Exploring advertising wearout

In the mid- to late 1980s the ARP Group uncovered evidence relating to advertising effectiveness: advertising's selling power gets used up, or wears out, in a predictable fashion.

Exploring Advertising Wearout

John Walling and Sian Owen, THE ARS Group, examine wearout's effect on brand share

Over the last few decades, the advertising industry has seen an ongoing and complex dialogue surrounding the debate on advertising wearout. Does it occur? If so, how fast? How should wearout be defined? Is it a function of individual advertising executions or of entire campaigns?

Much of the research on wearout seeks to understand advertisings micro effect, or how individual consumers respond to advertising repetition. Usually recall, awareness and other memory-based metrics are used in this research to measure...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands