Think Small

Sweating the small stuff in advertising, for the people spending their own money on it.

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The 60/40 rule says spend 60% on brand and 40% on getting sales. At a few thousand dollars a month, there usually isn't enough money for the brand half to do anything.

The 60/40 rule says a business should spend 60% of its advertising budget on building the brand — getting remembered, getting recognized, getting trusted before anyone's ready to buy — and 40% on getting people to actually buy right now. It comes out of work done by researchers Les Binet and Peter Field, and it has become one of the most repeated numbers in advertising. Ask most marketing consultants how to split an ad budget and you'll hear some version of it.

The trouble starts when a business owner spending two or three thousand dollars a month tries to apply it literally. Allocating $1,200 a month to brand building doesn't do anything close to what the same ratio does for a company spending seven figures a quarter. The rule doesn't fail because brand building is a bad idea. It fails because the rule was built for a different scale of spending than most small businesses have.

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Ready enough to launch beats one more round of edits.

October 24, 2026

Herbert Simon's idea of satisficing—stopping at good-enough instead of chasing perfect—and new research on the Cost of Dull, a body of work showing emotionally flat ads are the real failure mode, both point the same direction: stop hunting for the perfect ad and launch the one that clears a real bar.

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The $500 test plan for splitting a small ad budget.

October 23, 2026

A $500 ad test only teaches you something if you limit it to two or three variants and give each one enough spend to produce a real signal — split it five ways and you're paying for noise, not answers.

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