Canadians Trust Billboards More Than Your Feed. Here's Why.
New research on where Canadian consumer trust actually lives, and what it means for AI, OOH and the future of media planning. Part one of a three-part series on trust.
For years, the marketing playbook has rewarded whoever can capture the most attention, chasing bigger reach and sharper targeting with every media plan. New Canadian research from Vistar Media and Angus Reid suggests that playbook might be solving the wrong problem.
Their survey, with insights from 1,501 Canadian adults this year, found a trust gap that should reframe how marketers think about media planning entirely. Half of Canadians say they trust out-of-home advertising. Only 12% say the same about digital advertising. Sixty-one percent say they're annoyed by the amount of advertising they see online.
Scott Mitchell, Managing Director Canada at Vistar Media, spoke with MNC about what the data means, and he doesn't read that gap as consumers losing faith in advertising broadly.
Where Canadians actually place their trust
“One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing today is that consumers have become less trusting," he says. “I don't think that's quite what we're seeing. Consumers are becoming much more discerning about where they place their trust."
His read on why OOH earns that trust while digital struggles comes down to context. A billboard on your commute or a screen in a mall isn't fighting for space in a feed built to interrupt you. It sits inside the physical world you're already moving through, and that changes the relationship between the ad, the brand and the person seeing it.
“OOH isn't about checking another channel off the media plan or simply being everywhere at once," Mitchell says. “It's about showing up in the right places, where context can give a message greater credibility and help a brand become more familiar, relevant and trusted."
The line between relevant and invasive
Vistar's data also points to a specific line marketers can't afford to cross as AI creative tools get more sophisticated. A third of Canadians already say AI-driven personalization can feel invasive, and Mitchell says the difference between an ad that feels timely and one that feels unsettling comes down to what the ad seems to know.
“AI should help a brand understand the moment, not make a consumer feel like the brand understands them personally," he says.
He points to weather, time of day, traffic and location as signals that can make an ad more relevant without needing to know anything about the person seeing it. A grocery delivery brand reacting to a snowstorm feels useful because it reflects what's happening around you, not what an advertiser has learned about you specifically.
“It starts to feel invasive when that relevance becomes so specific that people find themselves wondering, ‘How do they know that about me?'" he says.
For Mitchell, the opportunity isn't turning OOH into a one-to-one digital channel. It's using AI to make an already effective mass-reach medium more responsive to the world around it, better creative decisions, sharper reactions to real conditions, more chances to be relevant in the moment.
“Ultimately, AI should make the advertising better," he says. “It shouldn't be the thing people notice."
Does AI inherit digital's trust problem?
That still leaves an open question: does OOH's trust advantage survive once AI starts writing and building the creative itself? Mitchell's answer starts by reframing what people are actually reacting to when they see a billboard.
“Most consumers aren't looking at a billboard and wondering whether AI played a role in producing it," he says. “They're deciding whether the ad feels original, relevant and worth their attention."
That doesn't mean AI is a non-issue. Vistar's research found 43% of Canadians say they're less likely to trust an ad once they know AI generated it, a number that puts real weight behind the idea that the technology itself carries some baggage. But Mitchell argues that makes the execution matter more, not less.
“If AI is simply used to produce more generic creative, faster, there's a risk that advertising starts to feel less distinctive and less human," he says. “If it's used to help marketers develop stronger ideas, respond to context or make a campaign more relevant to what's happening in the real world, it can play a very different role."
The challenge for marketers, as he sees it, is using AI without losing the judgment that makes advertising memorable in the first place.
Trust as a KPI, not a vanity metric
Zoom out far enough and this data points to a bigger shift than one channel's advantage over another. For a long time, the industry has optimized for what's easy to measure: impressions, clicks, reach. Mitchell thinks trust deserves a seat at that table too.
“Getting someone's attention is one thing. Earning their trust is another," he says. “Awareness and attention can tell you whether a message was seen or remembered. Trust helps us understand something different: whether the environment, the message and ultimately the brand feel credible to the consumer."
That distinction only gets more important as AI makes it cheaper and faster to produce advertising at scale. More content isn't the same as more effective content, and Mitchell says marketers still have to make deliberate choices about where they show up and whether the experience feels earned.
“The brands that use technology to create better, more relevant experiences, without sacrificing credibility in the process, will be in a much stronger position to build lasting relationships with consumers," he says.
Vistar's data makes the case for why trust matters. What it doesn't fully answer is how a brand actually builds it once it's decided to try. That's the question we'll dig into next week, with a framework for diagnosing exactly where trust breaks down inside a brand, and how to fix it before it costs you a customer.
