Trust isn’t just about awareness — it’s about understanding

Opinion

Credos reflects on the ASA’s ad campaign and the benefits of improved public trust, thanks to a better understanding of its role.

Awareness may be a precondition of trustfulness, but it is far from a guarantee. I mean, we are all aware of Donald Trump…

Among brands competing in a category, salience — itself a step up from passive awareness — is certainly of enormous value, prompting (and predicting) preference.

But we are all well aware of plenty of brands that we have no intention to buy; knowing about them does not mean they appeal.

Some things are more complicated than a shopping choice — one of which being advertising regulation.

Our industry values the public’s trust in the ads they come across; it underpins the effectiveness of their work. And trust in advertising correlates with a belief that it is well-regulated: of those who think the amount of advertising regulation is about right, 42% trust the industry; of those who think there is too little or no regulation, only 17% trust it, according to Credos research.

More than awareness

So advertisers, media owners and agencies alike invest considerable energy and money to sustain the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) as a first-class regulator. A chunk of that energy and money goes into the ASA’s own advertising campaign, now in the third year of its Advertising Association-led revival.

The results show that its success — more of which later — is about more than raising awareness.

Indeed, plain awareness of the ASA seems to bear no correlation with faith in its efficacy. Our quarterly public tracking surveys show that the over-55s (nearly 40% of the adult population) are far more likely to name the ASA spontaneously as an organisation dealing with complaints about ads than the under-34s (12% versus 2%) and almost twice as likely to recognise the name when prompted (81% versus 43%).

Yet, those same over-55s are twice as likely to believe that there is too little regulation of advertising than the younger cohort (37% versus 19%). Further, there is absolutely no difference between those aware of the ASA and those unaware when it comes to their trust in advertising overall.

This is not necessarily surprising. We know that older people are more disapproving of advertising than the young, who also trust it more. And it makes sense that older people will have had the time to become aware of the ASA.

But awareness alone is not enough to shake their negative opinion of advertising.

The ASA’s role

The change comes when people see and recall the ASA campaign.

Those claiming to have done so are more than twice as likely as those who did not (43% versus 21%) to say they tend to trust most ads, the ASA’s own awareness tracking survey found. They are even more prone (33% versus 14%) to say they trust the industry — a jump largely driven by the young, who are much more likely to recall seeing the ASA campaign.

The explanation? The ASA ads are not just about brand awareness but understanding.

Understanding, that is, of what the ASA does, that it does it across all media and that it does it well. And those who trust the ASA have a 50% higher level of trust in ads and the ad industry than those who don’t.

Obviously, there is a long way to go in building and maintaining this understanding of the ASA’s role, which is hardly universal or deeply held, but progress has been impressive. Trust in advertising has risen since 2021 from 30% to 38% — an unprecedented improvement.

Clearly, it’s not only about knowing something exists, but feeling confident in its competence and integrity that creates the trust that brands and even advertising regulators so treasure.

James Best is chair of industry think-tank Credos