The Weird Conundrum about Recent Ad Data

This still has me scratching my head.

According to a survey by Clutch, the most trustworthy advertising today is on television, followed by print, and then radio. At the bottom of the heap are online and social media ads.

Not only that, but ad campaigns that include print magazines in their mix have a 22% bump in trust, according to data from Magazine Networks.

Many agency execs are saying pffft to digital ads, and rethinking the fallout for their clients from digital’s no-good, horrible, rotten year. Digital ads are most likely to be found “annoying,” and ad blocking is a fact of life for any digital marketer.

Yet according to PWC’s latest Global Entertainment & Media Outlook report, online advertising is projected to grow by about 13% a year through 2022, while magazine advertising is expected to stay flat or slightly down.

It’s annoying, we block ads online, it’s not very effective, and we don’t want tracking – and even industry leaders are cautioning that we need to rethink our overdependence on it – yet brands are still lining up to feed the digital ad duopoly.

The magazine industry, meanwhile, does some great work in helping brands understand the power of print. Sharing the facts about print is the best way I know to change the paradigm. So I’ll keep sharing, and scratch my head.