Consumers quickly forget promoting, making it harder for brands to win each human attention and AI-powered discovery, based on a report<\/a> released Monday by Adobe.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n Brand recall is very important since it often determines who gets a click or call, explained Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media<\/a>, a market research firm in San Francisco.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “On an unconscious level,” he continued, “people often trust \u2014 and buy \u2014 brands greater than unfamiliar products. All things being equal, brand awareness is a tiebreaker. Price, after all, is a big variable.”<\/p>\n “If people cannot remember you, you do not make the shortlist,” added Alok R. Saboo<\/a>, a professor of promoting on the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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%).<\/p>\n “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>, a technology advisory firm in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Matthew A. Gilbert<\/a>, a marketing lecturer at Coastal Carolina University, explained that brands that play it secure and do not push creative boundaries generally produce forgettable ads.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n “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.”<\/p>\n “Brands have to exit of their option to set themselves other than the competition \u2014 each within the products they provide and their promotion of them,” he added.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “That is promoting 101,” observed Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group<\/a>, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Samantha Sands, a director at Bolt PR<\/a>, a public relations and digital marketing agency in Dallas, agreed with the need for frequency, but disagreed with how most brands execute it.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “To make that 24-hour window work, you wish multi-touchpoint storytelling,” she said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Richard Ashbaugh, CEO of Mabbly<\/a>, a digital marketing and branding agency in Chicago, also agreed with the frequency principle but questioned locking in an actual number.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n “Repetition builds memory provided that each exposure reinforces the identical recognizable idea,” he added.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n 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>, a worldwide provider of user-generated content platforms for brands and retailers.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “Consistently amplifying this message across touchpoints builds lasting retention,” she continued. “It is that this aggregate exposure \u2014 encountering a brand via traditional ads, reviews, social UGC \u2014 that really drives recall.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\nBrand Amnesia<\/h3>\n
Promoting 101<\/h3>\n
Need for Creative Effectiveness<\/h3>\n
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<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\nTurning Forgotten Into Found<\/h3>\n