A few weeks ago, a simple question started an unexpectedly long conversation in the office.

"Does anyone remember old advert jingles?"

People knew there were jingles they remembered. They were certain of it. Yet when asked to produce one, there was hesitation — fragments surfaced, half-finished melodies, a few uncertain lyrics. Then someone mentioned an old advert. Someone else found it online. And suddenly the room came alive.

"Oh, that one."

"I remember this!"

Before long, people were humming parts of the song, correcting each other's versions, and laughing at how much they had forgotten, and how much they still somehow remembered.

What struck me wasn't that people remembered the advert. It was that they remembered it at all. Some of these campaigns were years old, in some cases decades, and yet they had stayed lodged somewhere in people's minds long after countless newer campaigns had disappeared without a trace. Why? What exactly made them stick?

The obvious answer is repetition. Old advertising leaned on it heavily, the same jingle on radio, the same slogan on television, again and again. Brands weren't shy about saying the same thing hundreds of times.

There is real psychology behind this instinct. It's called the mere exposure effect, first documented by Robert Zajonc in 1968. People tend to develop a preference for something simply through repeated contact with it, regardless of its actual merits. Familiarity, on its own, breeds a kind of fondness.

But repetition alone doesn't explain much. If sheer frequency were the whole story, every advert we see repeatedly today would be equally memorable. It isn't. Even the research on exposure has a limit built in: studies describe it as an inverted U — liking rises with exposure up to a point, then plateaus, and can even decline with overexposure.

We now spend hours a day scrolling through feeds full of sponsored posts, short videos, and banners. We encounter far more advertising than previous generations did. And yet, ask someone to sing a memorable campaign from last year, and most of us would struggle. So repetition is probably necessary, but not sufficient. Something else has to be happening alongside it.

This is where advertising thinker Rory Sutherland offers a useful lens. Sutherland — Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and co-founder of its behavioural science unit, Ogilvy Change — has spent his career collecting examples of small, low-cost psychological interventions that produced outsized effects: turning a cereal box forty-five degrees, putting a name on a Coke can, wrapping free peanuts on a flight instead of serving them loose.

His recurring argument is that these effects don't scale the way spending does. A tiny change in framing or presentation can sometimes outperform a much bigger investment in strategy or media buying. Human attention just doesn't respond to inputs in a straight line the way budgets do.

In other words, memorability isn't only a function of scale. Sometimes it's a function of distinctiveness — a slightly unusual phrase, a melody that feels different, a slogan that sounds unlike everything around it. The power comes not from how loudly a message is delivered, but from whether it creates a small interruption, a moment where the brain has to pause.

This isn't just an advertising anecdote, either. Marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have built an evidence base around what they call distinctive brand assets — the colours, sounds, characters, and phrases that let a brand be noticed and recalled in a crowded market. Their research consistently finds that being distinctive matters as much as being remembered for the "right" reasons. A brand's memory cues often do more work than its message.

When you think about many memorable Ghanaian adverts, that pattern starts to appear. The jingles were often simple. The slogans were rarely complicated, some would probably fail every modern branding workshop. But they had personality. They sounded different. They gave people something to repeat, and more importantly, something worth noticing in the first place.

Perhaps that's where modern advertising faces a different kind of challenge. Many campaigns today are highly optimised — designed for platforms, for metrics, for clicks and views and engagement rates. The goal often isn't to be remembered next year. It's to perform this week. That's not a criticism, just a description of the environment marketers now work in.

However it creates a real tension. When success is measured in impressions and conversions, memorability can quietly become secondary. A campaign can post excellent numbers while leaving almost no cultural residue behind. People click, people buy, then people move on. The advert does its job and disappears.

The older jingles seemed to work differently, though it's worth being careful about why. They weren't competing with endless scrolling feeds and dozens of stimuli arriving every minute, so each exposure likely carried more weight. They had more room to settle into people's routines — more chances to be sung, quoted, and repeated outside the advert itself. That's not proof the old creative work was better. It may simply have had an easier environment to be remembered in.

But it does point to something worth taking seriously: memorable advertising may not be created when people merely consume it. It's created when people start using it — when a slogan becomes shorthand, when a jingle gets sung outside its intended context, when an advert escapes the screen and enters everyday life.

That's something repetition can help with, and something distinctiveness can help with, but neither seems to work alone. A catchy jingle without exposure goes nowhere. Exposure without distinctiveness becomes wallpaper, familiar, perhaps even mildly likeable in the way the exposure research suggests, but not memorable enough to be repeated on purpose. The real effect seems to happen when repetition meets something psychologically interesting enough to deserve repeating.

Which brings us back to the real question: what actually makes an ad memorable? Not just in the past, and not just as jingles. Maybe it isn't because advertising was better, or because audiences were different. Maybe it's because the campaigns that stuck found a rare combination of familiarity and distinctiveness, a message repeated often enough to stick, but different enough to be worth remembering. And if Sutherland and the distinctive-assets researchers are onto something, that combination may have less to do with massive budgets or sophisticated strategy than we'd like to believe.

Sometimes the thing people remember for decades isn't the campaign. It's a line. A tune. A tiny creative decision that made all the difference.