What you need to know:

• Last Thursday the world-renowned Ehrenberg-Bass Institute delivered another takedown of various advertising and marketing effectiveness principles – from Peter Field and Les Binet's 60/40 "long and short" rule, to ESOV, in which proponents spend above their marketshare in "market presence" to grow faster than competitors; essentially they, along with ad attention metrics, personalisation, targeting and frequency of ad messaging all lacked science, substance and credibility. 
• James Hurman argues it's another potential fracturing raid by the EBI on the international marketing and advertising community; those present at the EBI keynote in Singapore were influential APAC brands and marketers who are members of the Brussels-based World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).
• Moet Hennessy's APAC Head of Consumer, Gavin Merriman, was one exec at the WFA keynote in Singapore - he posted on LinkedIn that "no provocation was spared" by the "brilliant behemoth of penetration" but it did "make it hard to reconcile these opposing views ... what are us mere mortals meant to believe when brilliant academics start dismissing the evidence-based work of other brilliant academics as a myth ... [it's] hard enough wading through all the non-evidence based myths that haunt our field, let alone doubting the ones that are." 
• In Merriman's LinkedIn thread, the EBI's Prof. Byron Sharp responded: "Huh? Read the evidence. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute alone publish dozens of peer-reviewed articles. And I cited many other academic research articles."     
• While there is ongoing industry debate around the robustness of using awards entries as a data source for marketing and advertising effectiveness models (the UK's IPA Effectiveness awards and Binet & Field's "long and short" work, for instance), Previously Unavailable Founding Partner James Hurman argues in this OpEd that Ehrenberg-Bass risks sowing discord, confusing marketers and opening itself to accusations of hypocrisy.
• He says the Ehrenberg-Bass developed 95/5 rule is an example of the latter, given repeated suggestions from the EBI that the IPA-Binet & Field-developed 60/40 rule is a ‘myth’.
• Hurman suggests a more productive approach is to recognise that while datasets, methodologies and approaches differ, the work undertaken by the likes of Mark Ritson, Kantar, Nielsen, the ACA, IPA, WARC and others lead to the same conclusions as those reached by Ehrenberg-Bass.
• In the interests of transparency, the New Zealand-based Hurman works with start-ups and blue chips via Previously Unavailable but also collaborates with Cannes Lions and WARC on marketing effectiveness programs – both companies are owned by London-based Ascential, which took a stake in brand tracking start-up Tracksuit, backed early by Hurman. Mark Ritson, who has quipped about Prof. Byron Sharp in public addresses as the "Dark Lord", has also invested in Tracksuit.
• James Hurman and the CMO of US healthcare group Piedmont, Douwe Bergsma, also a board member of the US Association of National Advertisers (ANA), joined an Mi3 podcast earlier this year reciting a two-year overhaul of Piedmont's business in which much of the diverse brand, marketing and advertising effectiveness thinking subject to the EBI's heat (including EBI's central work), was applied to what they say was great success at Piedmont – the Dutch-born Bergsma was a veteran consumer goods marketer with Procter & Gamble and Georgia Pacific prior to his move to Piedmont.        
• The latest EBI takedown took place at the World Federation of Advertisers’ Forum Connect event in Singapore. Neither audio nor video has been made available.
• Instead, Mi3 has published audio from a presentation covering some of the same themes, and including similar criticisms, from the B2B Next event in Sydney last year. We sought permission to publish the official audio, but the embedded audio is a ‘bootleg’ copy recorded by journalists on the day. Listen to it here.
• Mi3 has offered the EBI and Prof. Byron Sharp a right of reply but it seems unlikely.   

Busting myths

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is back at it again – out in the world denouncing anything marketing-effectiveness-related that hasn’t been produced by their own organisation. This time at the World Federation of Advertisers’ Forum Connect event in Singapore, following a similar spray at the B2B Next event in Sydney last year.

According to Ehrenberg-Bass, the entire canon of marketing effectiveness that exists outside the perimeter of the University of South Australia is ‘a myth’.

Attention metrics (the efficacy of which have been proven out in excruciating detail by a growing number of different companies, corroborated by researcher Rob Brittain and the ACA, and which are currently being independently validated by the Advertising Research Foundation) are a myth.

The idea that effectiveness outcomes improve as people are exposed to ads more than once (patently obvious and having been tested and proven in innumerable studies) is a myth.

The principle of Excess Share of Voice (that our spend needs to be competitive in order to underpin brand growth) is a myth.

The 60/40 rule (that brands optimise long-term effectiveness when they spend around 60 per cent of their budgets on long-term brand building and 40 per cent on short-term performance marketing) is a myth.

