Fame Doesn't Transfer. That's Why the Ads Never Stop.

Apple held its "Surprise and Shine" event on September 9th to launch the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone. It was John Ternus's first keynote as CEO, eight days after he took over from Tim Cook. The marketing that followed looked exactly like every Apple launch before it: cinematic event production, wall-to-wall placement across video platforms, unskippable pre-roll, a media presence that's genuinely difficult to avoid for anyone online during launch week. A new chief executive, in his first week running the company, changed nothing about how Apple sells a phone.

One observer summed up the underlying pattern on LinkedIn days later: Apple has run essentially the same marketing strategy for 42 years, and the day it launched a foldable phone, millions had already engaged with it within hours. The natural question, watching one of the most recognized companies on earth spend at that intensity, is why it bothers. Nobody on the planet needs to be told Apple exists.

That question mixes up two things that are actually very different. The distinction is the entire answer.

Being famous is not the same as being remembered at the right moment

Being a well-known company is one kind of memory. Being the brand that comes to mind, specifically and immediately, at the exact moment someone is deciding to buy a particular new thing, is a completely different kind. It doesn't inherit automatically from the first.

This is the core finding behind decades of research out of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute on what's called mental availability: brands grow by being easy to recall in specific buying situations. That recall has to be built and refreshed for each specific thing a company wants someone to buy, not just for the company's name in the abstract. Everyone already knows Apple makes phones. Almost nobody, a week before September 9th, had "iPhone Duo, the foldable one, here's what it actually does" sitting in memory, because it didn't exist yet. That specific piece of mental real estate starts at zero for every new product, regardless of how much equity the parent brand has already banked.

Apple's saturation-level launch marketing isn't insurance against people forgetting Apple. It's the work of building an entirely new memory from scratch, at scale, in a matter of days, for something that had no memory footprint at all the week before.

This is also, less intuitively, why size doesn't make the job easier. A contested but widely discussed strand of research, associated with effectiveness researcher Les Binet, argues something counterintuitive: bigger brands may lose specific-product awareness faster than smaller ones, not slower. The theory is that forgetting happens at a roughly constant rate. A larger brand is simply juggling more of everything at once, more product lines, more launches, more competitors chasing the same finite attention, a more fragmented customer base spread across more categories. Not everyone accepts this cleanly. Brand researcher Julia Kinner has pushed back publicly that the underlying science isn't fully settled, and it's fair to treat it as a genuinely open, actively debated claim rather than settled fact.

But directionally, even skeptics don't dispute the basic mechanism. More products competing for the same finite human memory means more total reinforcement work required to keep each one specifically available, not less. A company Apple's size isn't fighting to be remembered once. It's fighting to keep a dozen separate product-specific memories fresh simultaneously, in a media environment where a July 2026 industry study found most branded ads are forgotten within days despite billions in collective spend behind them. Volume of spend doesn't guarantee the memory sticks. It's the entry fee for having a chance.

The part of this argument that's genuinely being contested right now

A serious challenge to the mental-availability framework is being made by credible people inside the industry right now, not from outside critics. Iris's global chief strategy officer Ben Essen argued this year that the entire model was built for a world where humans carried the full cognitive load of deciding what to buy, largely unaided. AI-mediated discovery is quietly changing that. When a shopping platform, a search AI Overview, or a recommendation system narrows the shortlist before a person starts consciously recalling anything, being remembered by the human matters less than being trusted, ranked and surfaced by the system doing the narrowing.

Essen's evidence isn't speculative. Ahrefs' analysis of 300,000 keywords, using December 2025 Google Search Console data, found that the presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 58% drop in click-through rate for the page that would otherwise rank first. Google itself is visibly hedging its own advertising-dependent business model in response, rolling out inline links and source attribution inside AI Overviews earlier this year. If that shift is real and accelerating, brand-building's job increasingly becomes about earning system-level reputation and trust, not just human recall.

Even Apple, the brand every "why do they still bother" question gets asked about, has already run into exactly this limit, in a category where its usual advantage didn't transfer. Research from Morning Consult found that Apple's overall reputation has not protected it from losing ground in AI mindshare specifically. Apple Intelligence's mental penetration fell 3.5 percentage points over four months even as its emotional-trust score held up. That's the clearest evidence, in that dataset, that a brand's general reputation and its standing in a genuinely new category can move in completely different directions at once. Apple's phone-launch memory machine is decades deep and extremely well built. Its position in the AI conversation is being fought from something much closer to a standing start.

Why this isn't free, and isn't always immediately rewarded

None of this makes an awareness push a safe bet. Adidas admitted in 2019 that years of chasing short-term, efficiency-measured performance marketing had quietly eroded the brand-building work that made its performance marketing efficient in the first place, and pivoted its measurement approach to protect long-term brand health over short-term ROI. More recently, a single quarter of aggressive World Cup-tied marketing, close to a billion euros, produced a profit miss that investors punished immediately: Adidas shares fell as much as 18% in a single session, the steepest one-day drop in the company's history. Building the right kind of memory at the right moment is a real, well-evidenced strategy. It is not a guarantee the market will treat it kindly on the way there.

What this actually settles

Apple doesn't need anyone to remember that Apple exists. It needs a specific, brand-new piece of information, that a foldable iPhone exists, what it looks like, why it matters, to occupy space in millions of minds that had nothing there a week earlier. It needs to do that fast enough and loudly enough to win the specific moment someone decides to buy one.

The Essen challenge is real, but it bites hardest where a purchase has already been commoditized into a recommendation an algorithm can safely make on someone's behalf: a phone charger, a subscription renewal, a mid-tier laptop. A $1,999 foldable flagship, in the first weeks it exists, is still overwhelmingly a human decision, made by someone who wants to have seen it, held it, formed their own opinion before an algorithm forms one for them. That's precisely the kind of purchase mental availability still governs, and precisely why Apple's spend still made sense on September 9th even as the ground shifts under other categories.

Being famous bought Apple nothing at that specific moment except the ability to get people's attention faster than a newer brand could. It still had to do the actual work of building the memory itself, product by product, launch by launch. A decades-old reputation can open the door. It can't walk through it for you.