Brand vs performance is a fake war sold by people selling both

I have sold brand. I have sold performance. I have done it in-house, and I have done it from the agency side. The pitch changed each time. The thing being sold did not. Every version ended with the same line: your budget needs more of this.

Every founder I meet has been told the same two things. You need brand and performance, roughly 60/40. And the fight between them is the big strategic question in marketing.

Here is what I think after years on both sides of that table. The war is a media-mix argument. The framing that made it famous came from the people who sell media. And it answers a question most founders are not facing.

The 60:40 rule came from an agency trade body, built on agency award entries. The sellers of the bundle and the author of the rule disagree with each other, and both positions sell more media. When someone ran a real experiment, the answer was about who you reach, not which kind of ad you buy. And a growth system allocates to its constraint, which is rarely media.

1. The 60:40 rule was written by the agency trade body, from agency award entries

Ask where 60:40 comes from, and most people say “the research”. The research is The Long and the Short of It, by Les Binet and Peter Field, published by the IPA in 2013. The IPA is the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the membership body for UK advertising agencies.

The method was a meta-analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank: 996 campaigns, 700 brands, 83 categories. Every one of those campaigns was an entry to the IPA Effectiveness Awards. Agencies wrote the entries. The slide that launched a thousand budget decks reads: “Activation share of budget. Optimum: ~40%. The 60:40 rule.”

Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put it bluntly in 2022: “they analysed a very weird data set, which is award submissions”. And then: “People wanted a number.”

Think about who is in that dataset. Big brands, with agencies that enter awards. Jake Higgins asked the obvious question in 2023: “How many successful startups do you know who submit campaigns into the IPA effectiveness awards? None.” If you run a Series A company in Singapore, you are not in the sample. The rule was never about you.

💡 Key Takeaway: 60:40 describes what won awards for agencies, published by the body those agencies belong to. Read it as a trade position.

2. The sellers of the bundle and the author of the rule disagree, and both sell more media

The platforms took the rule and sold a bundle. Google’s word for it is “full-funnel”. A Google managing director wrote in 2022 that full-funnel strategies see up to 45% higher ROI than single-stage campaigns. The source was a Google-commissioned Nielsen study of 21 packaged-goods brands. Run brand and performance together on Google, and buy both.

Now listen to the man who wrote the rule. Les Binet told Marketing Week in 2024: “Where I think we get it wrong is when we want to do both jobs at the same time… They’re different jobs.”

So the platform says bundle them. The author says keep them apart. They cannot both be right. Now notice what they share. Both answers end with you buying more media. The war has two sides and one cash register.

3. When someone ran the experiment, the line fell between new and existing customers

In 2015, three economists published a large field experiment on paid search, run at eBay. The result went to Econometrica. Brand-keyword ads had “no measurable short-term benefits”. Non-brand ads worked, but only on “new and infrequent users”. Frequent users “account for most of the advertising expenses”, and they would have bought anyway. Average returns were negative.

Look at where the line fell. It ran between people who already bought from eBay and people who did not. Brand-keyword ads sit on the performance side of every media plan, and at eBay they were reaching existing customers. The labels never entered it.

A sceptical founder will say: that is eBay, and everyone already knows eBay. Correct, and that is the finding. Two years later a team ran a similar test at Edmunds.com, a more typical company, and lost more than half of its paid traffic. The answer flipped because the share of the market that was already theirs was different.

That share moves as a company grows. Early on, almost nobody is a customer yet, and every dollar reaches someone new. Late on, most buyers already buy, and the marginal ad reaches someone who was coming anyway. So the allocation depends on your growth stage, and no ratio carries across stages.

Stage matters a second way. Lewis and Rao studied 25 large advertising experiments worth USD 2.8 million. The median confidence interval on return was over 100 percentage points wide. An informative test can need more than 10 million person-weeks. A Series A company cannot run that test, so it sets the split by argument. The loudest arguments come from sellers.

💡 Key Takeaway: The real question is who you still need to reach, and whether your data can tell them apart. Both change with stage. Where you cannot run the test, the ratio is someone’s opinion. Check who is paid to hold it.

4. A growth system allocates to the constraint, and the constraint moves with stage

Here is how allocation actually works. You find the constraint. You put money and people against it. You move to the next one. Media is one constraint among several, and where it sits depends on your stage.

• Before the product holds. The constraint is whether users who arrive stay and pay. Every new customer bought with media leaks out again, so media of any kind is buying churn. Fund activation, pricing and the one distribution channel that already works without ads.
• Scaling. Now the constraint is reaching new customers at a cost the unit economics can survive. Media becomes a real lever here. The allocation is new versus existing, in whatever format reaches the new ones. Before spending, check one thing: can your own data tell a new customer from a returning one? eBay could. Most companies cannot.
• Mature. Most of the market already buys from you. The marginal ad reaches someone who was coming anyway, as at eBay. The constraint moves to retention, expansion, pricing power or a new market. Media has to earn its place with an experiment.

At no stage was the question “brand or performance”. The question was who you still need to reach, and what stops them from staying once they arrive. Most founders I meet are arguing about the split while activation leaks and the data cannot separate new from returning. The argument feels strategic. Every word of it belongs to the people selling the lever.

Final Thoughts: the war is fake because both sides win it

Brand versus performance is a real argument inside a media plan. Two agencies can have it for years. What it never was is the question that decides whether your company grows.

The rule came from a trade body, built on agency award entries. The bundle came from a platform. The experiments drew the line somewhere else entirely: between customers you already have and customers you still need. That line moves as you grow, and so does the constraint in front of it. Before the product holds, the constraint is whether anyone stays. While scaling, it is reaching new buyers at a cost you can survive. Once mature, it is almost everything except the marginal ad.

So next time someone opens a deck with a 60:40 pie chart, ask two questions first. What stage are we at? And who do we still need to reach? If the answer comes back as a media line, you know what they are selling.

If you want a second opinion on where your constraint is, book a discovery call or connect with me on LinkedIn.

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A note before you close this tab. If your top of funnel has been thinning for reasons nobody can quite explain, the cause may not sit in your strategy. It may sit in your reporting defaults. That is fixable, and the fix starts with naming what your model cannot see.

Mervyn Chua is a growth-transformation consultant helping founders and CEOs build the strategic clarity and systems to grow in an AI-first world. If this raises questions worth exploring for your brand, let’s talk.