What Is Advertising Equity, Exactly?
Ask people how they generally feel about a brand’s advertising — not one execution, but the impression built up over years — and a clear signal emerges. Nepa measures it with three simple statements, each rated on a 7-point scale: whether a brand’s advertising is generally interesting, worth paying attention to, and rewarding to take part in. Average the three, and the result is a single score that captures something brand trackers and campaign dashboards each miss on their own.
Brand equity explains the overall strength of a brand — whether people know it, trust it and are more likely to choose it. Campaign metrics show how one specific execution performed. Advertising equity sits in between: it isolates advertising’s own contribution to the brand and reveals whether that contribution is accumulating into something bigger than any single campaign. Academic research backs this up — advertising equity behaves as a distinct, measurable asset, not simply a stand-in for how much people already like the brand.
The mechanism behind a strong score is mutual value. Advertising that only asks for something — time, attention, money — has to fight harder to be noticed. Advertising that gives something back, whether entertainment, knowledge, aesthetic pleasure, inspiration or emotional resonance, is better placed to earn attention instead of just interrupting for it.
Why It’s Worth Building
A strong advertising equity score isn’t just a nice number — it changes the conditions the next campaign launches into:
- It makes media budgets work harder. When people have already experienced a brand’s advertising as worth their time, the same media spend earns more genuine attention.
- It’s a counterweight to ad avoidance. Skipping, blocking and scrolling past ads is the default behaviour now. A brand with a track record of valuable advertising is more likely to get a second look instead of an automatic skip.
- It signals something about the brand itself. Visible effort in advertising has been linked in research to perceptions of product quality, innovation, customer care — even employer attractiveness.
- It helps leaders manage advertising as a long-term asset, giving management and board conversations a way to talk about accumulated communication value rather than isolated campaign spend, and helping teams tell the difference between a platform worth protecting and one that’s just become repetitive.
Inside the 2026 Study
Nepa surveyed 2,226 people aged 16–64 across Sweden in June 2026, scoring 95 major brands on advertising equity. Results are shown as an index, where 100 represents the average across all brands studied — a score above 100 means a brand’s advertising equity beats the market; below 100 means it’s lagging.
Charities and grocery retailers dominate the top of the ranking — a pattern that shows up clearly at category level too (more on that below). Further down the list, some very recognisable Swedish names land well above the market average, while others sit surprisingly far below it. (Note: the 95-brand set was originally assembled in 2018 to track the largest advertisers of that time, and has been kept consistent since to allow comparison over the years — it isn’t a current ranking by media spend.)
Want to see where your brand rank? Download the full Advertising Equity 2026 report → for the complete, brand-by-brand ranking.
Category Sets the Starting Line — Not the Finish
Some categories simply start from a stronger position, because they’re more naturally connected to things people already care about or welcome in their advertising. Others are more functional, regulated, or carry negative associations that make the climb steeper. Charities lead the field by a wide margin, with grocery retail, opticians and home & leisure retailers also enjoying a built-in advantage. At the other end, categories like betting & gambling, cars, telecom and banking start from a much tougher position.
The gap between the strongest and weakest categories is substantial — but category is context, not an excuse. A brand in a tough category can still lead its competitors for attention; a brand in a favourable one can still underperform. That’s why the most useful comparison for any individual brand usually isn’t the market average, but the category it’s actually fighting for attention within.
See how every category and brand scores. Download the full report → for the breakdown.
Reading Your Own Score
A high score suggests a brand has built a genuinely positive advertising history — people find its ads interesting, worth their attention and rewarding to engage with. The useful next question is what built that strength: the creative platform, the tone, the consistency, the brand cues, the emotional payoff?
A low score shouldn’t just prompt “why do people dislike our ads?” — that’s often too narrow a question, and it’s one of the limits of relying only on campaign-level metrics. The sharper question is what’s missing: receiver value, distinctiveness, consistency, relevance, emotional resonance, or a clearer link back to the brand. And any score is best read in three contexts at once — against the whole market, against direct category competitors, and against the brand’s own trend over time.
Three Things to Take With You
- Track it as an asset, not a campaign score. Read it alongside brand tracking and campaign metrics to see whether advertising is compounding into something bigger over time.
- Put it in the creative brief. Ask directly: will this work make people more willing to pay attention to what comes next?
- Protect what compounds. Hold on to a strong idea long enough for its value to build — but keep renewing the execution rather than letting it go stale.
