Thursday expires.

An empty function room has an expiry date. If nobody books next Thursday, you don’t get to sell that Thursday again in December. The venue owner is completely right to want business now.

Here’s the awkward part. The person choosing a venue for next year’s conference is drawing up a shortlist this afternoon. A last-minute lunch offer means nothing to them. And if they’ve never heard of your place, a booking link in six months is six months late.

Both customers matter. Their calendars don’t line up. That’s a far better starting point for a budget conversation than writing “brand” on one side of a spreadsheet and “performance” on the other and arguing about the percentages.

The ratio is a starting point, not an answer

The famous numbers come from Les Binet and Peter Field’s work for the IPA, starting with The Long and the Short of It. For consumer brands, their analysis of effectiveness cases pointed to roughly 60% of spend on long-term brand building and 40% on short-term activation. Their later B2B work for LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found B2B needed more activation, with an optimum of around 46% brand and 54% activation, on a much smaller set of cases.

Those findings are valuable. They’re also averages across very different businesses, and plenty of people quote them as though they were instructions. Mark Ritson, who’s argued hard for doing both, put it plainly in a piece for Think with Google: “bothism isn’t about a mandatory 50/50 split.”

My position: any budget split decided before you’ve looked at your customers’ calendar is a guess wearing a percentage sign.

Draw the calendar first

For each main type of sale, draw three dates. When does the buyer start thinking about it? When do they choose? When do you get paid? Use real booking histories and real buyer conversations. Don’t let one “average customer” explain everything from a Friday lunch to an annual conference.

National businesses should do it market by market too. A brand with strong distribution in its home state has a different job in a state where buyers don’t know the name. Splitting the budget by last year’s revenue quietly guarantees the new market stays small.

Price the opportunity that actually exists

Take an illustrative venue with $24,000 for the quarter. Existing commitments, production already booked and ongoing supplier costs, account for $8,000. That leaves $16,000 to place.

There are eight unsold weekday dates the venue could realistically fill before they expire. Each extra booking contributes about $1,250 after the cost of running the event. Sell all eight and the available contribution is $10,000.

So throwing all $16,000 at those dates makes no sense on those bookings alone. And if four would have filled anyway, the genuinely extra contribution is smaller again.

The owner puts $5,000 into the immediate job: contact previous organisers, make the dates and inclusions clear, and run a tightly targeted local promotion. Four genuinely additional bookings cover that spend. If the offer involves a discount, recalculate the $1,250 first. Booking every date at a loss is a real achievement for a room that could have sat empty for free.

For the later job, $8,000 goes to getting onto next year’s conference shortlists: recognisable creative built around the event the venue hosts best, in front of organisers while they’re planning, with an easy way to inspect the space. The remaining $3,000 is held back until the first results are in.

That split isn’t 60:40 or 45:55. It’s the one this business’s calendar and capacity support. Next quarter it’ll probably be different, and that’s fine.

Make finance a participant, not a gate

Take the plan to finance and ask what would have to be true for it to survive. Can the business fund $8,000 before next year’s bookings pay out? Is the conference market big enough to justify the effort? Can the campaign reach enough organisers often enough to be noticed?

If the only plan finance can approve returns cash in six weeks, say so out loud. Don’t pretend the same money is building a reputation over eighteen months. In a squeeze, cap the immediate opportunity and stage the later work: make the core creative now, schedule distribution when it can be funded properly and accept the shortlists you’ll miss. That’s a decision. Pretending you’re doing both with half the money of either is not.

Set the stop rules before you spend

For each allocation, write down the buyer, the occasion, the money committed and the date you’ll review it. For the immediate promotion, check extra bookings, contribution and dates left, and stop when there’s nothing profitable left to fill. For the conference work, first check that the right buyers saw the creative and linked it to the venue. Then look for inspections, shortlist invitations and, eventually, bookings.

An inspection is progress. The bank won’t take one as a deposit.

What to do on Monday

1. For each main type of sale, map three dates: starts thinking, chooses, pays.

2. Put your available capacity and cash timing beside them.

3. Cost the real short-term opportunity: units you can sell, times contribution, minus what would have sold anyway.

4. Allocate to now, later and a held reserve, with one sentence of reasoning for each. Take it to finance before you spend, not after.

5. Write a review date and a stop rule next to every allocation.

Then ask the question that matters more than any ratio: which buyers does this budget leave us invisible to?

Sources & notes

• Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA (the 60:40 brand to activation finding)

• Les Binet and Peter Field, The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, LinkedIn B2B Institute (around 46% brand, 54% activation for B2B; the authors call it a rough estimate from a small sample)

• Mark Ritson on “bothism”, Think with Google

• The venue and all budget figures are illustrative, not recommended spending levels.

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