? Is unpaid making paid media redundant? It also investigates the broader issues of budgeting, planning and reporting, and challenges the industry to reconsider approaches to efficiency, ROMI and measurement strategy. It is the first part of a new series about Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era, produced in association with Google and Thinkbox, and updates the media-related findings of the IPA's two previous analyses of the IPA Databank: Marketing in the Era of Accountability (WARC 2007) and The Long and the Short of It (IPA 2013).

Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era

This newest IPA report by the marketing experts, Les Binet and Peter Field, uses evidence from hundreds of Effectiveness Awards case histories collated in the IPA Databank, to show how successful marketing strategy is shaped by the context in which brands and businesses operate. Building on previous IPA Databank reports which identified what makes for effective, long-term marketing, the authors show how marketers can adapt some general principles to the particular context of their brands. It is part of a series of reports on Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era, and builds on the launch of the IPA's cross-industry EffWorks initiative (www.effwords.co.uk). The previous report, Media in Focus (IPA, 2017), updated the media-related findings of two earlier IPA Databank analyses: The Long and the Short of It, (IPA 2013) and Marketing in the Era of Accountability (WARC 2007).

Effectiveness in Context: A Manual for Brand Building

Les Binet and Peter Field

Using a unique mix of neuroscience, cultural history and advertising research, the study shows how an increase in abstract, left-brain thinking has spread across business and popular culture and how this is undermining creativity and making advertising less effective. Crucially, it also provides practical advice to reverse this decline. According to the 130-page publication, the reasons underlying the crisis relate to the way the brain attends to the world: the same instincts that lie behind short-termism and narrow focus are resulting in work that is flat, abstract, dislocated and devitalised - advertising that doesn't move people. An attentional shift has occurred in business and society; a change in thinking style that has left its mark not just on advertising, but also on popular culture

Lemon. How the advertising brain turned sour.

Orlando Wood

Look out An advertising guide for a world that’s turning inwards. Look out is a study of attention and its implications for advertising. It describes how our attention narrows following periods of technological disruption and how this can result in increased levels of detachment, fear and aggression – as Wood puts it – in culture turning inwards. This is the context in which advertising is being made today, and Wood reveals this narrowing of attention in the advertising sounds and images around us – the rigid ‘stare’, the loss of human vitality, the overuse of the word, the rhythmic soundtrack, its stasis and symmetry. Using attention, emotion and business effectiveness data, Look out shows how this kind of advertising, far from drawing people in, pushes audiences away. When companies move online they lose their physical availability, and so too their mental availability. Brand building advertising therefore becomes more important because it maintains the mental availability that is otherwise lost. To create the effective and memorable advertising that’s needed, Look out urges advertisers to capture the ‘broad-beam’ attention of audiences. The book describes how this can be achieved through advertising with an appreciation of human uniqueness, movement and ‘betweenness’, with character, incident and place, with humour, music and warmth of colour. But to succeed the industry must broaden its attentional plane, Wood argues – it must look out.

Look out