Say you run a ten-table restaurant and you've got $600 a month for Facebook and Instagram ads. Somebody tells you about the 60/40 rule: put 60% into brand advertising, 40% into performance ads that push for the sale. Sounds tidy. Sounds like something you could set up in your ad manager this afternoon.
Except there's a problem hiding in the instruction. The 60/40 rule wasn't built for a business with one ad budget. It was built for companies that already have two separate line items: a brand budget, usually managed by an agency running TV or big digital campaigns, and a performance or activation budget, usually managed by a different team chasing clicks and conversions. The rule tells those companies how to split money they've already decided to keep in two buckets. If you don't have two buckets, the rule isn't giving you an answer. It's asking you a question you haven't set up yet.
Where the number actually came from.
The 60/40 split comes from Les Binet and Peter Field's 2013 IPA report 'The Long and the Short of It', still described by the IPA itself as the most influential effectiveness report in the databank. Binet and Field tested different allocation splits against years of campaign results and found a pattern: spend everything on brand and you starve short-term sales, spend everything on performance and you slowly erode the brand, raising your acquisition costs over time. A 50/50 split does better than either extreme. But according to Deep Marketing's summary of the research, 60/40 outperformed 50/50 for combined short- and long-term profit, at least for the case they modeled: a new, non-food consumer goods brand.
That detail is doing a lot of quiet work: a new non-food FMCG brand, meaning a fast-moving consumer goods company selling things like shampoo or snacks that people buy often and without much thought, launching into a category with no existing recognition. It's the specific scenario the original ratio was calibrated to. Binet and Field never claimed every brand in every category should run the same split, and their own 2018 follow-up, 'Effectiveness in Context', said so directly: the right ratio shifts by category, business model, and how established the brand already is. So the split you choose has to match your own category and stage, not a formula built for someone else's launch, which is why Knowing judges an ad against the goal you set for it.
The rule was never one number.
The framework behind 60/40 was always three tables, not one ratio: a table for the brand-to-activation split, a separate table for how much you should be spending overall, and a third for what return you should expect on that spending. Campaign's writeup of the research lays out the logic for adjusting the split. Where buying decisions lean emotional, brand advertising tends to do more with less, so you can spend less on it and still get the effect. Where decisions lean rational, activation advertising earns its keep more easily. Where both are high, the money should tilt toward whichever job is harder, not toward a fixed percentage.
Deep Marketing's most recent review of the data, published in 2026, pushes the range even wider: something closer to 70:30 for brand-new market entrants who have no recognition to lean on, closer to 40:60 for brands that are already well known and mostly need to keep converting demand they've already built. The number moved because the businesses moved. A ratio calibrated to a hypothetical shampoo launch in 2013 was never going to hold steady across every business, in every category, thirteen years later.
Byron Sharp thinks the whole framing is off.
Not everyone accepts the premise that a fixed split is the right way to think about this at all. Byron Sharp, head of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, one of the largest advertising research organizations in the world, has gone after the 60:40 rule directly and by name. Responding directly to Binet's defense of the rule, Sharp called it "terrible, very misleading", according to a writeup on the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's own site, arguing it rests on softer award-show data rather than the kind of rigorous evidence he holds advertising research to. His prescription is different in kind, not just in ratio: reach as many category buyers as you can, stay visible continuously, and stop treating "brand" and "activation" spend as two separate jobs that need their own envelopes.
A ratio built for splitting two budgets is not useful advice to a business that has one.
Sharp also challenges pieces of the surrounding orthodoxy: he argues that running several different creative executions can actually hurt results rather than help, contrary to the common agency habit of rotating creative to fight ad fatigue, and he dismisses the idea of a magic "amplification effect" from running the same message across multiple channels at once. Whether or not you take his full position, the disagreement between him and Binet and Field, two of the most cited names in advertising effectiveness research, on a rule that industry decks present as settled science, tells you something. It is not settled. It was a well-evidenced starting point for a specific kind of company, and it has been argued over ever since.
What a one-budget business actually does.
Here's the part that matters for the restaurant owner with $600 a month. You don't have a brand team and a performance team. You have one ad account, running one or more ads out of the same pool of money. Trying to import 60/40 literally means either splitting your own budget into two campaigns, one that just shows your logo and does nothing else, and one that only pushes for reservations, or picking a number that sounds credible and hoping it applies. Neither is what the research was built to support.
The more useful move is this: stop treating brand-building and sales-pushing as two different ad types. Start asking every single ad to do both jobs. An ad that shows your food, says something specific and memorable about what makes your place yours, and also gives the viewer a clear reason to book tonight, is doing the work of both budgets in one creative. Campaign's summary of the Binet and Field framework is explicit that this isn't optional plumbing: sales activation's effectiveness is amplified by prior brand building, meaning ads that ask for the sale convert better and cost less when people already recognize the brand. The two aren't independent line items, even in a company big enough to run them separately. For a business with one budget, that's not a compromise. It's closer to the actual mechanism the research describes.
What the ratio was really protecting against.
The underlying finding that survives all the disagreement is this: businesses that spend everything chasing the immediate sale tend to see their acquisition costs climb over time, because nobody outside their existing customer list recognizes them. Share of voice means your slice of total ad spend in your category relative to your market share. Deep Marketing cites Danenberg, Kennedy, Beal and Sharp's 2016 study in the Journal of Advertising, which found that ten extra points of share of voice correlated with roughly half a point to seven-tenths of a point of market share gained per year. That's a slow compounding effect, not a campaign-level win, and it's the reason brand-only skeptics and performance-only skeptics are both partly right and partly missing the point.
What a small business can actually control isn't a budget split. It's whether the ad it's about to run this week is doing recognition-building and conversion-asking at once, or wasting its one shot doing neither particularly well.
Frequently asked
Common questions.
Should a small business split its ad budget 60/40 between brand and performance ads?
Only if you're already running two separate campaigns, one for recognition and one for sales, and have enough budget to fund both meaningfully. Most small businesses run one ad account. In that case, the fix isn't a split; it's building every ad to do both jobs at once.
Is the 60/40 rule still considered accurate advertising advice?
It's contested. Binet and Field, who created it, have since said the right ratio varies by category and company size. Byron Sharp has called the rule itself misleading, arguing the evidence behind it is weaker than the industry treats it. Treat it as a starting frame, not a fixed law.
What's the difference between brand advertising and performance advertising?
Brand advertising builds recognition and memory so people think of you when they're ready to buy, on a timeline of months or years. Performance advertising pushes for an immediate action, like a click or a booking. Binet and Field's research found the two amplify each other rather than working independently.