“Get off my screen!”: Explaining the generational trust divide

“Get off my lawn!” Hardly does the phrase need to be finished before a vivid image forms. An older gentleman,  wielding a stick, directs his general grumpiness at a group of kids; the enduring symbol of old-age resentment. If you subscribe to this stereotype of the older generation, you may be unsurprised to hear that they are significantly less trusting of advertising than younger people. “No wonder their trust in adverts is low”, you may say – “swap the kids for adverts and the lawn for a TV screen and this is the same scenario”. Yet, this is more than a case of old people waving sticks – Credos’ research suggests that something more systemic is driving the huge gap in advertising trust between the young and old.

First, the data

The size of the gap in trust between the young and old is unique within advertising – it is the only demographic in which such a contrast exists. This pattern has been true since we began tracking trust in 2010 and is remarkable in its consistency. It is also seemingly unique to advertising; all other industries that we track tend to share similar levels of trust across age groups, confirming suspicions that this is an advertising-specific trend that extends beyond a matter of general scepticism growing with age.

Figure 1 highlights the difference in trust between young and old. In 2023, exactly half (50%) of all 18-34-year-olds trusted the ads that they see or hear. This falls to 39% for 35-54-year-olds and to just 22% of those aged 55 and over.

Figure 1. Public trust in ads by age, 2023

Clearly, then, something is fuelling distrust amongst older audiences. To better understand the driving forces, we need to look more closely.

The media makes the medicine

Not all advertising is the same. ‘Advertising’ is a big word that is used to describe an ever-widening range of activities. As the list of activities labelled ‘advertising’ has grown, a ‘generational digital divide’ has emerged, whereby the young and old’s levels of trust are especially disparate in relation to new, predominantly digital media channels.

Figure 2 shows the levels of trust in each advertising medium in 2023 by age. There is a level of consistency in the trust of 18-34-year-olds across media, with newer channels slightly less trusted than longer-established ones. The 55+ age group, meanwhile, simply do not trust advertising on the internet.

Figure 2. Public trust in advertising media channel by age, 2023

So, trust in non-traditional forms of advertising may well be dragging overall trust in advertising down for the older age groups. But why is that? Again, the answer lies beyond the proverbial lawn.

Media socialisation

‘Media socialisation’ refers to the media we have become accustomed to over time, how we consume media, how we react to it, and whether we trust it.

Older people grew up and were ‘socialised’ in a largely unchanging media world. For them, the deal between advertiser and consumer was clear and remained the same: adverts paid for content, the consumer knew what to expect and when to expect it, and it was dominated by familiar brands. Adverts were not targeted to the same degree. This is what anchors older people’s expectations and attitudes towards advertising even if they are heavy online users.

Meanwhile, ‘digitally native’ younger people (under around 35 years of age) have grown up in a world characterised by ever-changing and developing web-based media. Costs of entry for advertisers are lower, so many more brands advertise, most of which are newer. Targeting at a personal level can be in-built. Young people largely feel at ease and familiar with this new advertising world and their levels of trust align accordingly.

For older people especially, though, advertising in non-traditional media confuses the deal between advertiser and audience. Many may struggle to distinguish between content and advertising, and digital advertising is far less predictable.

The changing shape of the ad industry

The increasing share of digital of the overall advertising industry is driving the polarisation of trust between young and Figure 3 shows the developing trust divide between the youngest age group (16-24) and the oldest (65+) to represent the generational divide. The anomalous 2014 year aside, there seems to be a strong correlation between the two.

Figure 3. The trust gap between 18-24 group and 65+ group mapped against digital’s share of total UK ad spend

Between 2011 and 2016, the trust gap sat at around 10%, but now sits at around 27%. Everyone now aged 18-24 have grown up with access to Facebook, Google and other online platforms, causing a widening of the gap in trust between the young and old.

To be clear, the trust gap is not just a result of the older generation trusting advertising less over time – it is also a reflection of the increasingly large section of young people who are comfortable with, and trusting of, new media formats.

An inherent divide

Despite all of this evidence, ‘media socialisation’ does not account for the whole divide. The observant reader may have noticed that, even when looking at the longest established media in Figure 2, there remains a significant trust disparity between young and old – only 27% of those 55+ trust radio adverts, compared to 49% of 18-34-year-olds, and the gap is even larger for OOH advertising. The 55+ demographic have had ample time to be socialised with OOH and radio adverts, so there must be another force at play.

Additionally, while Credos have only been tracking trust in the advertising industry since 2010, the Advertising Association have tracked ‘favourability’ (and ‘approval’ before that) of the industry since the ‘60s. Though trust and favourability are separate measures, they do have a strong relationship with one another; when favourability goes up, so too does trust and vice versa. Figure 4 shows favourability levels for each age group going back to 1969. It should be noted that a change in the questionnaire from ‘approval ‘to ‘favourability’ between 1992 and 2008 is likely to have had a significant effect on results.

Figure 4. Advertising approval/favourability by age, 1969-2023

As evidenced by the chart, favourability has trended downwards with age well before the advent of online advertising. To pin the generational divide solely on digital advertising is therefore too simplistic.

While we don’t know the answer for sure, again we can theorise. Firstly, there is a chance that older people are more settled in their tastes and purchasing habits. Having built up preferences over a longer period of time, they may be less inclined to respond positively towards adverts informing them of new products. An indifference towards new options may thus lead to a lack of trust in advertising in general.

It is also possible that older people’s trust is impacted by their vulnerability to scams and financial fraud [1]. Both ‘suspicious advertising’ and ‘vulnerable groups’ are key drivers of distrust, as identified in Credos’ Drivers of Trust study. It is therefore possible that, with age, we become more acutely aware of our vulnerability to being misled by others and become less trusting of all perceived sources of risk. Scams masquerading as adverts on many channels may therefore have a disproportionately negative effect on older people’s trust of advertising.

However, while age has always been a factor, our data suggests that the rise of digital has widened the gap between the young and old in a way that hasn’t been seen before. Using the same favourability data, Figure 5 looks at how much more likely someone aged 16-24 is than someone 65+ to be favourable towards advertising.

Figure 5. How much more likely a 16-24-year-old is to favour advertising than someone aged 65+, 1969-2023  

In 1969, someone aged 16-24+ was just 1.09 times more likely to favour advertising than someone over 65. By 2015, an 18-24-year-old was almost twice as likely (1.89) to favour advertising than someone 65+, and in 2023, this had risen to well over twice as likely (2.43).

What does all this mean?

We know that there is a significant difference in trust in advertising between the young and the old, and that this gap has grown considerably in the last decade or so. While age-related effects have always been present, the increasing share of digital has led to a disparity in trust: the young, who have been socialised with digital technologies, feel comfortable, while older age-groups do not.

On the surface, this seems a bad news story for the future of trust in advertising, as online’s share of the advertising market is only likely to continue in one direction. In the near-term, it is unlikely that the trust divide will narrow significantly. However, in the long-term there is hope. As more people are socialised with digital technologies and grow up understanding how to navigate them, trust in existing digital channels should start to climb. In 25 years, social media advertising will be considered a traditional media channel. The flip side of this, of course, is that there will likely be a new channel on the block for the older generation to be distrustful of. Just as the ubiquity of AI today was unforeseen ten years ago, the advertising channels of the future remain unknown to us now.

The trust divide is much more than a cry of “get off my lawn”, but while there are new technologies, there will be distrust of the unfamiliar. It is our job as an industry to make those emerging technologies and channels as safe and trustworthy as possible.

References

[1] https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/study-identifies-basis-sense-trust-older-people