It’s time to improve the public’s advertising experience

The UK advertising industry’s Trust Working Group, led by the Advertising Association, IPA and ISBA, has been working hard on addressing the decline of public trust in advertising since it formed in 2018.

One of the first steps it undertook was to develop a five-point industry action plan to address the issues that had emerged from research by our industry’s think tank, Credos. The first two of these actions, around advertising bombardment and excessive frequency, later were discovered to be advertising’s top drivers of public negativity.

Talking on this, at ISBA’s Annual Conference last month (see video below), ISBA Director General Phil Smith and Mark Evans, Managing Director of Marketing and Digital at Direct Line, discussed the outputs from our Trust Working Group. They said that loss of trust remained an existential risk for the industry, and it is vital that advertisers engage with measurement, particularly of frequency since bombardment was the major factor in consumer alienation. But it is equally in the interests of the media and digital supply chains to engage in the issue since it directly affected readers and users.

It was following this that ISBA, in partnership with consultants Derek Morris and Nick Manning, launched a brand new Advertising Experience MOT for any advertiser seeking to secure greater value and efficiency as a result of improving the public’s experience of their campaigns. It is a new, independently verified test of a company’s/brand’s approach to safeguarding the consumer, avoiding advertising bombardment and wasted investment. The MOT has five elements:

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 

You can download the report here.