Unlocking the "Trust Premium"

In 2024, one of Plus Company’s media agencies, Cossette Media, partnered with Think Tank, Vox Pop Labs and the Google News Initiative to field a study to examine the effects of Trust on advertising effectiveness in Canada. The study was conducted in French and English, with the aim of examining whether and to what extent advertiser brands are impacted as a result of the information contexts in which they are observed.

Key Findings

The key findings that led to the observation of "The Trust Premium" are as follows:

1. Trust is fundamental to creating brand affinity: the more trusted a publisher, the higher the observed brand rating.

2. Trustworthy environments lead to a 25% lift in brand rating: ads associated with trusted publishers inherit publisher credibility and in turn boost brand trust.

3. News publishers in aggregate are seen as 35% above the baseline level of trust across information environments. Local news publishers see an additional 16% gain in perceived trustworthiness among local audiences and this effect is particularly pronounced in Quebec.

4. Hard news has strong positive brand ratings that are statistically equivalent to soft news (e.g.: entertainment). Intuition that soft news is preferable to hard news in terms of brand impact is unsupported by study findings. Hard news and soft news produce the same outcomes for brand rating.

5. Ideological slant of a publication does not influence brand perception, even when the stance was different from the reader's personal beliefs

Want the full report? Download the study including takeaways for advertisers here.