Strategy & Craft
Splitting an ad budget: the 70-20-10 rule
Seventy per cent on what works, twenty on scaling, ten on experiments. The rule is old, simple, and violated in almost every account.
2 min readMay 9, 2026
Strategy & Craft
Brand building alongside sales activation
Performance advertising harvests demand. Brand advertising creates it. Run only the first and the harvest gets smaller every year.
Key points
- A roughly 60-40 split between brand and activation outperforms either extreme over time.
- Brand effects appear after six to eighteen months, which is why they get cut first.
- Rising cost per acquisition with flat spend is the classic symptom of a starved brand.
Two kinds of advertising exist and they behave differently. Activation reaches people who are ready now and converts them. Brand advertising reaches people who are not ready and makes them more likely to choose you when they are.
Why only one gets funded
Activation is measurable this month. Brand is measurable next year. In any budget discussion the measurable item wins, and the unmeasurable one is cut.
The consequence appears slowly. Cost per acquisition drifts upwards, year after year, with no obvious cause. The pool of people who already know and prefer you is shrinking, so each new customer must be bought entirely with media.
If your cost per enquiry rises every year while your spend stays flat, you are not being outbid. You are running out of people who already wanted you.
The evidence on the split
Long-running analyses of advertising effectiveness converge on a similar answer: roughly 60 per cent of budget to brand and 40 to activation maximises profit over a multi-year horizon, varying by sector. Business-to-business sits closer to 50-50, considered consumer purchases nearer 60-40.
Almost every small and mid-sized advertiser sits at 90-10 or worse.
What brand work looks like without a television budget
| Measure | Cost | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| A consistent visual identity used everywhere | one-off | high, compounds |
| The same claim on every touchpoint for three years | none | high |
| Vehicle graphics | one-off, low | high locally |
| Local sponsorship with visible presence | low | medium to high |
| A recognisable spokesperson in all content | none | high |
| Regular local press coverage | time | high |
None of that needs a media budget. It needs consistency, which is harder to sustain than spending.
The consistency rule
Brand effects come from repetition of the same thing. A firm that redesigns every two years and changes its claim annually is paying for brand building and then deleting it.
Fix three elements and leave them alone for at least five years: the visual signature, so colour, typeface and one recurring device; the claim; and the tone.
How to protect the budget
Brand spend gets cut because nobody can defend it in the quarterly review. Three defences work.
- Track name search volume. It is free, monthly, and correlates with brand strength.
- Ask every enquirer how they heard of you, and count the ones who say "I have known you for years".
- Run a switch-off test in one region rather than everywhere, so the effect becomes visible and arguable.
Frequently asked questions
Can a small business afford brand work?
Brand building is not a television budget. A consistent look, a memorable name and a repeated message cost almost nothing beyond discipline.
How do you measure it?
Prompted and unprompted awareness, search volume for your own name, and the share of enquiries that arrive already knowing what you do.
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