Nielsen recently surveyed over 25,000 consumers online across more than 50 markets from Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas and the Middle East on their attitudes toward trust, value and engagement of advertising.

According to the survey, in North America, online consumers under the age of 20 exhibit higher than average degrees of trust in all forms of advertising. North American consumers aged 30–34 are the most likely to trust online advertising. Female consumers in North America are more engaged than males in TV ads in the dimensions of humor, emotion and information, especially when it comes to finding a TV ad emotionally touching. In North America, the oldest consumer group measured (65 and over) is the least engaged with TV advertising by these same dimensions, while the youngest group (under 20) registers the highest level of engagement with online video ads.


Trust in Advertising
Nielsen measured consumer trust in 16 different marketing channels by asking consumers “To what extent do you trust the following?” Across all channels, an average 56% of respondents indicate that they trust advertising “completely” or “somewhat.” Peer recommendations top the list, trusted by 9 out of 10 consumers; while text message based ads perform the lowest, trusted by just 24%.

Across the 16 measured channels, non-media channels are more trusted than paid media channels. After peer recommendations, consumers trust brand websites, consumer opinions online, editorial content and brand sponsorships ahead of a broad list of paid advertising channels. This importance of peer recommendations and consumer opinions online justifies the attention marketers continue to pay to the use of social and consumer-generated media.

Of the paid advertising channels of online, outdoor, newspaper, magazine, radio, TV and theatrical, TV and newspaper are the most trusted media: 61% of global consumers say they trust TV advertising— the same percentage that trust newspaper advertising. Online and mobile advertising have perhaps the steepest hill to climb for consumer trust: in addition to text message advertisements, online search, banner and video ads are the only channels trusted by fewer than half of respondents globally. The good news for online is that consumer trust in that medium is growing. The percentage of global consumers trusting banner ads grew 27% between 2007 and 2009 (from 26% to 33% of consumers). The percentage trusting ads in search engine results grew 21% (from 34% to 41% of consumers).

Consumers today are more trusting of every marketing channel tracked when compared to two years ago, save newspaper advertising, trust in which declined a marginal 3%. Theatrical advertising saw the greatest growth in trust—increasing 37% since 2007, from 38% of consumers to 52%.

Download the entire survey.