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, and Nielsen reveals that trust in online advertising is increasing. While earned advertising in the form of word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family continued to be the most influential source among 84 percent of global respondents to a Nielsen online survey, owned advertising on branded websites was the second most trusted format in 2013, a rise from fourth-place ranking in 2007.
“Brand marketers should be especially encouraged to find owned advertising among the most trusted marketing formats,” said Randall Beard, global head, Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen. “This form of advertising is trusted by nearly 70 percent of consumers globally, which emphasizes the notion that marketers maintain the ability to control the messages about their brands in a way that consumers consider credible. This perceived credibility is a key component in advertising effectiveness.”
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 2007 survey.
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%).
Contrarian’s Take….
Always ask how this applies to MY product category. It really depends on the product doesn’t it? How much time is someone going to research a new cereal versus the purchase of a new car ? Consumers don’t have time to research or even think about everyday items but there are some purchases that warrant an investment in time and are worth talking about. As much as we would like to believe that someone is going to say “gee your hair looks terrific what shampoo are you using ?” It just rarely happens.
