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.

Central bankers like to say that monetary policy works through expectations. A beautiful concept implying a public that is constantly calculating, analyzing, and adjusting to the Fed's subtle signals. But that sophisticated engine only runs, of course, if someone actually bothers to update those expectations. In a paper I have forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Analysis, I dig into this very question: Do U.S. households truly revise their core assumptions about inflation, interest rates, and housing when the Federal Reserve makes an announcement? The period I examined (2013 to 2021) was nearly a decade full of unconventional tools, "forward guidance," and agonizingly slow normalization. This was the perfect test bed to see how much of the Fed's careful communication truly reaches the public.

The short answer? It reaches them, but on very narrow terms.