Despite all of these principles being increasingly used by marketers the world over to measurably and significantly improve the effectiveness of their marketing, we’re being told they’re fake news by an organisation that appears increasingly insular, blinkered and out of date.

It’s a cogent – if desperate – marketing strategy for the Institute. Sowing discord to erode marketers’ trust in anyone except Ehrenberg-Bass probably has the effect of a small group of anxious marketers paying them to be their one source of truth.

Smart marketers will see through it, of course. Their strategy’s showing, as we used to say in the advertising industry. Meaning that if your audience can see the trick you’re trying to play on them, they're unlikely to fall for it.

Scientific arguments

At the heart of Ehrenberg-Bass’ strategy is the idea that there’s a ‘scientific’ approach to understanding marketing effectiveness, which the Institute adheres faithfully to. They collect up large sets of real world data, and they apply serious scientific methodology to exploring hypotheses and deriving results. They do the deep work of comprehensively trying to disprove their hypotheses, until they’re proven beyond doubt. Then and only then do they share their findings with the world.

They contrast that approach against other forms of effectiveness research. The approach that’s most often in their firing line is the work that organisations like the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising do. The IPA has a very large set of data that’s drawn from the cases that have been entered into their effectiveness award programme over the past three or so decades. Researchers like Les Binet and Peter Field have analysed that data to produce many famous studies that delve into which advertising and marketing approaches work better than others to produce both short and long-term results for brands.

Ehrenberg-Bass’ argument is that those datasets are invalid. They represent the tiny percentage of advertising campaigns that have been entered into effectiveness awards. Because they’re edge-cases, in the grand scheme of things, they can’t possibly constitute a representative sample. Add the fact that those datasets are being analysed without an academic standard of scientific rigour, and the results simply must be spurious.

So we shouldn’t trust them.

The logic here is seductive. We’ve been taught to believe in science and to be skeptical of the unscientific. And there’s imminent sense in that. The science on global warming, for example, stands in stark contrast to the climate-denialism of conspiracy theorists on YouTube. I trust the scientists all day.

So yeah, for sure, if the science is saying one thing and the conjecture is saying another, we’re usually much better off trusting the science.

But this is where the logic begins to unwind.

Logic issues

Ehrenberg-Bass’ academic definition of ‘science’ and what they deem as the ‘pseudo-science’ of the non-academic marketing world are not telling us different things.

Those two different approaches produce exactly the same results.

Here are the key examples:

1. The principle of Excess Share of Voice has been analysed for decades using academic studies, Nielsen, Kantar, the IPA and the ACA. They all produce the same results. Brands tend to grow when they have ESOV. And they tend to decline when their spend isn’t sufficiently competitive. There are overs and unders, but both Nielsen and the IPA found the exact same coefficient using completely different data sets: on average, you get 0.5 per cent market share growth from 10 points of ESOV over a year.
2. Ehrenberg-Bass found that brands are more likely to grow by focusing their efforts on penetration rather than loyalty. The IPA found exactly the same pattern in the advertising effectiveness data – campaigns that focus on penetration by targeting broad audiences are much more effective at driving growth than campaigns that focus on loyalty by targeting existing customers.
3. The econometrician Paul Dyson, working with Kantar data, has recently re-proven the most important drivers of advertising ROI. And those are substantially similar to what Mark Ritson found in his meta-analysis of 6,000 Effie papers.
4. That advertising creativity amplifies the effectiveness of campaigns has been consistently proven across many academic studies and the analyses of WARC, IPA and Effie award data.
5. The principle of Creative Commitment – found by studying nearly 5,000 WARC and IPA effectiveness cases – tells us that campaigns are more effective when they commit to higher spend, duration of time in market and number of media channels used. This principle was confirmed (albeit with useful nuance added) by econometrician Dr. Grace Kite and her team at Magic Numbers, using a large set of real-world data from ‘everyday’ campaigns that weren’t entered into awards.
6. Ehrenberg-Bass’ concepts of mental availability and physical availability map on to the IPA’s ‘Long and Short of It’ concepts perfectly. They use different terminology, but they both prove the same principle – that marketing needs to do two jobs: create brand familiarity among a large group of people before they enter the category, then make things easy to understand, find and buy when they do come into the category.

The resources committed to those jobs need to be balanced. Physical availability without sufficient mental availability means too much supply and too little demand. Mental availability without sufficient physical availability means too much demand and too little supply. Balancing the two properly means supply-demand efficiency.

The perfect balance will very obviously be different for every brand, or the same brand in different contexts. But we’re all agreed that we need to be doing a bit more long-term brand building and a bit less short-term performance marketing.

