Or how your billboard campaign should remain significantly consistent. If you want significant return.

From Todd and Richard at Up To Something

You’ll get tired of your ad long before your audience does.

It happens all the time. A few weeks—or a few months—after launch, clients start to assume the public must be sick of seeing it too.

But your reaction isn’t indicative of your audience’s reality, and here’s why:

1. You’ve been staring at your ad for ages.
Before it ever hit the streets, you reviewed it, approved it, tweaked it, went back and forth on the headline, the visuals, the colors. You’ve seen it dozens of times, and talked about it even more. Of course you’re tired of it.

2. You’re actively looking for it.
The second your ad goes live—on TV, radio, social, or a billboard like Bryan Pharmacy’s “Really fast.” campaign—you start spotting it everywhere. Not because people are seeing it nonstop, but because you are primed to notice it. It’s the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon: when your brain keeps highlighting whatever it is that is suddenly important to you.

Your audience though? They aren’t. They’re busy. They’re parenting. They’re driving. They’re trying to remember if they left the garage door open, or their eight-year-old home alone. Your ad is fighting for—at best—a five-second cameo in their day.They’re seeing it far less often than you are. And they’re nowhere near done with it. Not by a long shot.

In year one, your campaign is just getting warmed up.

While you might feel worn out looking at them, your audience is just starting to notice. We see this all the time—clients get tired of a campaign long before the market does.

Now, we don’t like to use a whole lot of charts and graphs—mainly because we don’t understand them—but these, in this study—we get. And if it looks like a ton, we’ll break it down.

Andrew Tindall at System1 decided to prove what the ad world has been muttering about for decades. At System1, they analyzed 136 UK and US brands over five years—more than 5,000 ads and five billion dollars in spend. The takeaway was unmistakable: brands that kept the same campaign running for an average of 713 days saw a 15% increase in ad-to-brand recognition every single year.

Think about that.

That’s the equivalent of running the same play over and over—and watching it gain more yardage each time. Just like Munley Law’s sports-themed billboards—whether it’s a stiff-arm, a baseball smashing through the board, or the attorney staring you down with eye-black—the repetition isn’t boring. It’s branding. And the longer it stays in the market, the louder it hits.

Your audience doesn’t tire out. They tune in.

Consistency keeps your audience craving more.

And it isn’t just about keeping a campaign running—it’s about keeping it recognizable across every channel. That same System1 study (promise, last mention) found that the most consistent brands outperformed the least consistent by a mile: 4x the ROI and an extra 17.6% profit on top of what they were already making. That’s the kind of return you can take to the credit union.

Just look at Whitefish Credit Union.
Whether it’s “Bag bigger bucks,” “We’ve branched out,” “Fiscal therapy,” “Using common cents,” or “Loan and behold!”, every board shares the same tone, look, and unmistakable personality. You don’t need a logo to know who’s speaking—that’s consistency doing the heavy lifting.

How does this apply to you?

If your CTV ads don’t tie into your social… and your social doesn’t echo your billboards… and your paid search is just SEO slurry without brand identity… then you’re probably leaving a few bucks—maybe more—on the table for your competitors. Consistency isn’t repetition for repetition’s sake—it’s the signal you send out so the world can find you again—when they actually need you.

Establish your place in your market. And build on it.

Great advertising isn’t trendy—it’s trustworthy. The longer a strong idea stays in the world, the more familiar, likable, and effective it becomes. Consistency gives your audience something to hold onto, something that feels stable and recognizable no matter where they encounter you. And when all of your channels echo the same message—that’s amplification. Compounded recall. The point at which a good campaign becomes a profitable one. The brands that embrace this don’t just win attention; they win long-term growth.