Guess how many brand cue references were needed in a 30-second ad for 100% of people to remember who it’s from?

To explain… Andrew Tindall analyzed System1 and Effie Awards data and found that if your 30-second ad includes seven recognizable brand cues, recall rises to 100%.That doesn’t mean it’s recommended to have 7 distinctive assets in an ad, of course.The greater point is less than half of ads are even linked to the right brand after viewing.We’re making great ads people can’t name. Distinctiveness fixes that. It’s about being recognizable at a glance. Think Coke’s red, T-Mobile’s pink, or the Netflix “ta-dum.”Those are distinctive brand assets: memory shortcuts that make brands famous.

But they take time to own. It takes two to three years of consistent use before they truly belong to you. Most brands quit too soon.

Image below created by WARC from Jenni Romaniuk‘s work for the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

Creativity gets the credit, but discipline does the work.