The lifelong focus of Andrew Ehrenberg, one of the Institute's namesakes, was seeking ‘generalisable patterns’ in marketing data – patterns that existed across different datasets and environments. “A result can be regarded as routinely predictable when it has recurred consistently under a known range of different conditions,” he said. “This depends on the previous analysis of many sets of data, drawn from different populations. There is no such basis of extensive experience when a prediction is derived from the analysis of only a single set of data.”

Ehrenberg was famous for eschewing the statistical significance of a single dataset in favour of being able to generally replicate principles across many different datasets.

All of the above principles represent generalisable patterns. Patterns found again and again by different researchers using different datasets. It’s all very Ehrenbergian.

So why would Ehrenberg-Bass claim that the 60/40 rule is a myth?

Well, argument one is that it’s based on unrepresentative effectiveness award data. Argument two is that the methodology doesn’t meet an adequate scientific standard. And argument three is that there’s no such thing as a perfect golden ratio that you can apply to any brand.

The argument that effectiveness award data is unrepresentative is pointless if the same principles hold true in both forms of dataset. Which they do. Sure, I bet there’s someone out there who knows of an outlier example where the awards data says something different to other data sets. And yes, it’s marketing, there are always outliers. The point is that, on all of the big, important interrogations, the datasets yield the same answers.

And anyhow, nobody has ever claimed that effectiveness award data is perfect. As a community, we’re studying the same patterns in different contexts and environments. This is a valid, valuable, worthwhile thing to be doing. And when the principles hold true across different environments, this tells us that yes, indeed, the principles are robust. While our confidence in these principles should be being solidified, and our results improved by their application, Ehrenberg-Bass takes gas-lighting pot-shots in order to disorient marketers and increase their dependency on the Institute.

Argument two – that 60/40 doesn’t meet an adequate scientific standard – might have some validity. The IPA and those who study their data are not academics, and presumably Ehrenberg-Bass’ full-time scientists have the luxury of months of time to noodle over process-perfection.

But the argument is also hypocritical.

Hypocrisy at play?

A couple of years back, Ehrenberg-Bass published their '95/5' rule. It’s the idea that only 5 per cent of buyers are ‘in market’ at any given point in time. It was based on a thought experiment that, if businesses change large suppliers about once every five years, then they’re ‘in market’ one quarter out of twenty quarters. 5 per cent of the time. The other 95 per cent of the time they’re not in the market – but will come back into it at some point in future.

95/5 is categorically less scientific than 60/40. It wasn’t based on any data and doesn't conform to any kind of scientific standard, unless you have the hubris to believe that any old brainwave emerging from your institution immediately qualifies as scientific.

If Ehrenberg-Bass were as committed to scientific integrity as they claim to be, they would never have published the 95/5 rule prior to applying due rigour.

And yet that doesn’t make 95/5 false or unhelpful – which brings us to argument three.

In the cases of both 60/40 and 95/5, the point isn't that there's an exact magic ratio. The point is that generally, we should invest a bit more on long term brand building and a bit less on short term performance marketing if we want sustainable growth. And that there's normally a lot more 'future demand' – i.e. customers who will come into the market later – than there is 'existing demand' – i.e. customers ready to buy now. Marketing needs to balance its efforts among both groups.

The exact ratios will obviously differ from context to context. But as general rules of thumb, they're both useful heuristics.

The 'we're more scientific than you' posturing is, by contrast, not useful at all.

Legacy sinking

The work of Ehrenberg-Bass is valuable, no doubt. But it’s also incomplete. Beyond not factoring for attention, they don’t account for creativity or the power of an emotional connection to a brand. Both are things we know are huge levers of marketing effectiveness. Ehrenberg-Bass are good at the logic, but overlook the magic. And true marketing effectiveness is a combination of the two.

The work of the IPA and others provide us far greater insight into the magic – which complements the Ehrenberg-Bass principles perfectly. Together, the two bodies of work afford us a kind of ‘unified theory’ of marketing effectiveness. They back each other up on many of the core drivers of effectiveness, then each contribute valuable and additive evidence, enabling us to put the whole caboodle together to underpin optimal brand growth over the long term.

Undermining that highly advantageous position we’ve reached together as a marketing community is perverse, and fuels a perception that Ehrenberg-Bass’ priority is not to support our profession in reaching a higher plane of understanding – it’s to confound us, to sow distrust, to win and to make sure others lose in the process, though they needn’t.

In doing so they risk misleading their clients and the marketing community at large, they undermine the brilliant work of many of their people, and they soil the legacy of the namesakes of their institution.