5th Element's Azzam Khan makes a case for why brands need to take memory as a metric seriously and is something they have to earn. Let me ask you something. Can you name the last ad you saw before you opened this article?
Take a second.
You probably can’t. And that’s not a memory problem but a marketing problem.
We are living in the most attention-saturated era in human history. Every brand, every platform, every notification is fighting for the same two seconds of your day and somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that winning that fight was the job. Get the impression. Grab the eyeball. Hit the frequency target. Move on.
But attention without memory is just noise with a media budget.
I’ve sat in enough planning sessions to know how this goes. Someone puts up a slide showing reach numbers. Big numbers. The room nods. The client is happy. Then three months later we’re doing brand tracking and wondering why awareness hasn’t moved.
Because reach is not the same as resonance. We tend to confuse the two.
Seth Godin said it years ago: “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” The thing about stories is, they stick. A good story doesn’t need to be seen 100 times to be remembered. You hear it once and it stays.
Most of what we create isn’t synchronising.
Think about the brands you actually remember. Not the ones with the biggest media spends but the ones that live in your head rent-free. What do they have in common?
They made you feel something maybe a laugh or a moment of recognition. A small truth you hadn’t quite put into words yourself. That’s the whole formula.
We’ve built the most sophisticated targeting machine the world has ever seen and we’re using it to deliver content that people often forget before the page loads.
Here’s where I think we’re heading.
Generative AI is pushing content supply toward infinite. Which means the thing that becomes scarce and genuinely valuable is the stuff that lands. Not the stuff that gets seen. The stuff that gets remembered.
And memory doesn’t come from frequency. It comes from feelings. From one specific moment in a piece of communication where something clicks in a person which led them to thinks “yes, that’s exactly it.”
You cannot automate that moment. You can try. But you’ll know when it’s missing.
So what does this mean on Monday morning?
When you’re briefing work, the question shouldn’t just be “will people stop scrolling?” It should be “will they remember this tomorrow?” The metric we need to take more seriously is brand memory. How often, how clearly, how positively does someone recall your brand unprompted? It’s a harder number to get. It takes longer to move. But it’s the one that actually correlates to growth.
Give your creative teams a little more room to make something that feels like something — even if it’s harder to A/B test.
Attention is something you can rent. Memory is something you have to earn.
By Azzam Khan, Integrated Associate Director, 5th Element MEA.
