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A new report from Newsworks has underlined the importance of trust in advertising and the vital role news brands play in strengthening ad effectiveness.
The study, based on analysis of the IPA Databank by Peter Field, found that advertising campaigns featuring news brands between 2018 and 2022 enjoyed an effectiveness uplift of 52%; compared to advertisers that didn’t use news brands, those that did generated an 88% increase in profit growth.
Crucial to the success of a campaign – especially in the current climate – are perceptions of trust and quality, which are increasingly interconnected. Both are key to profit growth, with Field citing Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica and the proliferation of fake news as drivers for what he claims has been an explosion in “trust issues”.
Between 2018 and 2022, campaigns that used news brands on a multi-platform (print and digital) level as part of campaigns that also included TV, social, online video and non-online video drove an 87% increase in market share and a whopping 144% rise in profit compared to none-use of news brands.
And when shifting the focus to the boost multi-platform news brands gave individual media in the same period, the picture is equally rosy. TV was 125% more effective, social 162%, online video 109% and online non-video 137%.
The bottom line: environments supplied by news brands foster trust and perceptions of quality, which in turn improve the effectiveness of campaign activity – and are doing so more than ever.
But Newsworks has gone beyond Field’s study by seeking to redefine how we measure trust in brands. Instead of simply asking survey respondents to give a yes or no answer, a new metric based on four ‘pillars’ has been developed: perceived familiarity, fame, competence and risk.
Putting this into practice, a separate study undertaken in partnership with Tapestry and Map the Territory found advertisers that appear on news brand websites or seen as 1.5x more trustworthy than those featuring on non-news brands. Why? News brands are viewed as more competent and less risky when it comes to quality journalism and fake news.
To help brands understand this new metric, Newsworks has developed a trust calculator that lets you compare your scores in each of the four key areas to the average across 150 brands.
Want to bring news brands into your marketing strategy? Chat to Guerillascope today.