The battle for memory: Remembering when forgetting is our default setting

We’ve been thinking about memory lately, specifically what portion of the billions spent on advertising leaves a trace in our collective consciousness.

It’s a sobering statistic, but 89 per cent of advertising isn’t remembered at all.  7 per cent lingers only as a negative impression. A mere 4 per cent is remembered positively. If this isn’t keeping you awake at night already, it should be.

Consider Google's most-searched terms of 2024: Euros, Liam Payne, Baby Reindeer, Kate Middleton, Oasis tickets. A curious amalgam of sporting events, travesties, political anxieties, and cultural phenomena, fading into the ever-lengthening tail of our digital past. Of all the countless ‘moments’ this year, why did these land in the net of mass attention? 

Attention fragmentation discourse is as predictable as a Mercury retrograde announcement on X. We are, apparently, a society of scattered minds, our attention spans razed by the tyranny of the infinite scroll. Yet we’re simultaneously capable of remarkable feats of sustained attention. We absorb lengthy podcasts with devotional intensity. We lose entire weekends mainlining Netflix. We sit through hours of The Eras Tour with attention to detail usually reserved for Kremlinologists. 

The problem isn’t attention spans, it’s memorability. 

Pablo’s CSO and founding partner Mark Sng has inspired me to think more about memory, and the correlation between memory and the long-term effectiveness of advertising. Orlando Wood, Jenni Rominauk and Byron Sharp have told us that being distinctive with a keenly considered suite of assets will lodge your brand in people’s brains. But how do we, the people deciding what advertising will make its way out into the world, decide what will be memorable and what will not? And how do we do it without losing sight of creativity?

University of Chicago’s Brain Bridge Lab proved that humans are remarkably inept at predicting what will stick in our own memories. Their research focuses on art, and when they asked 3000 people to guess which images they remembered from 4021 paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago found humans perform almost at chance level. We're also remarkably consistent in what we collectively remember, which might be why AI is remarkably adept at predicting which images the human brain will remember. 

So, what does make something memorable? 

The science points to certain principles:

Beauty, emotional resonance, even personal preference matter far less than we might expect (don’t @ me, read the published study). What matters is processing efficiency: the speed and ease with which our brains can absorb and categorise information. Think of it like cognitive economics, or Marie Kondo for the mind - if it doesn't spark something, out it goes. It's why you can still sing the Hastings Direct jingle but can't remember what you had for lunch last Friday.

Designing for memory isn’t the enemy of creativity. The most famous works of art that capture the human imagination across space and time are also the most memorable. Just think of Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile. Artists want to create memorable art; we want to create memorable advertising. And advertising is a type of art. The enemy here isn’t creativity, it’s complexity. This doesn’t mean oversimplifying – it means being creatively intentional about what we want people to remember.

This has implications for brand building in an age where, as Catherine Kehoe reminded us at IPA Effectiveness Week, we’re moving from 'fire-and-forget' marketing to 'hand-to-hand' combat, and existing in an ecosystem where 90 per cent of display advertising engagement is accidental. The fundamental challenge lies in creating messages that stick. 

Technology won't save us from forgettable advertising. It might help with new AI tools, but the real magic happens when we understand that our brains are remarkably consistent in what they choose to remember. 

The winners in this memory game will be the ones working with the grain of human memory, who appreciate that attention is captured through novelty, but that memory requires us to create messages that slot effortlessly and creatively into our mental architecture.

It's about how we decide what's worth remembering in a world where forgetting is our default setting. And that's something for marketers to remember this year. Though, given the statistics, there's an 89 per cent chance they won't.

Lisa Stoney is Pablo's deputy chief strategy officer