Rebel & Soul has published the whitepaper ‘The Three Trillion Dollar Question’, drawing on a six-month neuroscience study examining why most brand experiences fail to convert into long-term consumer memory.
The marketing industry evaluates brand experience through engagement metrics: impressions, reach, dwell time, and social mentions. None of those measures determines whether a brand will surface in a consumer’s mind at a future moment of purchase.
According to the whitepaper, screen-based attention has fallen by 68% since 2004, from an average of two and a half minutes to 47 seconds in 2025, yet the dominant industry response has been to optimize for capturing more of that shrinking attention window, rather than examining whether attention is converting into memory at all.
The cost of that gap is the subject of the report. Globally, brands invest approximately one trillion dollars a year in advertising. Over a typical three-year strategic horizon, that represents three trillion dollars in collective brand-building investment.
The more useful question is why some campaigns stick in memory for six months while others vanish in four weeks, and whether that’s something designers can actually shape.
The report adds that a significant proportion of that figure is lost to memory decay before it can influence purchasing behavior, not because the creative failed in the room, but because most brand experiences are not designed with memory encoding in mind.
“The industry has spent years debating whether brand experience works at all. The more useful question is why some campaigns stick in memory for six months while others vanish in four weeks, and whether that’s something designers can actually shape,” said Kristy Castleton, Founder, Rebel & Soul.
The study tracked 24 branded adverts across 81 participants at five intervals — immediately after viewing, then at one week, one month, three months and six months — measuring how recall curves diverge over time and what design factors predict durability.
Content was scored against the INVOLVE framework, seven neuroscience-based principles for memory-encoded experience design, before testing began. High-scoring content was up to 52% more memorable at six months than content that scored below the memorability threshold. The curves produced by each tier never crossed: at every measurement interval, content that scored higher was remembered by more people, and the gap widened over time rather than closing.
Attention Versus Memory
One of the study’s findings concerns how the industry measures experience. Participants were monitored for brain activity via EEG, galvanic skin response, eye tracking and facial expressions during the initial lab session, signals commonly used to assess whether creative is working in the moment. But those signals did not predict which brands would still be recalled six months later.
The INVOLVE score, based on the creative’s design properties collected before participant data were collected, showed a consistent positive association with recall across all measurement intervals.
“Attention in the moment and memory over time are different outcomes, and the study shows they can diverge significantly. What the brain responds to during an experience is not the same as what it keeps,” said Castleton.
“The design of the experience, rather than the intensity of the response it generates, is a better guide to long-term recall.”
What the Brain Keeps and What It Lets Go
The whitepaper details seven neuroscience-based principles, each addressing a different aspect of how the brain decides what to encode and what to discard.
- Curiosity and neurochemical readiness for memory formation
- Novelty and broken patterns that capture attention
- Vivid, sensory-rich design that strengthens recall
- Structured information delivery to reduce cognitive overload
- Physical movement and embodied attention
- Multi-sensory experiences that create multiple retrieval pathways
- Emotional peaks that shape long-term memory
Each principle corresponds to a documented mechanism in neuroscience and can be scored against the INVOLVE framework before an experience goes live. The full report sets out the scientific basis for each, alongside evidence from the six-month study and case studies from client work across Asia-Pacific.
The full whitepaper is available here.
