Fluent Devices in Advertising
A come back, 20 years in the making
Introduction
Fluency in advertising refers to consumers' ability to recognise and emotionally connect with a brand quickly. Fluent devices, defined as recurring brand characters, icons or creative elements, help create this familiarity, enabling brands to stand out more clearly in a crowded marketplace.
Research agency System1 defines fluent devices as repeated creative elements that support brand recognition and establish lasting mental availability among consumers. Understanding their role in advertising allows marketers to build brand fluency, deepen consumer engagement and strengthen long-term brand value.
The following sections examine the function of fluent devices, explore successful examples, and assess how they adapt to today’s advertising environment.
TL;DR
Resurgence and Proven Impact: Fluent devices are making a strong comeback because they drive better brand recognition, emotional engagement and long-term business growth. Campaigns using them are significantly more profitable and effective than those without.
Adaptability Across Platforms: Fluent devices work well across fragmented media, offering consistent branding in short-form and digital environments. Advances in AI and digital production have made it easier to refresh and extend these assets.
Strategic Value for Long-Term Growth: Fluent devices are cost-effective compared to celebrity endorsements and, when used consistently and adapted carefully, become long-term brand assets that strengthen consumer loyalty and memorability.
Understanding Fluent Devices
Fluent devices — recurring brand characters, icons, situations or creative styles — are experiencing a resurgence in advertising after a period of decline during the 2000s and 2010s. Their revival is driven by robust evidence of their effectiveness in building brand recognition, emotional connection and business growth. Campaigns featuring fluent devices are significantly more likely to report significant profit gains, increases in market share and stronger customer loyalty. They also improve digital advertising performance by increasing viewability and brand recall.
Their decline was linked to the rise of digital and highly targeted advertising, where branding was often deprioritised in favour of personalisation and direct response. However, the fragmented nature of today’s media has made consistent, easily recognisable creative assets even more valuable. Fluent devices provide a shortcut to brand recognition and emotional resonance, especially in short-form and low-attention environments.
Moreover, fluent devices tap into emotional storytelling. They engage the brain's right hemisphere, which is more attuned to characters, humour and narrative than purely informational content. This makes them particularly powerful for long-term brand building.
Brands increasingly recognise the cost-efficiency and longevity of fluent devices compared to celebrity endorsements. An owned character or scenario can be leveraged across decades at relatively low incremental cost. Advances in digital production and AI technology have also made it easier to create, update and adapt fluent devices across different media formats, enabling a blend of traditional consistency and modern relevance.
In short, fluent devices offer brands a consistent, memorable and cost-effective way to build strong emotional and mental connections with consumers.
Forms of Fluent Devices
Fluent devices can take several forms, including:
Mascots and Characters: For example, Martin the GEICO Gecko, LiMu Emu, and Doug for Liberty Mutual in the United States.
Recurring Situations: Like Snickers’ "You're Not You When You're Hungry" or Specsavers’ "Should Have Gone to Specsavers."
Jingles: Such as McDonald’s "I’m Lovin’ It" or KitKat’s "Give Me a Break."
Each format delivers brand messages quickly and memorably, exploiting repetition to drive saliency and brand fluency. By consistently using these elements, brands create familiar shortcuts in consumers’ minds, reinforcing brand equity with every exposure.
The Role of Fluent Devices in Long-Term Brand Building
Fluent devices are central to long-term brand building. Brands that consistently use them achieve stronger brand recall, more robust emotional connections, and clearer brand differentiation than those that do not.
One key advantage is their ability to create lasting impressions. Research from System1 shows that fluent devices significantly outperform other creative approaches regarding long-term brand recall. For instance, Direct Line’s use of Harvey Keitel’s "The Fixer" character has built a strong, consistent brand association over multiple campaigns.
Similarly, Guinness has leveraged a distinctive creative style across its advertising — from the iconic "Surfer" commercial to later campaigns such as "The Purse" and "Liberty Fields" — maintaining a unified emotional tone focused on resilience, community and authenticity. This consistent visual and emotional identity helps Guinness maintain premium positioning while evolving with cultural trends.
Fluent devices provide brands with consistent storytelling frameworks that consumers recognise and trust. Over repeated exposures, these frameworks become embedded in memory, creating powerful associations that influence purchasing behaviour and loyalty.
