Improving the Advertising Experience

The UK advertising industry’s Trust Working Group, led by the Advertising Association, has today launched a new paper – Improving The Public’s Advertising Experience – concentrating on the advertiser’s role in the process.

The paper, which you can download on the right, launched at ISBA’s Annual Conference where ISBA – the trade association for advertisers in the UK – also launched a new Advertising Experience MOT for brands, following work by industry consultants, Derek Morris and Nick Manning. These developments come as new research from UK advertising industry thinktank, Credos, shows the public’s trust in advertising finely balanced, with an uptick overall in public trust and favourability during the past twelve months but with a widening gap versus other UK industries including banking and energy.

Advertising’s top driver of public negativity – bombardment and excessive frequency and retargeting is addressed in Improving The Public’s Advertising Experience with five actions and guidance for all advertisers to follow:

1. Make your advertising welcome in people’s lives
2. Place business effectiveness above efficiency
3. Achieve full visibility of where your advertising goes
4. Ensure every impact and exposure matters
5. Deploy the necessary resources to track, measure and manage this programme.

The actions were developed by Manning and Morris, working with Credos, through a full review of available data, alongside qualitative interviews with a select group of the UK’s biggest advertisers, their agencies and leading media owners.

At the same time, ISBA has launched the Advertising Experience MOT for every advertiser seeking to secure greater value and efficiency as a result of improving the public’s experience of their campaigns. The MOT, available to all advertisers, is a new, independently verified test of a company’s/brand’s approach to safeguarding the consumer, avoiding advertising bombardment and wasted investment. 

Phil Smith, Director General, ISBA and Co-Chair Trust Working Group, said:

“Public trust in advertising is finely balanced. People still appreciate entertaining and relevant advertising, but they can also feel ‘bombarded’ by too much irrelevant, obtrusive and repetitive advertising and they are switching their attention off. The more the balance tips towards the negative, the less welcome advertising will be in people’s lives. By ensuring that people are receptive to our advertising and improving consumer trust, we will create better value for our investment.”

Keith Weed, President, Advertising Association, commented:

“Improving the advertising experience is wholly in our hands. We have more tools and more opportunities to deliver advertising than ever before and we need to choose wisely how we use these in order to protect the vital relationship we have with the public. We need to put the consumer experience back at the heart of everything we do and, by doing so, create a healthy and sustainable industry for everyone – for people, advertisers, media owners and agencies.”

All of these developments come as new tracking data is released by Credos showing that while public trust and favourability towards advertising has seen an uptick over the last year, it still lags behind other comparable industries. Overall favourability towards advertising increased from 50% to 65% from December 2018 to December 2019, but the gap between the number favourable towards advertising, versus the average of those favourable to other industries, increased from 19% to 21%.