As marketers spend billions of dollars a year on advertising, effectiveness cannot be measured by impressions alone. Resonance
is the holy grail of a successful campaign. In a market saturated with clutter, marketers need to reach audiences with advertising messages using the formats that make the most impact. While TV remains the front-running format for the delivery of marketing messages based on ad spend, consumers globally are also looking to online media to get information about brands .
While recommendations from friends and family, as well as consumer opinions posted online, remain among the most trusted forms of messaging, online and mobile advertising formats reported some of the biggest increases in trust since Nielsen’s survey.
In addition to an increase in trust in the messages on branded websites, more than half (56%) of respondents said they trust consumer- consented email messages, an increase of 7 percentage points since 2007. For other online advertising, almost half (48%) trusted ads in search engine results, online video ads and ads on social networks. More than four in 10 (42%) trusted online banner ads, up from 26 percent in 2007—a form that is steadily seeing increased ad dollars spent, with 26 percent growth in the first quarter of 2013. Forty-five percent of respondents in Nielsen’s 2013 survey believed display ads on mobile phones were credible, and 37 percent trusted text ads on mobile phones, up from 18 percent in 2007.
While trust in advertising can lend itself favorably to consumers’ goodwill toward a company, an important indicator of effective advertising is a consumer’s willingness to take action as a result of exposure to an advertisement. And the survey results show that trust and action often go hand in hand.
Not surprisingly, word-of-mouth formats such as recommendations from family and friends and consumer opinions posted online prompted the highest levels of self-reported action among 84 percent and 70 percent of respondents, respectively. Roughly two-thirds of respondents indicated that they take action at least some of the time based on ads shown on TV (68%), branded websites (67%), ads in newspapers (65%), consumer-consented emails (65%), editorial content in newspapers (64%) and ads in magazines (62%).
Think like a consumer…
If you’re interested in learning about a product are you going to go to Facebook or to the brand’s website? You’ll most likely go to the brand website and use social media to get others opinions if the product warrants more research (most don’t).