Brands that sustain fluent devices over time benefit from emotional resonance, increased trust and a more resilient brand equity base.
Creative and Emotional Aspects of Fluent Devices
Fluent devices operate like successful sketch comedy shows, where audiences form attachments to familiar characters and story arcs. Saturday Night Live and The Fast Show built loyal audiences through memorable, recurring characters; similarly, brands that use fluent devices introduce familiar figures or narratives that consumers quickly recognise and enjoy.
Effective, fluent devices engage viewers emotionally. They evoke joy, nostalgia, humour, empathy or even surprise, strengthening memory encoding and emotional bonds with the brand.
For example, the Always Coca-Cola jingle, launched in the 1990s, successfully associated Coca-Cola with joyful, universal experiences. Meanwhile, the "Got Milk?" campaign captured relatable, everyday frustrations through its recurring situation-based device, embedding itself into American popular culture.
Moreover, fluent devices create shared cultural references. Campaigns such as Specsavers' "Should Have Gone to Specsavers" built a running joke that consumers began to use outside of advertising contexts, further embedding the brand in everyday life.
Fluent devices also support category entry points. For instance, Snickers’ "You're Not You When You're Hungry" uses humour and familiarity and directly associates Snickers with the hunger solution moment, making it easier for consumers to think of the brand at relevant purchase occasions.
Thus, fluent devices work across rational and emotional dimensions, creating distinctive memory structures that underpin brand saliency and emotional preference.
Recent Trends in Fluent Devices
Fluent devices are currently experiencing renewed attention from brands aiming to build strong, recognisable identities across increasingly fragmented media landscapes.
Resurgence and Effectiveness: Fluent devices have been proven to significantly improve business outcomes. System1’s research shows that campaigns with fluent devices are far more likely to achieve large profit gains, grow market share, and increase customer acquisition compared to campaigns without them.
Cross-Platform Consistency: Fluent devices excel in providing consistent, recognisable branding across television, digital, out-of-home, audio, and packaging. Their ability to signal the brand rapidly is especially valuable in environments with short-form content and lower attention spans.
Emotional Engagement and Memorability: Characters, recurring scenarios and jingles engage the right brain, making advertising more emotionally resonant and memorable. Brands such as Guinness, Corona Beer and Coca-Cola show how consistent creative assets can evolve while maintaining strong emotional resonance.
Adaptation to Cultural Movements: Brands are broadening the themes their fluent devices represent. Guinness, for example, has shifted from purely masculine storytelling to narratives about community and resilience. Corona Beer has adapted its beach imagery to incorporate environmental themes, maintaining core visual identity while aligning with contemporary values.
Integration with Modern Technology: Digital production tools and AI have made creating and adapting fluent devices for multiple platforms easier. Campaigns such as the "Got Milk?" revival on social media show how brands can bring classic fluent devices into new environments while preserving their fundamental recognisability.
Cost-Effectiveness and Longevity: Unlike short-term celebrity endorsements, fluent devices offer brands long-term assets that deliver ongoing value and recognition without the volatility of external partnerships.
In summary, fluent devices are increasingly seen as critical brand assets in an environment where attention is scarce, emotional resonance is key and consistent brand identity must be maintained across many touchpoints.
In Conclusion
Fluent devices are powerful tools in building brand recognition, emotional engagement and long-term value. Their ability to create consistent, memorable brand assets across multiple platforms makes them highly relevant in today’s competitive and fragmented media landscape.
Brands must treat fluent devices as strategic long-term investments. Successful fluent devices maintain consistent core elements — character, a situation or a style — while adapting their expression to reflect changing cultural values and media behaviours. Examples such as Guinness's inclusive storytelling shift and Corona’s environmentally conscious adaptations illustrate how to evolve fluent devices thoughtfully without losing their distinctiveness.
Consistency and emotional resonance are key. Fluent devices nurtured over time become embedded in consumer memory, reinforcing trust, loyalty and brand saliency. In a marketplace crowded with transient campaigns and short-term tactical promotions, fluent devices offer brands a way to build lasting mental availability and emotional preference.
Marketers who invest in and adapt fluent devices wisely will be better positioned to create sustainable brand growth and stronger consumer relationships over the long term.
