The 95% of Marketing That Actually Works (Spoiler: It's Not What Gets Measured)

Why the industry's obsession with short-term metrics is destroying long-term value

The Investment Gap Nobody Measures

How marketing lost sight of what drives growth

Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank shows that brand building should receive approximately 60% of marketing budgets for optimal effectiveness, with 40% going to sales activation. Yet their research indicates most organizations have inverted this ratio, focusing heavily on short-term activation.

The effectiveness difference is significant. According to their book "The Long and the Short of It," campaigns that balance long-term brand building with short-term activation outperform activation-heavy strategies on multiple business metrics. The data spans thousands of case studies from 1998-2018.

This isn't theoretical. When brands shift to activation-heavy strategies, they see initial sales spikes that decay within weeks. Binet describes these as the "carbs of advertising"—a sugar rush followed by a crash. Meanwhile, brand building acts as the "protein of advertising," creating mental structures that bias behavior for years, according to their research published in "Effectiveness in Context."

The Emotion Equation Everyone Ignores

Rational persuasion is declining in effectiveness

The most significant finding from Binet and Field's analysis of the IPA database wasn't about budgets or channels—it was about emotion. Their research in "Marketing in the Era of Accountability" found that campaigns using purely emotional content consistently outperformed those using rational messages.

According to their analysis, emotional campaigns delivered stronger results across brand metrics. For brand building specifically, emotional campaigns generated more "very large business effects" compared to rational campaigns in the IPA case studies they examined.

The only area where rational messaging showed strength was in short-term direct response campaigns. For long-term metrics—awareness, differentiation, trust—emotional campaigns demonstrated superior performance in their research.

Yet marketing presentations remain focused on product features and rational benefits. The industry has evidence that emotion drives effectiveness but continues defaulting to logic-based arguments in creative briefs and campaigns.

The Price Power Secret Hidden in Plain Sight

Brand building supports pricing strategies

Binet's presentation at Kantar's Ignite 2023 event highlighted research showing that long-term brand building campaigns can reduce price sensitivity more effectively than other marketing activities. The analysis suggests creative brand campaigns help maintain pricing power.

According to Binet's research, price promotions tend to increase price elasticity, training customers to wait for deals. Short-term activation campaigns showed limited ability to support premium pricing in the cases studied. However, emotional, fame-driving brand campaigns demonstrated stronger ability to maintain price premiums.

The mechanism appears to be psychological rather than rational. Strong brands create emotional connections that can influence purchase decisions beyond pure price comparison. This may explain pricing differences between strongly branded products and functionally similar alternatives.

Binet's research suggests premium brands need sustained investment to maintain pricing power, with returns coming through margins rather than just volume growth.

The Fame Factor That Changes Everything

Why awareness and reach still matter

According to Binet and Field's research, campaigns that aim for "fame" deliver stronger results than other types of marketing. Fame campaigns—those designed to get people talking and generate media coverage—show particular effectiveness in reducing price sensitivity and increasing mental availability.

The IPA data suggests fame doesn't require celebrity endorsements or massive budgets. Rather, it means creating advertising that enters cultural conversation and becomes part of how people discuss a category. Creativity that encourages sharing appears to be a key route to achieving fame effects.

The relationship between share of voice and share of market, documented for over 50 years, remains relevant because fame amplifies voice. Brands with memorable, talked-about campaigns can achieve outsized impact relative to their media spend.

The compound effect builds over time. Famous brands typically require less media investment to maintain market position and benefit from earned media coverage. This creates efficiency through what initially appears to be inefficient spending on creative development.

The Digital Measurement Trap

More data, less growth

Digital marketing promised perfect measurement and delivered perfect myopia. Marketers now have more data than ever and less effectiveness than ever. The IPA database shows marketing effectiveness at historic lows despite—or because of—our ability to measure everything instantly.

The addiction to short-term metrics has created what Field calls "the era of shit marketing." Immediate feedback loops—clicks, conversions, engagement—feel like effectiveness but correlate weakly with long-term growth. Brands optimize for metrics that feel good but mean nothing.

E-commerce made it worse. Now every business has real-time sales data creating real-time pressure for real-time results. The quarterly earnings call has become the marketing strategy. The dashboard has become the decision maker. The algorithm has become the CMO.

Meanwhile, the things that actually drive growth—mental availability, emotional engagement, fame, differentiation—resist easy measurement. They build slowly, compound invisibly, and pay back unpredictably. So they get ignored in favor of metrics that update hourly but matter barely.

The Training Crisis Nobody Discusses

Marketing's expertise gap is widening

"Marketing is complex and requires solid understanding of psychology, economics, and data analysis," Binet argues. Yet most marketers receive less formal training than baristas. The result? An industry that confuses activity with effectiveness, correlation with causation, and measurement with management.

In finance or medicine, rigorous training is mandatory. In marketing, it's optional. This gap leads to over-reliance on easily accessible metrics, vendor promises, and industry mythology. Marketers literally don't know what they don't know.

The expertise gap shows in budget allocation. Despite decades of evidence for the 60/40 rule, most brands still overspend on activation. Despite proof that emotional campaigns outperform rational ones, most creative briefs focus on product benefits. Despite fame driving exponential returns, most campaigns aim for efficiency.

Professional development in marketing focuses on tools and platforms, not principles and psychology. Marketers know how to use Google Ads but not how advertising works. They can optimize a campaign but not explain why people buy things. They're operators, not strategists.

The 2026 Inflection Point

Why the next 18 months will separate winners from zombies

Interest rates killed the "era of free money," forcing companies to deliver actual profits. Inflation made pricing power essential. Economic uncertainty made brand strength critical. The conditions that allowed performance marketing to dominate have reversed.

Brands that invested in long-term building during the easy money era now have pricing power during inflation. Those that chased activation have nothing but higher CAC and lower margins. The bill for a decade of short-termism is coming due.

By 2026, the separation will be complete. Brands with strong mental availability will raise prices while others discount. Famous brands will need less media spend while unknown brands pay more for less. Emotional connections will drive loyalty while rational benefits become table stakes.

The question isn't whether to invest in brand building. It's whether there's still time. Building mental structures takes years. Creating fame takes consistency. Developing emotional bonds takes patience. The brands starting now might already be too late.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Marketing

Most of what gets measured doesn't matter

Here's what 15 years of Binet and Field's research actually proves: 95% of marketing activity focuses on the 5% that barely matters. Short-term activation, performance optimization, and tactical campaigns dominate budgets and attention while contributing minimally to long-term success.

The industry has built elaborate measurement systems for the wrong things. Attribution models that assign credit randomly. Dashboards that display vanity metrics. Reports that confuse correlation with causation. All while the actual drivers of growth—emotion, fame, mental availability—go unmeasured because they're hard to quantify.

The solution isn't better measurement. It's better marketing. Invest in creative that builds memory structures. Focus on fame that compounds over time. Build emotional connections that transcend rational comparison. Do the things that matter, not the things that measure.

Marketing effectiveness isn't declining because the discipline doesn't work. It's declining because marketers have forgotten how it works. The principles haven't changed. The evidence hasn't changed. Only the willingness to follow it has changed.

The 95% of marketing that actually works can't be measured in real-time, can't be optimized by algorithms, and can't be reduced to dashboards. It works on human time, not digital time. It builds on emotion, not information. It compounds through memory, not media.

That's not a bug. That's the feature.