Australians recall 80s taglines, not new ones, Cubery survey finds

What Australians actually remember

Ask Australians to name their favourite advertising tagline of all time and the answer skews old. Nike's 'Just Do It', first used during a 1988 campaign, ranked first in Cubery's spontaneous recall survey of a nationally representative Australian sample.^[1] Toyota's 'Oh What a Feeling' came second and Yellow Pages' 'Not Happy Jan' third.^[1]

The rest of the top ten reads like a timeline of television advertising's long run: Bunnings' 'Lowest prices are just the beginning' (active since the first warehouse opened in 1994), Red Bull's 'Gives You Wings' (in use since 1987), Qantas's 'Spirit of Australia' (on livery since at least 1984), McDonald's 'I'm lovin' it' (launched September 2003) and Mazda's 'Zoom-Zoom' (introduced April 2002).^{[8][6][7][4][5]} The oldest line in the top ten, KFC's 'Finger Lickin' Good', dates to 1952, more than seven decades before the survey was published.^[2] Nothing coined in the past ten years appears anywhere in the results.^[1]

Why old lines win

Lines that dominated Australian television during the 1980s and 1990s ran for years without meaningful alteration, pairing words with jingles, characters or visual signatures that reinforced each other across seasons and formats. Cubery's survey relies on spontaneous recall rather than prompted recognition, so the taglines appearing here have embedded themselves deeply enough to surface without a cue.^[1]

Wil Logan, Senior Consultant at Cubery, said the pattern reflects what these lines are doing inside a buyer's mind. "The strongest taglines act as mental shortcuts for a brand. Rather than communicating a functional message they encode a distinctive brand idea into people's minds," Logan said.^[1] A tagline operating as a memory structure accumulates value across years rather than peaking during a media burst and fading when the spend stops.

The compounding effect of multiple assets

Several lines in the top ten arrived alongside audio assets and mascots that kept working long after individual spots had aired. Red Bull's animated characters, the KFC colonel, and Toyota's physical gesture all gave consumers multiple retrieval paths to the same verbal anchor. Logan said the combination is deliberate and measurable. "When more than one distinctive asset is used together consistently, the impact compounds. Audio cues can trigger brand memories, while taglines provide a verbal anchor for what the brand stands for," he said.^[1]

Nike's 'Just Do It' was first used in a 1988 advertising campaign, according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, making it 38 years old at the time of the survey.^[3] Sitting at the top of an unprompted recall survey in Australia in 2026, a line of that age illustrates how long consistent deployment takes to build the kind of memory structure Cubery's data is measuring.

What the refresh cycle gets wrong

The taglines occupying the top positions in Australian memory took years, in most cases decades, of consistent repetition to reach that position. Any new line entering the market now competes against that accumulated stock of memory, which runs directly against the annual refresh cycle many brand teams operate on.^[1]

Cubery's survey does not name a single tagline introduced this decade in its top ten results. Specsavers' 'Should've gone to Specsavers', a registered trademark of the Specsavers Group and a line that has run consistently for years, did not feature in the published rankings either, suggesting the bar for entering collective memory at that level remains high regardless of creative quality. The question Cubery's report does not yet answer is how many years of consistent deployment a modern tagline needs before spontaneous recall catches up with legacy lines from the broadcast era.