Too-narrow targeting: Les Binet's warning to Belgian advertisers

On September 1, 2026, at the UBA Media Date, professor Les Binet warned Belgian advertisers: the industry's obsession with efficiency and narrow targeting cuts profits, it does not grow them. Here is what this means in practice for your Meta, LinkedIn and Google campaigns.

1. Les Binet's warning at the UBA

At UBA Media Date 2026, organised by the United Brands Association (UBA), professor Les Binet, an international reference in marketing effectiveness, warned advertisers against what he calls "small thinking": an obsession with granular data, narrowly defined audiences, short-term results and disposable creative work. According to him, this mindset limits advertising ambition and reduces the real commercial contribution of campaigns, harming brands and agencies alike.

2. Budget matters eight times more than ROI

The standout figure from his talk: the budget allocated to a campaign is roughly eight times more decisive for commercial results than measured ROI. In other words, the most important marketing decision is not fine-tuning every euro spent, but setting a budget large enough to reach a broad market. Very narrow targeting improves apparent ROI, less spend for the same number of measured conversions, but it reduces the real volume of sales generated.

3. The vicious circle of over-targeting

This mechanism feeds on itself: narrow targeting produces weaker results in volume, which pushes budgets down at the next review, which narrows reach further, and so on. For Les Binet, this cycle denies brands the cumulative effect of consistent creative work over time, the kind that builds growth rather than holding it back.

4. What this means for Belgian SMEs

For a Belgian SME running Meta, LinkedIn or Google campaigns, this finding calls for rebalancing two types of activity: broad-reach awareness campaigns, which build long-term brand memory, and narrowly targeted conversion campaigns, which capture immediate demand. Betting only on the latter, because they look more profitable on a dashboard, often means trading future growth for a hollow ROI figure.

The AI lens, humans first

AI excels at analysing large volumes of audience data, testing creative variants and measuring a campaign's effects over several months. But deciding how to split a budget between broad reach and precise targeting remains a strategic call, specific to each market and each business. That is our stance: humans first, AI in support.