Go big on media spend or go home, marketers told

Delegates to the WFA Media Forum in Stockholm heard the results of new research into the power of advertising and why scale matters.

The presentation from Les Binet was based on a new study called Go Big or Go Home, conducted with the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and independent media agency Media Lab. The full recording is available for WFA members to watch here.

In his presentation, Binet revealed how scale and relative scale matter when it comes to driving effectiveness, given that budget was responsible for 89% of advertising payback.

“The single most important decision that you have to make is how much to spend,” he said. “Too many times the budget is either handed down from finance, or it's argued for using very simple heuristics, such as last year plus inflation, and that is the main thing that determines how much money you make.”

The study showed that marketers needed to spend more time on budgeting and to budget for growth and budget for profit. “You need to keep arguing for budget increases above inflation each year, and you need to be outpacing your competitors. It's an arms race, so one of the things that you want to be thinking about is share of voice,” he warned.