Current models posit that awareness of advertising declines immediately and gradually once it is over, although anecdotal evidence from managers suggests that awareness stays constant for a while and then decays rapidly. This pattern arises because consumers remember advertisements for a finite time before they forget.

In this study, Professor Prasad Naik and Assistant Professor Ashwin Aravindakshan extend advertising models by incorporating the memory for ads. They conceptualize the role of memory as a ‘delayed forgetting of ads’ and capture it using delay differential equations, which exhibit richer dynamics and expand the class of dynamic models used in marketing.