Why certain ads stick while others don’t

I can tell when a campaign is going to fade before it ships. The deck looks polished. The tagline is clever. The media plan has reach. Yet there is no single moment the viewer will remember the next morning. No image that becomes a shortcut. No line you can retell at the kopi shop or in a Riyadh coworking lounge. When that is missing, budget just buys silence at scale.

Sticky ads feel different because they make one choice at a time. The team aligns on the feeling to leave behind, the scene you can replay without the brand present, and the line a real human would repeat. Everything else is support. Founders struggle here because the business is complicated and they try to fit the whole company inside thirty seconds. The result is an explainer, not a memory.

I learned this the hard way with a marketplace startup in Kuala Lumpur. Our first big push tried to prove we were cheaper, faster, and more trustworthy than old school vendors. We crammed three claims, two offers, and five features into one film. It tested well in a controlled group, then died on contact with the real world. What people told us in post-mortem calls was humbling. They could not remember the brand name without looking at the ad again. What they recalled was a pleasant tune and a friendly face. That is not a business outcome.

The fix did not come from new creative tricks. It came from accepting how memory works under pressure. People are busy, slightly distracted, and flooded with stimuli. They will keep what is easy to encode. Ease comes from three things that most early teams underuse: one emotion, one picture, one line. Anything that competes with those three becomes friction and gets cut by the brain.

One emotion does not mean sentimental. It means specific. Relief when the bill is lower. Pride when a parent can provide. Mischief when you beat the queue. Pick one and design your beats around it. We picked relief. Not generic happiness. Relief has a body feel you can show on screen. Shoulders drop. Breath softens. The camera lingers on that exhale. That was our first concrete choice.

One picture feels almost childish to pursue, which is why many founders ignore it. But visual hooks are how a brand sneaks into the mind without asking for permission. Think of a bright red umbrella in a rainstorm. A gold ring tied to a ribbon on a baby’s wrist for a family finance app. A delivery box that wiggles like a puppy when it arrives. When you revisit the same visual in cutdowns, posts, and out-of-home, it compounds. Our marketplace chose a yellow sticky note on a front door with a single handwritten word: Sorted. It showed up in every asset, sometimes framed, sometimes tucked in the corner. Over time, people did not have to read it. They felt it.

One line matters because speech is how humans pass ideas around. If your line cannot be said naturally, it will never travel. This is where many smart teams overwork language and lose the music. In Singapore I see tech founders reach for corporate polish. In Saudi I see ambition dressed as grandeur. In both cases the line stops being human. We took our original mouthful and rewrote until it sounded like something you would text a friend. The final line was simple: Done already. It broke no new ground, yet it moved. Riders said it to merchants. Customers typed it in reviews. That is the signal you look for.

Once those three anchors are set, you still need the ad to live where your users actually pay attention. The rule I share with teams is to match story speed to feed speed. TikTok scrolls reward quick premise reveal, then unspool a series of small satisfactions. You must show the hook inside the first second and keep your visual cue in frame. Instagram Stories tolerate softer build as long as the first frame feels personal. Out-of-home buys forgiveness for slower pacing, but only if the single picture and line can be read in two heartbeats. Founders often build a hero film then force it into every channel. That is not adaptation. That is waste.

There is also a quiet craft in repeating without feeling repetitive. Sticky ads re-echo the same cue in new scenes. The yellow sticky note might appear on a gig worker’s helmet one day and on a fridge the next, but the brain experiences it as one thing. You are not trying to surprise the viewer with your brand each time. You are trying to help them recognize you faster than last time. Recognition is a kindness in a crowded feed. It earns you the right to say less and be heard more.

What about features and proofs. Do they not matter. They do, but not as the spine. Proof points belong in the second beat of the story or in the captions and comments around it. If the emotional spine and visual cue are doing their work, the viewer will linger long enough to read your price, your guarantee, your delivery window. Early teams reverse this sequence and put the hard sell first. That is why they get skipped. Nobody is ready to weigh details before they feel anything.

Every region adds its own texture. In Malaysia, humor travels because shared languages create natural code switching. A single word delivered in BM then echoed in English builds warmth fast. In Singapore, precision and time savings land more cleanly than swagger. In KSA, family and pride motifs carry power, but audiences are also fatigued by glossy perfection. They respond well to quieter confidence and a line that feels spoken, not proclaimed. None of this is a rule book. It is a reminder to honor the ear you are trying to reach.

There is a point where teams ask whether a brand should protect its codes or chase novelty. This is a false choice. You protect the code that helps recognition and you refresh the context that keeps it alive. Keep your color, your jingle note, your core picture. Change the scene, the characters, the micro-story. If you scrap your codes too often, you make your own spend expensive. If you refuse to evolve them, you turn into wallpaper. Sticky brands are disciplined and playful at once.

Founders also underestimate how distribution shapes memory. If your media plan spikes for two weeks then vanishes for six, you do not have a campaign. You have a flare. Memory is frequency plus freshness. Plan for steady pulses, not a single blast. Negotiate for placements that stack your cue in short succession across formats. The effect is not additive. It is multiplicative. Three encounters in a day beat nine over a month. People need to bump into you across contexts to trust that you are real.

Finally, measure what actually predicts stickiness. Do not celebrate impressions that never resolve into recall. Do not overvalue click-through rates on placements designed for attention, not action. Run simple recall tests inside your own channels. Ask unprompted questions in story polls. Track how quickly people can name you from the picture alone. Watch for organic reuse of your line in comments. When you hear strangers repeating your language back to you, you have earned permission to scale. If you do not hear it, do not scale. Go back and choose sharper anchors.

The blunt truth is that most ads do not fail because the product is weak or the market is cold. They fail because the team tries to say everything and ends up saying nothing. Sticky work comes from humility about how minds work and courage to cut. One emotion. One picture. One line. Adapt to channel, repeat with variation, and let your codes do the compounding. That is how a brand becomes the thing people remember without trying.

If you are a founder staring at a big spend, pause and ask three questions. What will someone feel that they can name. What will they see that they can sketch. What will they say that they would text a friend. If you cannot answer in one breath, you do not have an ad yet. You have a draft. Finish it before you buy reach. Because budgets do not make ideas stick. Choices do.

And if you need a litmus test, use the phrase many teams are afraid to say out loud: why certain ads stick while others don’t. Put your draft next to that line. If your ad makes the answer obvious in silence, you are ready. If it needs a paragraph of explanation, you are not. The audience will tell you either way. Better that you find out first.