Consumers quickly forget promoting, making it harder for brands to win each human attention and AI-powered discovery, based on a report released Monday by Adobe.
Based on a survey of some 1,000 U.S. consumers, Adobe found that only 17% of the respondents were confident they might recall the names of the last three ads they saw after just 24 hours.
“In an era where AI tools increasingly mediate discovery, brands face a dual threat: being forgotten by consumers and being invisible to the AI systems consumers depend on to search out them again,” the report noted.
Brand recall is very important since it often determines who gets a click or call, explained Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media, a market research firm in San Francisco.
“Because users are likely to click on familiar brands, and Google rewards behavioral signals, brands rank higher in search and get more clicks,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“On an unconscious level,” he continued, “people often trust — and buy — brands greater than unfamiliar products. All things being equal, brand awareness is a tiebreaker. Price, after all, is a big variable.”
“If people cannot remember you, you do not make the shortlist,” added Alok R. Saboo, a professor of promoting on the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.
“Awareness is step one within the buying journey, and most purchase decisions occur from memory, not off a shelf,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “A brand no person can name is a brand that competes on price alone, and that is a race to the underside.”
Brand Amnesia
Adobe found that ads contribute to “brand amnesia” by being irrelevant (73%), clickbait or misleading (56%), untrustworthy (55%), intrusive (47%), boring (38%), bloated with information (35%), or confusing (26%).
“Great promoting doesn’t just tell people something. It makes them feel something,” observed Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst of SmartTech Research, a technology advisory firm in Las Vegas.
“Great storytelling, unique visuals, humor, surprise, and consistency across campaigns all help make it more likely someone will remember the brand later,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “Great ads sell an idea before they sell a product.”
Matthew A. Gilbert, a marketing lecturer at Coastal Carolina University, explained that brands that play it secure and do not push creative boundaries generally produce forgettable ads.
“They chase trends, rehash old concepts, or copy competitors without explaining why a consumer should select their brand,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “If an ad is forgettable, no amount of repetition will improve its ability to generate brand recall.”
“Brands have to exit of their option to set themselves other than the competition — each within the products they provide and their promotion of them,” he added.
“Consumers have almost no attention span, so when you don’t catch their attention in the primary three to 5 seconds, they’ll move on,” he said. “It’s gotten to the purpose where the hook that previously engaged a consumer to observe the remaining of your ad has actually turn into the ad itself.”
Promoting 101
Adobe also reported that shoppers need to come across a message at the least 4 times inside a 24-hour window for it to stay. That finding reinforces the case for high-frequency, cross-channel brand presence, the report asserted.
“That is promoting 101,” observed Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore.
“You’ve got to repeat the ad not only multiple times to a consumer but run the campaign long enough so the potential buyer considers buying the thing once they need it,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “In case you aren’t promoting when the necessity occurs, you’re far less more likely to close the sale.”
Samantha Sands, a director at Bolt PR, a public relations and digital marketing agency in Dallas, agreed with the need for frequency, but disagreed with how most brands execute it.
“If a consumer sees the very same retargeted banner ad 4 times in a day, that does not construct recall, but can construct banner blindness and brand annoyance,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
“To make that 24-hour window work, you wish multi-touchpoint storytelling,” she said.
Sands explained which may mean a thought-leadership PR article within the morning, a short-form video on their lunch break, and a highly targeted email within the evening. “That builds an omnipresent memory without feeling just like the brand is spamming them,” she noted.
Need for Creative Effectiveness
Richard Ashbaugh, CEO of Mabbly, a digital marketing and branding agency in Chicago, also agreed with the frequency principle but questioned locking in an actual number.
“Frequency matters, but context and artistic quality matter much more,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “A remarkable message seen twice can outperform a mediocre one seen 10 times.”
“Repetition builds memory provided that each exposure reinforces the identical recognizable idea,” he added.
Ultimately, it is a query of creative effectiveness, which explains why immersive, longer-form storytelling formats like video consistently rank as probably the most memorable, maintained Jo Callahan, VP for strategy and experience at Bazaarvoice, a worldwide provider of user-generated content platforms for brands and retailers.
“When a consumer observes the tangible role a brand plays within the lives of real peers, that authentic storytelling significantly drives each long-term memorability and market salience,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
“Consistently amplifying this message across touchpoints builds lasting retention,” she continued. “It is that this aggregate exposure — encountering a brand via traditional ads, reviews, social UGC — that really drives recall.”
Turning Forgotten Into Found
Adobe’s report advised that to win in 2026, brands have to unify the human and machine discovery journey. “This requires moving beyond siloed marketing strategies toward a unified content supply chain that satisfies each the human desire for entertaining, relevant creative and the technical requirements for generative engine optimization,” it noted.
“Turning ‘forgotten’ into ‘found’ with intelligent automation ensures that, by linking high-impact production and LLM search visibility, organizations can keep their products discoverable through authoritative AI search summaries and personalized re-engagement triggers, even when a brand name fails to stay,” it added.
Ariane Lovell, co-founder and public relations director of Trifecta Media Group, a worldwide marketing and communications agency, argued that brand recall is becoming considered one of the clearest indicators of whether marketing is definitely working.
“Consumers are seeing more content than ever before, so the goal is not simply to achieve people, it’s to depart a long-lasting impression,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “The brands that win shall be those people remember without having to be reminded.”
“Essentially the most memorable brands don’t rely solely on promoting,” she added. “When consumers repeatedly encounter a brand through news stories, expert commentary, partnerships and organic conversations, that credibility reinforces recall in a way paid media alone often cannot.”