New research on the taglines Australians recall best found the winners are decades old, with KFC's 1960s line still posting exceptional recall. That is not nostalgia. It is proof that distinctive brand assets compound while performance spend expires the day it runs, and a case for splitting the budget on purpose.
The strongest taglines act as mental shortcuts for a brand.
The Take: The advertising Australians remember best was built decades ago, and that is not a nostalgia story. It is an indictment of how brands spend now. A generation of marketers optimised every quarter for the click and left nothing behind in memory, while the brands people can still recite made one durable asset and defended it for years.
Why do old taglines still win?
KFC's line first ran in the 1960s and still posts some of the strongest recall in the country. Roughly 60 years on, a good tagline is still working.
Creative effectiveness firm Cubery asked a nationally representative sample of Australians to spontaneously recall their favourite advertising tagline of all time. Nike's Just Do It came first, Toyota's Oh What a Feeling second and Yellow Pages third. Most of the winners are more than 20 years old. The oldest of the lot, KFC's Finger Lickin' Good, dates to the 1960s and still posts exceptional recall.
Cubery frames these lines as distinctive brand assets. They build mental availability. They lodge in long-term memory. They fire as a shortcut before a buyer has consciously decided anything.
That is Wil Logan, a senior consultant at Cubery. He is right. The uncomfortable part is what it says about the rest of the budget.
What are you actually buying when you spend on performance?
There are two ways to spend a marketing dollar. One buys an asset you own. The other pays for a result you will never keep.
Performance is the second kind. A click today, a lead today, a sale today, then silence the moment the spend stops. Turn off the feed and the result stops arriving the same afternoon. You rented the outcome. You never owned anything.
A distinctive asset is the first kind. Built once, kept consistent, compounding quietly for years like a deposit that keeps earning while you sleep. The brands Australians named are still drawing down on deposits made before most performance marketers had a LinkedIn profile.
Performance spend stops paying the second you stop feeding it. A distinctive asset keeps paying long after the person who built it has left.
Now weld two numbers together. In FY2025, Australians spent more than A$4.3 billion on social advertising alone, close to 29% of every digital ad dollar. Almost all of that spend buys a result that expires on the day it runs. Set that next to a line written in the 1960s that Australians still recall without prompting, and the contrast is stark. One is an expense. The other is an asset that never stopped appreciating.
The lines that outlived their campaigns
The pattern in Cubery's ranking is hard to miss. The lines people hold onto were laid down early and left alone.
Every one of these was built before the current fashion for spending the entire budget on immediate response took hold. Every one is still doing its job for free.
The decade KFC's tagline first ran, and Australians still recall it ahead of ads that launched last week
What I would do about it
The fix is not to abandon performance. It is to spend like the business is yours to keep, not like you are here for one quarter.
Split the budget on purpose. Decide the share that builds an asset and the share that buys a result this month, then hold the line when the quarter gets tight.
Build one distinctive asset and stop redecorating it. A tagline, a sound, a look. Then leave it alone when the new marketing manager arrives wanting to make their mark.
Measure the asset, not just the campaign. Track unprompted recall and branded search over years, not clicks over weeks.
Refuse the reset. The most common way Australian brands destroy value is repainting everything every time the guard changes.
When we assess an Australian business, brand strength is one of the dimensions in our methodology. We look at whether the business owns a distinctive asset a customer could name unprompted or whether it keeps changing its face. You can read how we score it.
This is my opinion, not a law of physics. Performance spending has a place and a good tagline will not save a bad product. But the evidence in front of us says the most durable marketing in this country was made by people who built something and kept it, while the rest of the market keeps paying for attention it hands straight back. If you want to build the kind of asset that still pays out in 2050 rather than one that expires on Friday, that is the work we do inside NR Studio.
Frequently asked questions
Is this just nostalgia talking?
No. Cubery used spontaneous recall, not a prompted list, so these lines surfaced because people actually hold them in memory. Age is the symptom. Consistency is the cause.
Should I stop spending on performance?
No. The point is proportion. Keep the response spend that pays your bills this quarter and carve out a real share for the asset that pays your bills a decade from now.
How long does a distinctive asset take to pay off?
Longer than a campaign and shorter than you fear. Brand assets compound, so the earlier you commit to one and the longer you leave it untouched, the more it returns.
What kills a good tagline?
A new decision-maker who wants to leave a mark. Most Australian brands erode their own equity by changing the line, the logo and the look every few years instead of committing to one.