It’s too bad we can’t market to elephants. In a poll of more than 13,000 adult humans, more than half were unable to remember any specific ad they had seen, heard, or read in the past 30 days.^[12] How many can you remember right now? Clearly, forgetting by consumers is a big headache for marketers.

As the popularity of the board game Trivial Pursuit shows us, people have a vast quantity of information stored in their heads that is not necessarily available on demand. Although most of the information that enters our memory does not go away, it may be difficult or impossible to retrieve unless the appropriate cues are present. What influences the likelihood that customers will remember a commercial message?

Individual cognitive or physiological factors are responsible for some of the differences we see in retrieval ability among people. Some older adults consistently display inferior recall ability for current items, such as prescription drug instructions, although they may recall events that happened to them when they were younger with great clarity. The recent popularity of puzzles like Soduku and centers that offer “mental gymnastics” attests to emerging evidence that we can keep our retrieval abilities sharp by exercising our minds just as we keep our other muscles toned by working out on a regular basis.

Not surprisingly, recall is enhanced when we pay more attention to the message in the first place. Some evidence indicates that we can retrieve information about a pioneering brand (the first brand to enter a market) more easily from memory than we can for follower brands because the first product’s introduction is likely to be distinctive and, for the time being, no competitors divert our attention. In addition, we are more likely to recall descriptive brand names than those that do not provide adequate cues as to what the product is.

The way a marketer presents her message influences the likelihood we’ll be able to recall it later. The spacing effect describes the tendency for us to recall printed material more effectively when the advertiser repeats the target item periodically rather than presenting it repeatedly in a short period. The viewing environment of a marketing message also affects recall. For example, commercials we see during baseball games yield the lowest recall scores among sports programs because the activity is stop-and-go rather than continuous. Unlike football or basketball, the pacing of baseball gives many opportunities for attention to wander even during play. Similarly, General Electric found that its commercials fared better in television shows with continuous activity, such as stories or dramas, compared to variety shows or talk shows, which are punctuated by a series of acts. A large-scale analysis of TV commercials found that viewers recall commercials shown first in a series of ads better than those they see last; this may be due to the tendency for our attention to wander as we endure a commercial break.^[13]

Some advertisers today are experimenting with bitcoms that try to boost viewers’ retention of a set of ads inserted within a TV show. (We call this a commercial pod.) In a typical bitcom, when the pod starts, a stand-up comedian (perhaps an actor in the show) performs a small set that leads into the actual ads. This is one way that marketers are trying to integrate a show’s contents with commercial messages and increase viewers’ involvement with advertising.

Finally, it goes without saying that the nature of the ad itself plays a big role in determining whether it’s memorable. One recent study on print advertising reported that we are far more likely to remember spectacular magazine ads, including multipage spreads, three-dimensional pop-ups, scented ads, and ads with audio components. For example, a Pepsi Jazz two-page spread with a three-dimensional pop-up of the opened bottle and a small audio chip that played jazz music from the bottle’s opening as well as a scratch-and-sniff tab that let readers smell its black cherry vanilla flavor scored an amazing 100 percent in reader recall.^[14]

Short of putting on a Broadway production, what can we do to improve memory for our messages? As a general rule, prior familiarity with an item enhances its recall. Indeed, this is one of the basic goals of marketers who try to create and maintain awareness of their products. The more experience a consumer has with a product, the better use she makes of product information. Also, stimuli that stand out in contrast to their environments are more likely to command attention which, in turn, increases the likelihood that we will recall them. Almost any technique that increases the novelty of a stimulus also improves recall. This explains why unusual advertising or distinctive packaging tends to facilitate brand recall. Mystery ads, in which the ad doesn’t identify the brand until the end, are more effective at building associations in memory between the product category and that brand—especially in the case of relatively unknown brands.

How about the way a message gets delivered? Is it true that a picture is worth 1,000 words? There is some evidence for the superiority of visual memory over verbal memory; the available data indicate that we are more likely to recognize information presented in picture form at a later time. Certainly, visual aspects of an ad are more likely to grab a consumer’s attention. In fact, eye-movement studies indicate that about 90 percent of viewers look at the dominant picture in an ad before they bother to view the copy.^[15]

But here’s the fly in the ointment: Although pictorial ads may enhance recall, they do not necessarily improve comprehension. One study found that television news items presented with illustrations (still pictures) as a backdrop resulted in improved recall for details of the news story, even though understanding of the story’s content did not improve.^[16] Another study confirmed that, typically, consumers recall ads with visual figures more often and like them better.^[17] Understanding what they said is another story.