“Small thinking” is killing advertising, warn Binet and Davis in latest IPA report
Advertising effectiveness is being undermined by a fixation on short-termism, narrow metrics and underinvestment, the latest IPA report has found.
In the report, Go Big or Go Home, released today, Les Binet, an authority on marketing effectiveness, and Will Davis, chief data officer and co-owner of Media Lab, warn that “small thinking” is killing advertising and call on the industry to “think big” again to unlock real business growth.
Binet says: “We need to stop gazing at our navels and our dashboards. We need to get out there and make waves. We need to create emotion at scale. We need to do things that make the public laugh, cry, or gasp. We need to make things that people will remember all their lives.
“We need to go big or go home.”
According to Binet and Davis’ analysis, research and case studies contained within the report, the industry is too focused on efficiency at the expense of effectiveness.
Binet and Davis argue that businesses are damaging profits by prioritising the wrong metrics, ignoring valuable customers, underestimating the importance of budget-setting and missing major media opportunities. They also warn that inefficient creative approaches mean many campaigns fail to deliver sufficient return.
Efficiency vs effectiveness
The report’s central argument is about better budget-setting and argues that, rather than optimising for short-term ROI alone, marketers should focus on market share growth, margins, profits, and shareholder value.
Binet and Davis acknowledge that marketers’ preoccupation with short-termism often comes from financial pressures to prove their department is a “profit centre”, and ROI provides immediate, defensible data points. But, they argue, this leads to a “‘marketing death spiral’ – where budgets get cut because they are no longer driving meaningful business growth, despite having a high ‘efficiency’ score on a dashboard”.
The authors also call for stronger collaboration among marketing, finance, and sales teams, better training in commercial and financial thinking, and more research into the long-term effects of advertising, including pricing power, emotion, memory, attention, and broader stakeholder influence.
Davis says: “The shift from ‘small thinking’ to ‘big media’ isn’t born of nostalgia; it’s born of forensic necessity.
“Medialab was founded 21 years ago as performance marketing specialists, built specifically to prove how every marketing pound worked. We have observed a consistent, undeniable pattern: the ‘performance ceiling.’ Even the most aggressively optimised campaigns eventually plateau.
“When Costs Per Acquisition (CPAs) begin to climb and performance peaks, the data tells us that efficiency has hit its limit. At that point, you don’t need more optimisation; you need to go broader.”
Big budgets
In the report, Binet and Davis also identify three key factors that determine long-term effectiveness: budget, number of media, and creative.
They suggest that only when you have all three factors do you get “big effects”. They argue a “big budget” is required because “the more you spend, the more you sell”; “big media” means “the more media you use, the bigger the effects”; and “big creative” is “famous, emotional ads” that will resonate.
However, ultimately, effectiveness is largely about budget and scale because “clever media and outstanding creative won’t deliver if the budget is too small”.
The report concludes with a challenge to the wider industry to celebrate work that genuinely connects with the public, rather than advertising designed primarily to impress other marketers.
More from Les Binet
The report comes a month after Binet spoke about brand-building effectiveness during a panel about attention and memory at The Media Leader’s Future of Brands. You can watch the full panel below.