Monday, April 16, 2012

Banner ads flop in consumer-trust poll

Online banner ads, which are the primary source of digital revenue for most publishers and broadcasters, are among the least trusted sources of commercial information, according to an important new consumer survey.

While 90% of consumers have faith in online recommendations from friends and 75% of consumers value opinions posted at consumer websites, only 28% of consumers in North America trust online banner advertising.

The sentiments are contained in a global survey of 28,000 consumers that was published last week by the Nielsen Co., the market research firm.

The good news in the survey for newspapers is that 61% of consumers trust editorial content about products and 47% trust print ads. But the bad news is that most publishers and broadcasters have no products to compete with the digital advertising media that have the most credibility with consumers.

As illustrated below, respondents to the Nielsen survey put far more stock in peer recommendations and crowd-powered ratings than they do in traditional advertising, where the print, broadcast and outdoor formats retain the confidence of not quite half of the respondents to the poll.

In the digital realm, search-engine and social-network advertising are held in higher esteem than online banners – perhaps because the ads tend to be targeted reasonably well to the interests and demographics of the recipients.

As the Googles and Facebooks of the world gather ever more data about their users and get ever more sophisticated about how to use it, most publishers and broadcasters still run generic, run-of-site banners that can't hold a flickering candle to the laser-like ad systems operated by their abundantly funded digital competitors.

Because ad dollars are sure to follow consumers in the fullness of time, the inadequacy of their online ad platforms spells a big problem for the legacy media.


4 Comments:

Blogger edzn said...

as a person who designs banner ads for a living,i had to ad my two bits... the same report also showed that trust in banner ads is actually up and rising, as users get more and more targeted ads from advertisers, the reactions and interactions from users with banners will surely increase

4:06 PM  
Blogger John said...

How accurate can this be? Isn't a "North America" poll a stretch? Plus, using the broad term "newspapers" without breaking it down is like saying homo sapiens to explain race and ethnicity.

7:29 AM  
Blogger John said...

A North American survey, how representative is that for the majority of newspaper circulation which is local? "North American" and "newspapers" is like using homo sapien to describe race and ethnicity.

7:36 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Newspaper ads get 47% and online ads get 28%. I think that newspaper online ads can boast a much higher rating than the ugly ads you get in your Yahoo email or others like that.

8:58 AM  

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