Les Binet

Who they are: Les Binet is Group Head of Effectiveness at the advertising agency adam&eveDDB and one of the most widely cited researchers on how advertising pays back. With Peter Field he wrote The Long and the Short of It, published by the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) in 2013.

The concept HaELM draws from: Binet and Peter Field separate brand building, which builds memory and preference over time and pays back slowly, from sales activation, which prompts a purchase now and pays back quickly. Working from the IPA Databank of effectiveness case studies, they found that about 60% of budget on brand building and 40% on activation gave the best balance. Decode uses the split to explain why a Google Maps hunt with no ticket link is brand building: any sale it drives happens later, somewhere else, and can’t be traced back to it.

Decode articles where their thinking appears: Spider-Man: Brand New Day × Google Maps: A Film Promotion Built into a Daily Habit

Source: IPA, “The next chapter for The Long and the Short of It”; IPA Effectiveness Leadership Group, “Les Binet”; Alex Murrell, summary of The Long and the Short of It.