There are conferences where you deliver a keynote, and there are conferences where a 66-year-old legendary Englishman in a soft dark grey shirt walks on mid-morning and quietly saws the legs off half the industry, on stage, in front of said industry, with smarts, a twinkle and charts. Yesterday, at the UMA/UBA Day in Dolce La Hulpe, was clearly the second kind. Les Binet was the speaker just before me, as I closed the morning as a keynote speaker. Les Binet and I, on the same stage… I still can’t fathom it, it has been rattling around my skull ever since, like an old Roman coin in a tumble dryer, and I still cannot quite believe I get to write it.
For the three people in Belgian media who somehow do not know him, Les is the never-aging godfather of advertising effectiveness. He joined BMP as a planner in 1987, stayed through every rebrand until it became adam&eveDDB, ran effectiveness there for years, and now consults independently through Binet Consulting. Half the IPA case book has his and Peter Field’s fingerprints on it, and if you have ever won an argument with a CFO about why the brand line matters, you were probably standing on their shoulders and did not know it. I have quoted the man in a plethora of client decks for close to two decades, usually to make a point not everybody wanted to hear (and, in fairness, sometimes to make a point I did not entirely believe myself but very much wanted the audience to). Sharing a bill with him felt like being asked to play a short acoustic set on the same night as Springsteen, dressed up like Elsa from Frozen. Nice of you to stay, folks.
His talk was called "Go Big or Go Home", and it was the sermon this trade has been dodging for too long. No nostalgia lap, no greatest hits medley, no coming book plug-in. Just a cold, clear, numbered, evidence-heavy filleting of the small-town thinking that has been quietly hollowing out marketing since Covid, delivered with the polite Cambridge smile of a man who has done the math, the work, the miles and is just a little disappointed in you personally.
Where he stuck the knife
The headline number, which I will now be putting on every deck I write for the next twelve months: nearly 90% of the variation in profit generated by advertising is down to the size of the budget. Only about 11% is down to ROI. Budget is roughly eight times more important than ROI. We spend our professional lives sanding down the 11%. We call it discipline. Les called it, and I quote, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. He is not wrong.
Then the second cut, delivered with the same benign smile. Gartner data, global, post-Covid: advertising-to-sales ratios have fallen 40% and never recovered. Not a wobble, not a cyclical dip, but a structural collapse. The trade has confused efficiency with sufficiency, and sales and profits are following the budgets down the drain in a very orderly Belgian fashion.
From there, a tour of the classics delivered by the man who wrote them. Small thinking is the disease: small budgets, narrow targeting on the 5% of buyers currently in market, a media mix collapsed to performance channels, creative reduced to product shots and price points, ROIs up, effectiveness down. Ehrenberg-Bass showed decades ago that growth comes from reach across all category buyers, and most brands still refuse to believe it. He threw in a lovely, bitter aside about the industry’s obsession with Gen Z. As a 66-year-old man, he pointed out, roughly half of consumer spending in the West comes from people over 45, and yet everybody wants to sell to teenagers with no money.
Share of voice, still: above share of market if you want to grow, budgets rising, and slightly ahead of the curve with the brand or the growth stalls.
The long and the short, updated: about 62/38 on average in B2C, remixed towards brand as the brand matures, brand advertising ratcheting the base level of sales while making the performance spikes bigger and, crucially, dulling price elasticity. About half the financial payback from advertising comes from being able to charge more and discount less. Not a soft benefit. That is the margin line. No shit, Sherlock.
Then, because he cannot help himself, a beautiful ambush on attention. The Dentsu Brand Reset Project with Lumen and Kantar, eye-tracking piped through tracking metrics into profit: below 1.5 seconds of attention, no long-term effect at all. Around 30 seconds you max out. Voluntary attention (the kind you earn with a story worth watching) is roughly twice as effective in the long run as forced attention (the kind you buy with a non-skippable slot). And a personal crusade about audio that he has been running for a year and I am now joining. Something like 20 to 30% of the selling power of a piece of video comes from the soundtrack. If you are cutting audio production to save money, you are cutting a quarter of the effect.
His closing: think big in terms of big budgets, big media plans, and big creativity. Go big or go home.
Following Les with a Calder mobile
I closed the day with "Mind the Gap. Hold the Fort.", built, unwisely for a Belgian audience already thinking about their apéro, around an Alexander Calder mobile. Calder invented the mobile, (the word and the art object), and left a line on a wall in Roxbury, Connecticut that I have been circling for two years. Things do not balance themselves. Keeping things in balance takes work, and smarts, and energy. Balance is a verb. An artist who died in 1976 described our industry better than most consultancy decks I have read this year. Including mine.
The whole talk was one number. 96% of Belgian advertisers say Belgian media are crucial to their campaign success. 44% of digital investment actually reaches a Belgian player. Conviction is local. Plumbing is global. And when you crack open the digital euro and look inside, the gap that people love to moan about is not 100 euros wide. It is 11. Eleven euros of unexamined default per hundred that went international in categories where a Belgian option was sitting right there. Available. Competitive. Some of those eleven were the right call, genuinely, fine. Others were not. Eleven is actionable. Everything else, and I said this in Flemish because the phrase is unimprovable, is zever in pakskes.
