Testing Effect
Why does testing help us remember better?
In this issue
Good morning.
Somewhere out there, a shopper has your product sitting in a cart, waiting for you to blink.
91% of Americans delay purchases hoping for a discount, and 51% abandon a cart specifically to bait a discount email.
Holiday season is a two-month staring contest, then. And they've been training since March.
What if doing nothing beats 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn't intelligence. It's patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Remember the good old days of rereading notes all night, then still blanking in the exam?
Turns out rereading was the problem.
The testing effect says we remember things better when forced to recall them, not just review them. Retrieval strengthens memory.
Research by Roediger and Karpicke found students who tested themselves remembered much more a week later than students who simply restudied. It's why pub trivia sticks.
So, how do we get customers recalling instead of skimming?
Three ways to leverage Testing Effect
Make the product the quiz
Readwise sends you a daily email of your Kindle and article highlights. Nice, but passive.
Enter Mastery. A quick edit turns a highlight into a Q&A card or a fill-in-the-blank, with the key phrase hidden.
Cards come back on a spaced repetition schedule, so users retrieve ideas instead of rereading them.
The result: the product becomes the reason people remember their books. Hard to cancel something that's become your memory.
For marketers: swap passive tutorials for quick recall prompts. Ask new users to rebuild the workflow they just saw, not click "next."
Certify your customers
The HoneyBaked Ham Company once ran a Hammelier quiz. Customers answer questions about its hams. Pass, and you're crowned a "HoneyBaked Hammelier," certificate included.
Yes, a ham sommelier. But every answer forces shoppers to retrieve what makes the product special, and a ham you can describe is a ham you'll buy again.
It also collected leads from ham lovers who now hold a title to defend.
Your version: ecommerce brands can quiz buyers on care tips or ingredients. SaaS teams can certify power users on features, then badge them in-app.
Make ads ask, not tell
Brilliant's ads skip the feature lists. Many drop a logic puzzle on screen and challenge viewers to solve it.
Even its homepage gets you solving problems before asking for an email.
Each attempt is a tiny act of retrieval. Viewers aren't absorbing a pitch, they're working through one, which makes the brand far stickier than another "learn more" button.
Try it in your creative: ask a question your product answers, pause, then reveal.
Bonus: people who get it right feel smart. People who get it wrong want the answer. Either way, they watch.
What 100K keywords reveal about where your best content ideas hide
Reddit ranks in Google's top 10 for 46% of keywords, and 2 in 3 AI Overviews cite a social or community source.
Yet most content calendars start with the message and work backwards. That's how AI slop happens.
This guide shows how to listen first, then write: where your audience talks, how it varies by niche, and how to get cited by AI.
CHATGPT: Visual ads are landing inside image generation for Free and Go users, testing in the US later this month. Attribution partners like Triple Whale and AppsFlyer are plugged in too, and DoubleVerify and IAS get pilot access to audit brand suitability. Early CPAs look promising.
TIKTOK: Agentic everything just dropped at Advertising Week: Buy Direct one-click checkout, a conversational Shopping Assistant, and AI lead agents. US advertisers also get the TikTok Ad Network, extending campaigns across nearly 400,000 apps. Smart+ now automates search ads too. Plenty to test.
GOOGLE: Fake bylines are officially deception. The helpful content guidance now names AI-generated headshots, invented names, and false credentials as signals of a low-quality page. If your blog runs on a cast of imaginary experts, audit those author pages before the automated systems do.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Picture Superiority Effect.
The "Pop Quiz" Crew
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