In their words:
“Trust is an ambiguous concept, not easily defined by a single metric and rich in meaning and interpretation… The results [from report A Matter of Trust] show that despite the prevalence of pure play digital platforms, magazine brands (in print and online) provide a trusted environment for advertisers… relevant, reliable and expert, all of which are significant factors underpinning trust in media brands.”
Key findings:
- When asked “To what extent do you trust this media brand?”, more people trusted magazine brands (70%) than social media (30%).
- Magazine brands (62%) are more trusted than social media (35%) among digital natives.
- When measuring trust, relevancy and meaning carries the most weight (31%), followed by reliability and ethics (27%) and expertise and objectivity (20%). Magazine brands rank more than twice as highly as social media in all three.
- Magazine brands are more implicitly trusted than social media across all 20 different keywords analysed in the study (including authoritative, ethical, honest, quality, transparent and useful).
- Magazine brands were the most trusted medium in beauty (79%), fashion (82%), home (46%), motoring (60%), entertainment (80%) and news (74%).
- Of all the case studies analysed at by Magnetic, the rub effect of magazine brands on trust related-KPIs ranged from 64-94%.
In our words:
The research reveals a fundamental disconnect between planners and consumers in how they view relevancy.
Rightly, both see relevancy as critical to trust, yet planners tie it more to social media, while consumers feel magazine brands are better at building trust. This misunderstanding feeds into a wider issue for planners as they routinely revert to TV and social media for trust-related briefs. A Matter of Trust shows they’d be better off using magazine brands.
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