If marketers care about trust, now is the time to show it

Opinion

If the industry genuinely believes trust matters, now is the time to insist on the safeguards, transparency, and accountability that will protect consumers, brands, and our industry alike.

My memory has never been my strongest muscle. Whilst I was sitting in the Advertising Association’s LEAD event earlier this year, I was suddenly taken back to the Odeon in 2023, when then AA president Alessandra Bellini stood on stage showing some fairly dramatic charts about the frankly devastating loss of trust in advertising. At the time, we sat only just above politicians. Given the political climate we’d just lived through, that was quite the achievement.

So whilst it is comforting in 2026 to see that trend reversing and the lines of trust going up, and kudos to the AA for the centenary celebrations that focus so much on it, we do have a way to go to fix it. So why is it so hard?

I don’t think any business with a nine-figure media budget wakes up wanting to deceive its customers. Even with the famously short tenure of CMOs, deliberately misleading current or future buyers would be such a spectacularly short-term strategy that even the most promiscuous podcast host might question it.

Nor should we expect consumers to trust advertising blindly. A healthy scepticism is entirely rational. Our industry exists to persuade people that products and services are worth buying. That’s literally the job. Someone seeing an advert saying “this holiday is wonderful” shouldn’t immediately reach for their credit card.

Trust doesn’t mean unquestioning belief

Trust means believing the system itself is fundamentally honest. That ads aren’t intentionally misleading, fraudulent or manipulative. When that baseline exists, consumers can judge great creativity, compelling copy and brilliant targeting on their own merits.

That’s why trust is such a powerful north star. Without it, everything else falls apart.

The Advertising Association deserves enormous credit for making trust a relentless focus for our industry. But if we’re serious about restoring it, we also have to be honest about where we’ve lost trust.

For me, large brands with reputations to protect are an important part of this conversation, but they’re not the primary cause. I don’t think I’m alone in believing that the collapse in trust over the past two decades closely mirrors the rise of the digital platforms that now dominate media.

In many ways, those platforms have transformed marketing for the better. They democratised media buying. They let businesses of every size reach audiences that once would have been inaccessible. They modernised the Yellow Pages for the internet age and enabled genuinely brilliant creativity to flourish.

But they also escaped many of the responsibilities that traditional media owners had long accepted. Newspapers, broadcasters and radio stations have always carried editorial accountability alongside commercial opportunity. The largest digital platforms have often pursued the latter without embracing enough of the former.

Consumers increasingly recognise this distinction. The trust problem today isn’t simply about advertising itself. It’s about platforms that profit from scam ads, fraudulent content, and bad actors, while too often reacting only after the damage is already done. Add the well-documented societal harms we’ve spent years debating, and it’s not difficult to see why public confidence has been shaken.

What to do…

Advertisers did not create these problems, but they have more influence over solving them than they sometimes realise.

For years, marketers have invested billions into a relatively small number of platforms. Yet despite repeated brand safety crises, misinformation scandals and questions around governance, those investments have continued to flow. The industry has often treated these issues as an unfortunate cost of accessing unparalleled scale, rather than as problems significant enough to change buying behaviour.

What makes this moment different is that, unlike social media twenty years ago, the commercial relationship between AI platforms and advertisers hasn’t been fully written yet.

Every major AI company is exploring what advertising, sponsorship and commercial partnerships will eventually look like. They want marketing budgets. They want the legitimacy that comes from working with the world’s biggest brands. And that gives advertisers something they rarely acknowledge they possess: leverage.

Before significant advertising budgets flow into LLMs and AI assistants, marketers should ask difficult questions. How will harmful content be prevented? How will copyrighted material be respected? What safeguards exist against manipulation, fraud or bias? How transparent will commercial recommendations be? What happens when AI gets something wrong?

The reality is that platforms need advertisers just as much as advertisers will eventually want access to these audiences. That’s a rare alignment of commercial incentives and public interest. It’s also a window that won’t stay open forever.

If the industry genuinely believes trust matters, and it does, then now is the time to insist on the safeguards, transparency and accountability that will protect consumers, brands and our industry alike.

If marketers care about trust, this is the moment to prove it.

Graham Alexander is the director of adtech and marketing services at With