What adverts can teach us
The Stolen Curriculum
Good adverts are built to change what people do, using many of the same ideas as good teaching, so every ad can be a free lesson in design
What it says, in plain language
The idea in one sentence: good advertising is designed to change what people do, using many of the same ideas about memory and attention as good teaching, so once you know what to look for, every advert becomes a free worked example.
You’ve seen this already
You have seen tens of thousands of adverts. Some are still in your head decades later. A handful changed what you bought, where you went or what you believed. None of that happened by accident.
Advertisers have borrowed from psychology for over a century, and they have strong reasons to keep what works. Many ideas in this library show up in good adverts: spreading learning out, testing yourself, pictures and words together, not too much at once and if-then plans.
| What the ad does | Why it works |
|---|---|
| One message, one ad, nothing else | Our minds can only juggle a few things at once. One clear message gives it a chance to land. |
| Jingle, slogan, sound logo | Words set to a tune and rhythm are easier to recall, and the tune itself becomes a cue. |
| Same line, repeated across years and formats | Coming back to something beats meeting it once. The gap between times is the point, not the problem. |
| ”Can you finish the jingle…?” | Pulling something back out of memory yourself fixes it better than being told it again. |
| Hook, open question, cliffhanger | Feeling you need to know something makes you pay attention. Show the problem before you name it. |
| A story with feeling, not a list of facts | Memories tied to a feeling tend to last longer. The laugh or the wince helps the message stick. |
| A clear call to action | When an ad wants action now, it says exactly what to do next. If nobody ever said what should change, the design never aimed for it. |
Why it matters for your teaching
Advertisers judge an ad by whether it changes what people do in the end, not just whether they liked it. Some ads ask for action now; many aim to be remembered when the moment comes. Either way, they start from the behaviour they want. That is the heart of Teaching That Lands too: start with what people need to do differently, then build the teaching from there.
Teaching often starts from the other end: what do I need to cover? Think of an induction for new healthcare assistants that tries to cover twenty policies in a morning. An advertiser would ask: what’s the one thing they must do on their first shift? Say it clearly, show it, come back to it next week, and end on it.
Try this
- Name it when you see it. When an advert catches you, ask which idea it’s using. That’s spacing. That’s a memory cue. That’s a when-then plan in four words. Naming it is itself a quick memory workout.
- Use the one-idea test. Before you plan a session or a slide, ask: what is the one thing I need people to do differently? If you can’t say it in one sentence, the session doesn’t have a shape yet.
- Plan the ending. Most sessions fade out with housekeeping and a quiet thank-you. Finish instead on a plan, a question left open, or the one thing that matters.
- Answer the learner’s question, not yours. Yours is “what should I cover?” Theirs is “what problem in my working day does this solve?” Marketers call this the “job to be done”.
How sure are we?
This is a lens, not a theory. The ideas in the table each have their own evidence, some strong (spacing, retrieval), some more mixed. The advertising side is weaker. Most adverts are not properly tested, and much of the best-known evidence comes from award entries, which are success stories rather than fair tests. At its best, though, an advert has a real budget behind it and real sales figures showing whether it worked.
Some ideas get stretched in the retelling. The “peak-end” finding (Kahneman and colleagues, 1993) shows that the most intense moment and the end weigh heavily in how people judge an experience looking back. It doesn’t show they remember the content better.
One caution: advertising aims to persuade, sometimes against people’s interests. Teaching borrows the methods, not the motives.
Where it comes from
The memory research came first. Hermann Ebbinghaus described forgetting, and the value of spaced repetition, in 1885 (see Ebbinghaus, 1885). In 1903, the psychologist Walter Dill Scott wrote The Theory of Advertising, applying psychology to adverts on purpose. In 1920, the psychologist John B. Watson moved into advertising. Recent books by Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Field, and Robert Heath look at what makes campaigns work. “The stolen curriculum” is this library’s name for the lens. It isn’t an established theory with a founder.
The evidence