The article argues that advertising is often misunderstood as persuasion or information when one of its most important effects is memory retrieval. Ads can make a product, brand, or category easier to recall when a buying situation arises. Recent research on “ads as cues” shows that advertising can increase demand among habitual users and even spill over to similar competitors, as when one cola ad reminds consumers of the broader cola category.

The piece uses this mechanism to clarify brand versus performance marketing. Upper-funnel ads may not create immediate action, but they can make later search, sales, or product interactions more effective by making the brand more retrievable. The measurement challenge is therefore about the estimand: a brand-level experiment can estimate marginal lift, but not what advertising does to the full competitive memory environment.