Your customers said you are lying

You sent a message to your market and your target believes what you are saying right? Not a chance… but to what degree do customers trust in advertisements?

AC Nielsen has a good idea with their global (47 countries) on line survey for advertisement confidence.Let’s take a look to some of the areas covered by the survey.

In general terms customers believes in other customers (78% of the sample), then in news papers (63%), Blogs (61%) and Brand’s web pages (60%). Note: A high percentage indicates the amount of people that said to trust completely or to some degree in advertisement.

Clearly word of mouth is quite important world wide especially in North America (NA) and in Latin America (LA) with an 80% level of confidence.

Blogs are considered to be a trust worthy source of information in NA (66%) and Asia (62%). South Korea seems to be the more enthusiast country with blogs scoring an 81%. LA has the smallest confidence level in this section.

Brand’s web pages have also high levels of confidence. LA has a 74% where as NA a 61%. Mexico has the highest confidence level with a score of 76%.

E-mails fell into the 50% class globally speaking. Again NA and LA scored the highest numbers. Brazil is an interesting case, having a 79% level of confidence. More or less 30% more than the average.

Search engines and internet banners are smaller in general confidence levels but in LA they have a 49% and a 52% respectively. Following the same pattern as before, LA and NA consider them to be trust worthy. Mexico once again is the leader in banners showing 36% more points than the average.

It seems that Italians, Danes, Germans and Lithuanians do no not trust in advertisements very much. On the other hand, LA and NA present the highest confidence levels.

E-advertising is growing every day and I’m sure that in the near future it will beat traditional advertising. The key question is how to increase customers’ confidence in for example search engines and banners, or how to develop new ways of advertising like the Forrester example of energizing which is really interesting. But well, that’s another story.

Just one last thought that came into my mind after reading the report... Mexico is present in almost every top ten of each advertisement category being in 4 cases the leader. Is it that my home land is to innocent?