What you will find in the article:
- Ad awareness is crucial in effectiveness planning for brands.
- New research highlights ad awareness as a valuable lead indicator.
- Ad awareness accounts for 17% of brand consideration across sectors.
- Indirect effects of ad awareness improve brand perceptions significantly.
- Marketers should reintegrate ad awareness as a key performance indicator.
Ad awareness became quite a dirty word in effectiveness. The industry focused too much on it, and we correctly steered toward more System 1 thinking, subconscious engagement and attention, alongside metrics that felt closer to an outcome. But we overcorrected.
New research from Thinkbox, Ebiquity, WPP Media, and Gain Theory, being presented at this year’s IPA Effectiveness Conference, will help redefine effectiveness planning. It pulls us into a more practical place, where we can understand whether an ad works better, and why.
It’s the most useful piece of effectiveness research I’ve seen this year. Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
We got a bit obsessed with ad awareness
From the 1940s onward, marketers got really excited about ad awareness. Then we had our hands slapped, were told it wasn’t an actual outcome, and “brand consideration” slipped in further down the funnel.
It’s no coincidence that in the digital era, we swapped the metric that tells us whether an ad got noticed for one that sounds closer to a sale.
The irony is that evidence linking awareness and sales existed decades ago. Millward Brown, whose co-founder Gordon Brown invented the Awareness Index, was plotting ad awareness against sales back in 1987.
But we focused on it too much. Classic Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a reliable measure.
Awareness is a gateway
We were right to question ad awareness, largely thanks to Robert Heath. His Low Attention Processing model showed that advertising can be processed with very little conscious attention. Emotional content gets absorbed implicitly, building feelings about a brand without us realizing.
His work with Agnes Nairn showed that recall measures can reward rational, high-attention ads and punish emotional ones that often do the most work. Judge ads purely on whether people remember them and you risk making ads people remember, rather than ads that grow brands.
But that doesn’t make ad awareness useless. We threw out a good lead indicator because it made a bad target and wasn’t perfect.
That makes this new research a proper practical leap for marketing. The researchers don’t pretend it replaces everything we’ve learned about low-attention processing and feelings-based learning. They frame ad awareness as a practical gateway.
It also has more data behind it than most studies you’ve read: 1,478 brands across 128 sectors, whole-of-market YouGov BrandIndex data from January 2022 to March 2026 and around 328,000 observations per model.
It gets to a result that may sound small, with ad awareness accounting for 17% of brand consideration. But the consistency of that relationship from category to category suggests they are on to something.
Most of the work from ads happens indirectly
This is what makes it the effectiveness lesson of the year. Of that 17%, only 6% is direct: the ad reminds you the brand exists, with mental availability doing its job. The other 11% is indirect.
The research says noticing advertising improves perceptions of a brand’s quality, value and reputation. Those perceptions then drive consideration.
Something I keep finding: ads build brands that change behavior, which then creates sales.
Ad awareness explains 12% of quality perceptions, 18% of value for money and 13% of reputation. Quality alone is the biggest driver of consideration, at 34%. Advertising peacocks: brands that advertise look like brands worth buying. One of many ways advertising works.
In some categories, it’s even more important
As usual, the averages hide the delicious outliers. In QSR delivery, ad awareness explains 69% of consideration. Lotteries, 62%. Ride hailing, 61%. Fashion, 50%. Even the median category, bus travel (my ADHD won’t let me get over how obscure that category is, Bus Travel?), sits at 14%.
Ad awareness isn’t perfect. It carries the baggage of eyes on screen, processing the ad, then remembering it. That isn’t entirely how advertising works. But it’s clearly part of it, and every category above the median should consider this in its effectiveness conversations.
Make it a KPI again
The researchers involved call ad awareness “a means, not an end.” I agree. I’m not suggesting we celebrate recall scores as if they were profit, though some on LinkedIn will today. But it’s a measurable lead indicator between spend and business outcomes. It is exactly what CFOs keep asking for. We’re being handed gold. Use it.
Two final, practical thoughts for all marketers:
1. Don’t write off research because a media body paid for it. People will throw this at you, I’m sure. Thinkbox doesn’t pay for an outcome. It pays for proper effectiveness research because proper effectiveness research keeps leading back to TV. Profit Ability 2 found TV generates 54.7% of advertising’s full profit. Better-informed marketers spend more on TV. That’s their strategy.
2. This isn’t one and done. A benchmark of 84 brands, £5.2bn of spend and 12 media channels, showing which media build ad awareness most efficiently, lands at a Thinkbox event on November 18. My hunch says TV will look rather good. Proper evidence has a habit of leading there.
Creativity will play a massive part too. Ad awareness includes high-attention thinking about your ads, but great distinctive creativity can also earn it by making people feel. And we know that drives profit.
Ad awareness got a bad rap because marketers tend to demand black-and-white answers. We were right to stop worshipping it but wrong to stop using it. This research puts it back where it belongs: a useful intermediary metric that partly explains how advertising works.
Not such a dirty word after all.
Andrew Tindall is a senior leader in the advertising industry and leads growth at System1, where he champions creative effectiveness and evidence-based marketing. Known for his sharp thinking on out-of-home, emotional advertising, and brand growth, he’s become a go-to voice on how creativity and data can work together.
Source: thedrum.com