For years, marketers have chased attention: viewability and watch time. But for brands, the more consequential problem is not whether people notice them, it is whether anything they see is actually remembered. Brands are not chosen simply because they are seen, but because they are remembered in ways that survive real decisions.
This is a collaborative article Professor Gemma Calvert, Krishnan Menon and Gita de Beer where they argue that AI is making brands forgettable by prioritising efficiency and sameness over emotionally meaningful experiences that create the lasting memories that drive purchase decisions.
This is where many AI strategies quietly go wrong. Across organisations, AI is being used to increase speed, scale and efficiency. The unintended consequence is that it is also increasing sameness, and sameness is hostile to memory. Brand trackers may look reassuringly green, yet penetration, pricing power and growth refuse to move. That gap is the tell tale sign of awareness without buying memory.
AI is not the root cause here. Fragmented media and converging creative formats were already weakening memory formation long before generative tools entered the picture. What AI does is amplify those weaknesses when it is deployed to optimise efficiency rather than meaning.
The brain that stops trying to remember
Human memory is selective and effortful by design. To store something meaningfully, the brain has to work on it, elaborating it, linking it to other ideas and feelings, and retrieving it again later. That effort is not a flaw, it is how meaning is formed.
When the brain expects information to live elsewhere, it simply invests less effort. This is cognitive offloading. In Betsy Sparrow's 2011 research, people who believed information would be saved digitally were less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where to find it, a phenomenon that became known as the Google Effect.
AI accelerates this habit. Machines store and retrieve perfectly; human memory does not. As AI increasingly summarises, indexes and predicts for us, the brain does less elaborative and associative work, the very processes that allow information to be encoded with meaning. Brand messages may be seen and even recognised on screen, but they are less likely to be remembered in ways that shape later choice.
How fragmented media cuts stories short
The brain organises experience into episodes, coherent chunks of "what just happened." Every clear shift, swiping to a new video, opening a notification, closing a tab, creates an event boundary that interrupts memory formation.
The strategic implication is straightforward. If a brand does not create continuity across moments, the brain treats each exposure as disposable by default.
Research by Richard Silberstein shows that when branding appears at scene cuts, narrative endings or abrupt changes in pace, brand recall drops significantly. In fast scrolling feeds full of short, disconnected clips, brands that show up only in fragments may be noticed, but they are rarely encoded. They pass through attention without ever settling into memory.
When brands start to blur
The hippocampus relies on a process known as pattern separation to keep similar experiences distinct. It is what allows people to tell one brand from another, even when they advertise in the same places and use similar formats.
Many AI-driven marketing tools prioritise fluency, predictability and short-term engagement. The result is creative work designed to "fit the feed": templated formats, familiar emotional cues and converging styles. When brand encounters become too similar, pattern separation weakens. Ads feel interchangeable. Brands may still be recognised when prompted, but they are harder to discriminate and easier to overwrite at the moment of choice.
Seen this way, distinctive brand assets are not aesthetic flourishes. They are cognitive tools, the minimum signal the brain needs to keep one brand separate from the rest in a crowded stream.
Distinctive brand assets are not aesthetic flourishes. They are cognitive tools, the minimum signal the brain needs to keep one brand separate from the rest in a crowded stream.
Memory decides what survives
Strong memories depend on context and emotion. Context anchors meaning in a specific "where and when." Emotion signals why something matters. Together, they tell the brain what is worth keeping.
AI-mediated content often strips both away. Stories are compressed into summaries. Emotional peaks are smoothed into generic positivity. What tends to survive memory formation is not polish, but relevance. Concrete situations where a brand clearly helps solve a problem, avoid a risk or achieve something meaningful.
Brands that rely on endless mid-funnel reminder messages often end up with shallow memories that fade quickly. Being visible is not the same as being retrievable.
No recall, no brand
Memories last only when they are used. Retrieval is not a by-product of memory; it is how memories stay accessible.
When AI retrieves information for us, we practise recall less, and offloaded information becomes harder to access later. A brand may still be recognised when shown, yet fail to come to mind during real-world decisions, especially under time pressure. Recognition without retrieval rarely translates into choice.
The uncomfortable implication...
Memory is becoming the real scarcity. Weak encoding, fragmented episodes, blurred distinctiveness, flattened emotion and lack of retrieval do not show up clearly on standard dashboards. Brand health scores can look strong while brand memory quietly erodes.
The uncomfortable truth is that if the main job you give AI is to make more, cheaper and more feed-native content, you are not increasing productivity, you are depreciating the brand. An AI business case that talks about cost per asset but ignores memory strength or pricing power is incomplete. That implies three shifts:
3 Strategic Shifts Required
Treat identity as a memory tool.
Brand strategy must prioritise clear identity and distinctive assets. AI should be used to test what people genuinely associate with the brand and to stop work that weakens those links, even when that work performs well in dashboards.
Design for memory, not just reach
Media and creative planning need to support memory formation explicitly, favouring fewer episodes, stronger continuity and presence in emotionally meaningful moments. In practice, this often means trading some short-term engagement for work that builds longer-lasting demand, less chopped-up storytelling and more coherent arcs across feeds and platforms.
Measure memory, not just attention
The real question is whether the brand comes to mind on its own when people choose, not whether it is recognised when prompted. That requires complementing attention metrics with unprompted recall, reaction-time choice tasks and changes in pricing power over time, and allowing AI to optimise against those outcomes.
The Strategic Paradox
AI will not decide whether a brand is remembered or forgotten. But if we continue to use it to optimise what is fastest to produce rather than what is hardest to remember, we are not building brands. We are quietly training buyers' brains to filter our brands out before conscious choice even begins.
About the Authors
Dr Gemma Calvert is Professor of Neuromarketing at Nanyang Business School and Deputy Director of the Nanyang Centre for Marketing Technologies at NTU. A pioneering neuroscientist in consumer behaviour, her work explores how subconscious processes shape decision-making, brand perception and memory. She has been recognised among Stanford University’s Top 2% of scientists and has served on the World Economic Forum’s Neuroscience Panel. Gemma is Co-Founder of Split Second Research and advises global brands and government agencies on applying neuroscience and AI to strategy, innovation and growth. Alongside academia, she is an entrepreneur, speaker and co-founder of Gemini Retreats, designing executive programmes that apply neuroscience to leadership transformation in the age of AI.
Krishnan Menon is a Strategic Marketing and Growth Advisor. He is a senior marketing and brand transformation leader with nearly 30 years of experience across Asia Pacific markets. He specialises in helping organisations translate global complexity into local nuance at the intersection of brand, technology, data, and AI, crafting clear strategies that drive growth, distinctiveness, and long-term value. Krishnan has led multidisciplinary teams across multiple markets and regularly writes and speaks on the future of marketing and human-centred brand building.
Gita de Beer is Global Director Strategic Initiatives, The Heineken Company and Chair of The Marketing Society Singapore. She builds brands that matter to people and accelerates business growth by staying ahead of culture. A global marketing and growth leader with 20+ years across Heineken, Diageo, Vogue, Coca-Cola, Unilever, and both B2C and B2B sectors, she specialises in turning cultural shifts, behavioural insight, and technology into commercial value.
You can find out more about membership to The Marketing Society here and what we are doing in Singapore.
For Marketers Who Mean Business.
