• by Wayne Friedman , October 3, 2007

For consumers, slick ads aren't the deal-breaker. It's what other people say about products that earns their trust. Word-of-mouth marketing is still valued among all other advertising platforms, says a recent Nielsen Internet survey.

Seventy-eight percent of consumers say they trust other consumers' recommendations over all advertising/marketing avenues. Next in the trust line: Ads in newspapers, at a 63% score. Consumers' opinions from online blogs came in third at 61%. Brand Web sites were at 60%.

Of the 13 different ad platforms Nielsen surveyed, new digital platforms--including some of that group's biggest categories--took the last three spots. Search engine ads only generated a 34% trusting score; online banner ads were at 26%; and--dead last--was text ads on mobile phones.

Traditional media, on the whole, did much better than new digital platforms. Television and magazine were in the middle of the pack, each with a 56% score; Radio was at 54%; and brand sponsorships, at 49%.

Nielsen conducted this global twice-a-year study among 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets from Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas and the Middle East.

In general, European consumers were most distrustful of all advertising among nations around the world, with Danes (28%), Italians (32%), Lithuanians (34%) and Germans (35%) the lowest in the world. On the flip side, the most trusting were Philippines (67%), Brazil (67%), Mexico (66%), South Africa (64%), and Taiwan (63%). This more or less follows how consumers feel about word-of-mouth marketing among countries, with higher levels of trust existing in Asia-Pacific nations: Hong Kong (93%), Taiwan (91%) and Indonesia (89%). At the other end of the spectrum, those least likely to trust what they hear from other consumers come from European nations, such as Denmark (62%) and Italy (64%).