Brand cue placement: the 1.5-second rule.

What counts as a brand cue.

A brand cue is any element a viewer can use to decode whose ad this is, without reading the wordmark. Ehrenberg-Bass calls these distinctive assets, and they extend well past the logo.

• Colour, Tiffany blue, Cadbury purple, the orange of Hermès.
• Character, Tony the Tiger, the Geico gecko, the Compare-the-Market meerkats.
• Sonic logo, Intel's five notes, Netflix's ta-dum, McDonald's whistle.
• Packaging silhouette, the Coca-Cola contour bottle, the Toblerone triangle.
• Recurring talent or voice, a returning ambassador or a recognisable narrator.
• Owned visual device, Apple's white-on-white product shots, Spotify's duotone gradients.

The wordmark is one cue among many. It is also the slowest to decode and the easiest to ignore at small thumbnail sizes. The strongest ads land a non-wordmark cue first.

The 1.5-second curve.

Across 2,047 ads in the cohort, we coded the timecode of the first distinctive asset on screen. The pattern is steep and the cliff is real.

The 1.5-second threshold is not arbitrary. It is roughly the point at which feed-scrollers commit to or abandon a video. An ad that delays its first distinctive cue past that point is a film with a brand attached, not a branded film.

Why logo frequency does not matter.

A common reflex on under-performing creative is to add more logo. Bigger end-card. A bug in the corner. A pack-shot every two seconds. The data does not reward this.

• Ads with 2 well-placed cues (one inside 1.5s, one in the resolution), median Brand Impact 68.
• Ads with 8+ logo appearances, median Brand Impact 52.
• Ads with a logo lock-up every shot, median Brand Impact 49.

Saturation does not compound. After the third or fourth appearance, additional logo placements stop adding signal and start eroding the narrative, the creative reads as a corporate deck, attention drops, and Brand Impact falls with it.

Placement is the variable. Frequency is not. Land the first cue early, resolve the brand in the final beat, and let the rest of the cut breathe.

The 60-second audit.

You can run this on any cut, in any review, without a tool. It takes under a minute.

1. Open the ad and scrub to 0:00. Watch it through once at full speed, sound on.
2. Mark the timecode of the first distinctive asset. Not the first frame the logo appears, the first moment a brand-illiterate viewer could guess whose ad this is.
3. Count distinct cues in the first 5 seconds. Colour, character, sonic, pack, each counts once. Two is healthy. Five is noise.
4. Mute and replay. If you cannot decode the brand with sound off in the first 3 seconds, the cut is sonic-dependent, which is fine for radio, fatal for feed.
5. Score the verdict. First cue inside 1.5s → likely Scale. 1.5–3s → likely Sharpen. After 3s → almost certainly Rebuild.

Category exceptions.

The 1.5-second rule is the median across the cohort. Two categories systematically, and intentionally, bend it.

• Luxury. Fragrance, fine watches, high jewellery. Delaying brand resolution is part of the format, narrative-first, brand last, by design. Top-decile luxury cuts often land the first cue between 4 and 8 seconds. They also accept a lower Brand Impact score in exchange for narrative texture.
• Pharma and regulated health. Compliance copy and balanced disclosure structurally push branding deeper into the cut. The audit still applies, but the verdict benchmark is calibrated against the category, not against feed-native DTC.

Outside these two, the rule holds across DTC, FMCG, fashion mainstream, tech, finance, automotive, food and beverage, and entertainment. If you are running a TikTok or Reels cut for any of those, the first 1.5 seconds is the audit.

The honest caveat.

Brand Impact is a model prediction, not a measurement. It is validated against public engagement and click-intent outcomes only, TikTok engagement, TikTok CTR, YouTube view counts. As of 5 May 2026, held-out out-of-sample Spearman ρ sits between +0.30 and +0.32 across those three signals.

What it does not do, and what we will not claim it does:

• It does not predict sales lift, attributed conversion, or ROAS.
• It does not reproduce survey-based ad-recall or brand-tracking studies.
• It is not an eye-tracking measurement, heatmaps predict visual attention, they do not measure it.

What it does well is rank cuts pre-spend, surface the 1.5-second placement question consistently, and give a defensible read on which option to test in market. The audit above is the part you can do without us. The score is the part we add.

The other five guides.