You can’t influence someone if they don’t notice you. But what if being noticed, too often, is exactly why they’ve stopped paying attention?
Modern advertising loves a subtle nudge. We lean into priming, passive attention, salience, all the indirect tools designed to build brand preference without demanding too much. But here’s the rub: in a world where we’re exposed to between 4k-10k ads per day, our brains have adapted.
Enter digital desensitisation, a kind of cognitive shield that filters out anything that doesn’t feel new, relevant or emotionally charged. Then comes latent inhibition, where the brain learns to actively ignore things it has seen before but found meaningless.
Suddenly, the very strategies built to create connection might be doing the opposite. We’re not just being overlooked, we’re being mentally muted.
The science is clear, brand awareness isn’t just built through repetition, it’s built through repetition that lands. It’s the combination of emotional relevance, contextual timing, and creative distinctiveness to move a brand from seen to stored in memory.
Dr Karen-Nelson Fields latest work with Peter Field and Adam Morgan in The Eye-Watering Cost of Dull Media, proves this point yet again, estimating that efficiency drops 77 per cent when these elements are not prioritised in planning. That’s not just creative underperformance. It’s a systemic failure in how we plan our advertising and deliver it.
So what do we do if the more often people see you without meaning, the more effectively their brains learn to ignore you?
Priming and Passive attention. Considered smart, efficient advertising. Until it isn’t.
Priming is advertising’s long game. The theory seems reasonable: show people something enough, your colour, your logo, your tone of voice and eventually, they’ll develop a preference for it, often without realising why.
It’s why a certain antihistamine feels like the “right one” in the chemist. Or why your mate orders the beer he’s seen advertised all summer. Familiarity feels like trust.
Paired with passive attention, those fleeting exposures via billboards, pre-rolls, or podcast bumps, the model becomes one of subtle, background influence. Not shouty. Not demanding. Just always there.
It’s long been considered smart, efficient advertising. Until it isn’t.
Latent inhibition: The Silent Campaign Killer
Here’s where the brain fights back.
Latent inhibition is the brain’s way of protecting itself from overload. When we see something repeatedly and it doesn’t matter to us, we stop noticing it entirely. It becomes invisible.
In advertising, this means that the tenth exposure to your ad doesn’t just do less, it can actually train the brain to suppress you entirely.
That shouty radio ad? Gone. That once-interesting pre-roll? Skipped automatically. Your message doesn’t just fade. It’s blocked.
When this happens, brands don’t just lose attention. They lose access. And reversing that indifference costs more than getting noticed in the first place.
The Tension: Repetition vs Relevance
This creates a strategic dilemma. Priming and passive attention rely on repeated exposure. But repetition without relevance doesn’t just fade into the background, it fails to register at all.
Imagine an established brand blanketing digital audio, OOH, and social platforms with the same static creative. At first, it’s there. But without novelty or emotional pull, the brain quickly stops registering it. It doesn’t provoke, engage, or annoy, it just vanishes.
The result isn’t irritation. It’s invisibility.
It’s not just media wastage but also memory never formed. A brand seen often and remembered never. If your funnel metrics aren’t meaningfully shifting despite investment, this could be what’s happening.
So, What Now?
If priming is planting seeds, latent inhibition is the soil going dry. We need better irrigation.
To cut through, brands must match advertising delivery with psychological receptivity. That means planning media not just for exposure, but for entertainment, emotional resonance, and participation.
1. Familiarity with Freshness
Latent inhibition loves stale repetition. Break the pattern with meaning, not just motion.
Don’t just repeat. Refresh. It might be as simple as utilising a rotation of different formats across channels adding freshness to how people are seeing creative.
Spotify Wrapped is a perfect example; same idea, but updated every year with new data, playful twists, and personal resonance. You anticipate it, its meaningful to you and a way to connect with others.
2. Sequence Attention, Not Just Reach
Dull media collapses story potential. Good media lets your brand idea stretch its legs.
Repetition isn’t enough if the message doesn’t evolve. Use media to build a story, not just deliver a slogan. High-attention formats like CTV and premium video can carry richer messages that unfold over time.
Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign does this well. Every execution is visually distinct but connects back to a single brand idea. It creates a narrative that rewards attention rather than exhausting it.
3. Emotion Over Exposure
Emotion slows down attention decay. It’s more effective than frequency alone. But only if the media environment allows space for that emotion to land.
The Suncorp One House campaign made people feel something, by connecting to a cause (bush fires) that impacted Australians and providing a solution that delivered long lasting community impact. Choose formats with high attention volume. Know the emotion you’re trying to evoke. Some are more commercially effective than others.
4. Build Micro-Engagement Loops
Every micro-action is a jolt of novelty, the antidote to cognitive autopilot
Layer interaction into media, because even simple gestures can refresh attention and build memory. Small asks, polls, swipes, customisation, creates audience agency, turning viewers into co-creatives. They also disrupt the path to latent inhibition by turning a passive audience into an active one.
Reframing Brand Awareness
This isn’t a case of abandoning priming or passive attention. It’s about respecting the limits of repetition and baking in cognitive novelty through behaviourally informed media planning.
As marketers, we must ask: are we reinforcing brand meaning, or just accelerating indifference?
The harsh truth is that familiarity without feeling builds forgettability. In today’s media world of high-frequency, low-attention advertising, the real risk isn’t being noticed and forgotten, it’s never having had the chance in the first place.
