If you’re a digital marketer, you’ll hate this quote on brand-building from Les Binet.

“Brand building is more important in a digital world than it is in the old economy. Most marketers have learned completely the wrong lesson. They’ve seen the efficiency of short-term activation and they put all their money in there.”

If you’re a digital marketer, you love the metrics you get from digital campaigns and you want to attribute sales boosts to the campaigns you’re running. They MUST be responsible because you can produce metrics to prove it. You don’t attribute boosts to anything else unless you can measure it just as easily. So things like improving sales skills, an stronger economy, the demise of a competitor or long-term marketing activities count for nothing.

If you’re a digital agency, you’ll hate it even more. You depend on customers commissioning campaign after campaign from you. And you’ve got metrics that show they work. Don’t let anyone utter the phrase “correlation does not equal causation”.

But if you want the stats that point to the importance of long-term brand-building to support those short-term digital campaigns, “The Long And Short Of It” is the bible you need. It’s harder to show the connection, but it’s there.