The rule fits on a beer coaster, which is the correct unit for this industry: Belgian first. Global by evidence. Never by reflex. And because the same argument applies to the same crowd about AI (same balance problem, different tool), I closed on an Augmented IQ map. Left is prompt, accept, ship, atrophy: a commoditized human, replaceable, indistinguishable, confidently informed about nothing. Left is slop, and brain deadness, intellectual lobotomy by the knives of more, quicker, cheaper. Right is prompt, challenge, synthesize, create; Contrarian marvels. Doing what could not be done before. Creating a core of irreplaceable, augmented thinking. Same tool. Same subscription. Same price. Nobody drifts right by accident, and I can already feel the brown-beige free-fall into brainrot. Check the average LinkedIn post. Urgh.
Les Binet told us to go big. Les is right. Les is usually right, which is very annoying. But in a small market, going big does not mean going away. It means protecting the conditions that let us matter at all.
And that is where the two keynotes shook hands without either of us planning it. His 90% and my 11 are the same phenomenon at different scales. Big markets underfund brand. Small markets underfund themselves. Both of us spent precious time telling media professionals that the discipline they are so proud of is, on the numbers, cowardice with a spreadsheet. Reach beats targeting for growth, in London and in Aalter. Proxy metrics are useful, not the point: he said it about attention seconds and dashboards, I said it about local-value scoring and carbon audits. And creativity is a multiplier on every euro of media, whether the euro is going to a Belgian sales house or into an LLM subscription that is quietly writing your ad copy while you sleep.
We differed on tone. We landed in the same place from opposite weather.
The quiet thing I keep coming back to, a day later, has nothing to do with the numbers. Les is 66. He opens with a joke about being 66. Then he casually cites Ehrenberg-Bass work "going back decades" as if it were yesterday’s slide, and reaches for the current Dentsu, Lumen and Kantar research as if it were the same conversation. That is what long memory in this trade sounds like. Most of us now have the attention span of the platforms we buy from. Les has the attention span of the outcomes he measures. Those are not the same span, and one of them is why he is still on stages twenty years after most of his cohort quietly moved into vineyard investing.
I got to prove that theory on the ground, too. I spent golden time in conversation with Les Binet and with Ruben Schreurs, with Bart De Pauw, Luc Suykens, Hugues Rey, Max Brouns, Neil Vincent, Alex Thore and Bernard Scheray over a beer and nibbles. In a trade obsessed with dashboards, attribution, MMM, incrementality models and audit scorecards, the thing that actually moves this industry forward is still two or three people who trust each other enough to say what they really think before, between and after the sessions. Human connection. You cannot fake that. And no marketing mix model has ever (re)produced it.
Ruben opened the morning and he is the reason my notebook came home half full. He is the CEO of Ebiquity, WFA’s exclusive partner on effectiveness, presenting the Paid Media Effectiveness Handbook that they built together off the back of 71 global heads of media, 27 in-depth qualitative interviews and roughly 40 billion in global media investment. The headline finding is a punch to the collective plexus: 77% of brands cannot separate their brand impact from their short-term sales impact, only 15% of them say effectiveness outputs are the primary driver of media budget decisions, and while 81% of brands feel aligned with their agencies, a hilarious and depressing 14% feel aligned with their own finance department. Which means most of the money moving through this trade is set by people who do not talk to the people measuring whether it works. Ruben’s proposal, and it is the one I keep chewing on, is a "commercial translator" function that sits between marketing, agency and finance, translating both directions until the boardroom stops treating brand equity like emotion.
Everything he said was sharp. Everything he did off stage was sharper. He has one of those razor-fast minds that finishes your sentence in a better version of your own words while you are still forming the verb, and I mean that as an unqualified compliment and a small ongoing threat.
Deborah Gurofsky was the only woman on stage all morning and she owned it. SVP and Managing Director at Bell Media in Toronto, Canadian, not American, and she came armed with a talk called "Hooked, Then Ghosted: The Era of the One-Night-Stand Brand" that combined the best deck design of the day, the sharpest comic timing of the day. Her thesis: social media is Jim at the bar, all short-term seduction and 1.7 seconds of attention, while premium video is the actual relationship, 13 seconds on TV, 12 on streaming, and a genuine chance at loyalty.
Affinity is love. Loyalty is commitment. She closed with the mic drop of the year, "when you’re ready for a real commitment, call me", and I promise you nobody in the auditorium was thinking about media plans at that exact moment. Genius branding, weaponized.
Thanks to UMA and UBA for the invitation, to François Chaudoir for the wrap, to Bart Gunst for sharing all the insights and building blocks for “Going for growth”, to Bart De Pauw, my old buddy and the day’s moderator, for weaving smarts, wit, egos, decks, call sheets, timing and genuine showmanship into a shape that made the whole bill look like it had been rehearsed for a week, and to the whole line-up for a genuinely useful day. Belgium does not do vanity conferences well. This one earned its slot in the calendar.
And thanks to Les, for still doing the work, for still saying it plainly, and for handing a country of Belgian media professionals a phrase we can now nail above every pitch room door.
Go big. Please. The alternative is on the Gartner chart, and it is not pretty.
