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As a general rule, direct activation refers to advertising intended to generate a sale that specific instant....and if it fails to generate that sale it has no effect after the fact. Brand building is intended to generate a sale in the future, typically by building a memory structure so that when they enter the market in the future, your brand is more easily remembered.
Whether something is BB or DA is a function of both media and creative choices to differing degrees.
Paid Search is almost always and should always be DA.
TV is usually BB, but it can function as DA (think DRTV).
Paid Social works equally well as BB or DA, but never both at the same time.
The trick is to be explicit about the function each tactic is intended to fulfill beforehand. Once you've done that don't allow BB tactics to be held accountable to DA metrics and vice versa.
This is an excellent breakdown. I would add that if Les Binet's style of breaking it down just isn't doing it for you, that it's okay to branch out to other sources of information. Look up books dedicated to each of these topics as separate ideas, and you'll probably quickly grasp the difference.
Les Binet (and his academic partner Peter Field) split advertising into brand and activation, and then apply that split to banks of case studies from the IPA. It's a simplification but it's a powerful way of understanding general patterns in advertising. You should read some of Binet and Field's books published by the IPA, Marketing In The Era of Effectiveness and The Long and the Short of It