How great is an ad, if you can’t even remember the brand?

The other day, I saw a bike ad on TV. Created from a simple insight of ‘admiration for bikes’, it had an impactful casting, great background music and overall feel-good plot. I could totally connect with it. It was clearly stating to the prospective buyers “If you ride me, you would be adored by many.”

While discussing the ad with a friend, he asked me for the brand name. That’s when I realised, I remembered everything about the ad, except the brand name. To this, my colleague asked, “how great is an ad, if you can’t even remember the brand?”

This left me completely perplexed. Was it my oversight, that I didn’t pay attention to the brand name or was the ad too good that it overpowered the branding? When I started to think about the other ads I watch on TV, I realised, I don’t remember most of the brand names or at least not the correct ones. I know it belongs to a category of product, but mostly I wouldn’t know which specific brand it is promoting. Does that happen to you too?

We all know that the sole purpose of advertising is to create a space for the brand in the customer’s mind so that at the time of buying, this brand has a top-of-mind recall for the customer. Research is carried out at various levels, strategies are devised, so much time and effort are spent before arriving at a brief that helps cull out a memorable ad. Then, where do the ad makers or the brand teams lose track of what is to be achieved out of it? I tried to rationalise the possible issues and came up with a few points that could have been the reason behind this.

1. How much creativity is too much? Some ads are so creative, so intelligent, so spectacular, that it takes all the focus from the brand. What good is an ad if it doesn’t serve the very purpose of remembering the brand it was made for? The ad needs to be creative as well as effective. I feel most of the times, in the pursuit to create a masterpiece, we forget the real purpose. It is important to stick to the creative brief, while creating a masterpiece. Now, that triggers the second problem!
2. A good creative brief – Highly underrated, a creative brief is often the differentiator between good and ‘awesome’ creative work. While most people see this as a mundane piece of work in the whole creative process, a good, researched brief often lends the creative team the right ammunition to strike balance between strategy and creativity to position the brand to its target audience. In that case, was the brief not at all about the brand recall? Was it just about creating the stir without emphasis on the brand? How would you justify that? This led me to the third possible problem.
3. Overthinking- Did we overthink on the brief? We wanted to stand out in the crowd. We wanted to create something different, yet something that touches the emotions of the audience. The bike ad does exactly that. It begins with a kid sitting on the bike and playing bike ride, a college-goer posing on the bike for a click, the attention the bike gets from people. All these situations capture the aspiration part of it, but the ad ended, and I couldn’t recollect which brand it was all for. That brings me to the last point of contention.
4. A new ad. A new message. Too many different points of communication with each ad. There are very few brands, who stand by their positioning for a longer time. In order to address short-time market demands, or answer a competition, brands keep trying out different ads, without realising that it is diluting their positioning. Very few brands have been able to win the war of strong brand positioning. I would like to cite the example of Sprite here. Whatever the ad, it ends with one messaging – “Sprite. It’s clear”. It is so well crafted and reiterated through all their ads, it has won a strong place in our minds. A well-deserved one at that. Won’t you agree? 

So, what do you think? Is this a problem with the brief, the creative, the market conditioning or the requirement? Or Is this even a problem in the first place? I haven’t been able to arrive at a conclusion. I would like to know your views on how you think brands can strike a right balance between creativity and recall.