Why Gen Z Can’t Recall Ads: The Psychology Behind the Shift
TV's share of ad spends fell from 39.2% to about 21%, digital rose to 44%+. What the shift means for brand recall, attention and influence.
Ask a 25-year-old in 2015 to name an ad they liked and you would get an instant answer: Zoo Zoos or a telecom jingle. Ask a Gen Z consumer today and you may get a blank stare before Gully Boy or Zomato pops up. The question from a veteran strategist’s tenth-anniversary research is sharp: if blockbuster film songs are dead, are blockbuster ads dead too?
The Media Mix Has Flipped
Between 2015 and 2025, television slipped from 39.2% of all media spends to roughly 21%. Digital formats jumped from 11.6% to more than 44%. Within digital, e-commerce in-platform advertising and influencer campaigns are growing fastest.
This is not just a budget shift. It changes how often people are exposed, in what context, and whether a message gets encoded into long-term memory at all. Attention is fragmented across dozens of feeds, stories and short videos. That fragmentation makes it harder for any single campaign to become a shared cultural reference.
Performance Marketing Is Winning the War for Budgets
Digital’s measurement advantage has pushed brands into constant optimisation meetings, never monthly or quarterly planning. Big brands worry they do not understand performance marketing. D2C brands quietly admit they struggle with brand marketing. The long-running Binet and Field debate between brand building and sales activation keeps raging, and number-driven performance marketing currently has the upper hand.
Psychologically, this creates a trade-off. Performance ads are engineered for immediate response: clicks, trials, conversions. Brand ads build mental availability and distinctive memory structures that make a product come to mind later. Optimise only for the click and you may win the quarter but erase the brand from next year’s consideration set.
The Influencer Noise Trap
Unilever stirred the industry by declaring that big brand campaigns are over and it would use 10,000 influencers. The risk is obvious. If thousands of voices say slightly different things, the result is not persuasion but background noise. Selective attention is the brain’s default. When messages feel non-distinct or repetitive, consumers tune out.
Still, Memorable Ads Exist
The last decade still produced campaigns people actually remember. A few from the list are worth studying:
- Swiggy’s Gulab Jamun Uncle
- CRED’s Bappi Lahiri moment
- Nike’s Da Da Ding women athletes
- Ariel’s Share the Load
- Vicks Touch of Care with Gauri Sawant
- Tanishq Ekatvam
These worked because they carried a distinct emotional signature, a clear brand link and enough repetition to build memory, not just immediate clicks.
What Marketers Should Do
Treat performance and brand as complementary, not competing. Use performance marketing to harvest demand that brand memory creates. Make influencer work pattern-based: one sharp brand idea translated by many voices, not ten thousand free-form interpretations. And measure brand recall and salience, not only ROAS, if you care about what customers remember next year.
Source: ETBrandEquity.com
