Singapore-based brand experience agency Rebel & Soul publishes The Three Trillion Dollar Question, a whitepaper presenting the findings of a six-month memorability study across 81 participants and 24 branded adverts.
SINGAPORE, 30 June – Rebel & Soul today publishes The Three Trillion Dollar Question, a whitepaper drawing on a six-month neuroscience study to examine 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.
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 optimise 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. A significant proportion of that figure, the whitepaper argues, is lost to memory decay before it can influence purchasing behaviour, 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,” says 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.
One of the study’s most striking findings challenges 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. The design of the experience, rather than the intensity of the response it generates, is a better guide to long-term recall,” adds Castleton.
The whitepaper details seven neuroscience-based principles, each addressing a different aspect of how the brain decides what to encode and what to discard. They span the role of curiosity in priming neurochemical readiness for memory formation; the attention effects of novelty and broken patterns; the retrieval advantages of vivid, sensory-rich design; the encoding risks of cognitive overload and how structured information delivery avoids them; the memory effects of physical movement and embodied attention; the value of multi-sensory variety in creating multiple retrieval pathways for the same experience; and the weight that emotional peaks carry in what survives in memory weeks and months later.
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.
