And that’s just real-time fluency, not the tougher and more important metric of branded recall among unpaid, inattentive audiences with a memory-shredding delay before being quizzed. Most studies conclude that just around half of all advertising achieves branded recall.
Now back to the killer ratio: half of the ads aired in America can’t even communicate what product they are selling.
There’s a simple explanation: Most marketers are too involved in their product. Most agencies are too interested in their storytelling. Both miss market orientation.
They don’t realize that consumers don’t care about their product, don’t focus on advertising, and have a bazillion more important things to think about. This total lack of involvement contrasts directly with professionals spending eight hours a day fixated on one brand and a thirty-second masterpiece. We make ads in exact inversion to how they’re consumed.
Bad advertisers assume a single whiff of a logo at the end is enough—like a Hitchcock movie revealing its triumphant conclusion in the final frames. Brands with a more advanced grasp of effectiveness know better. They use distinctive assets from the outset to ensure immediate recognition at the start, throughout, and after. They squeeze value from every pixel they paid for.
Andrew Tindall’s “Rule of 7” is instructive here. His analysis of a giant Effie database suggests a brand needs seven distinctive assets in a thirty-second ad to achieve 100% branded recall. Not seven different assets—just seven repetitions of the colors, shapes, and other elements in your asset palette. And no, that doesn’t limit creativity. It challenges it to work harder toward its true purpose: advertising effect and sales.
Achieving branded recall and maintaining distinctiveness is crucial for all brands. But it’s especially critical for AI brands like ChatGPT, which are incredibly generic. They all look the same, operate the same, work off each other, launch innumerable product iterations, and fall blandly into a big, gray AI bucket.
While AI awareness is near-universal among Americans, most people don’t see any difference between AI providers. Menlo Ventures found that “most people don’t distinguish between older assistants like Alexa and Siri and newer large language models like ChatGPT and Claude. It’s all the same.” I don’t know which AI models I’m currently subscribed to. Do you?
