Trust in Advertising Hit 40 Per Cent. The Industry Thinks That’s a Win.
Matt Bourn and James Best’s new book ‘Trusted Advertising’ examines how brands can rebuild confidence in an era of declining institutional trust.
Matt Bourn, the Director of Communications at the Advertising Association, has spent an hour explaining why 40% trust in advertising is good news.
Recent research shows that whilst 40% trust the advertising they see, 33% neither trust nor distrust and only 25% actually distrust advertising.
Bourne is watching the trend line, not the absolute number. Trust climbed from lower levels three years ago. While trust in government, media, and the monarchy craters, advertising is moving in the other direction.
New IPA research shows why that matters to your P&L. The organisation reviewed close to 1,000 entries in its Effectiveness Data Bank, comparing trust-building campaigns against the average. Trust-builders won on customer acquisition costs, retention, and pricing elasticity. “You can charge a little bit more,” Bourn said. As the AA marks its centenary, Bourn and co-author James Best have written a book examining what builds trust - and what destroys it.
The Least Compliant Channel Is the One Everyone’s Betting On
The research threw up a paradox that Bourn and Best couldn’t ignore. Influencer marketing is “probably the least compliant channel” from an ASA regulatory compliance perspective, Bourn said. “The number of cases where people are putting out commercial information, not necessarily disclosing it”, keeps growing.
Every marketer they spoke to is doubling down on influencers anyway. They’re “authentic.” They “build trust.”
Bourn coined a phrase: “Nobody trusts influencers, but everybody has an influencer that they trust.”
For fashion and beauty brands, this isn’t academic. “There are creators who can point to a particular new beauty product, and that beauty product sells out as a result of that one creator or influencer,” Bourn said. The channel with the worst regulatory compliance is delivering results that traditional advertising can’t match.
Em Wallbank exemplifies the shift. A former nurse turned full-time creator during Covid, she writes her own scripts, designs her own costumes, sets up production in her apartment, films, edits and publishes. “She’s a one-person studio,” Bourn said. When asked about spacing out ads between content, she told him: “If I produce three great pieces of advertising-funded content and go back to back to back, provided they’re great pieces, and people find them entertaining, that’s absolutely fine.”
What Actually Builds Trust (And What Doesn’t)
“You can’t have a bad product or service and cover that up through great advertising, because people will find you out,” Bourn said. Trust starts with product quality, not campaigns.
McDonald’s rebuilt trust from the late 2000s through “high-quality advertising and consistency.” Tesco faced the horse meat scandal, improved product quality, and backed it with consistent advertising. Both are now highly trusted brands.
The lesson isn’t complicated. “Consistency is a fundamental part of building long-term trust,” Bourn said. The industry gets excited about new campaigns, but the brands building trust stick with what works and evolve slowly.
Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign is nearly a decade old. For Bourn, seeing Danny Boyle shoot scenes from 28 Years Later on iPhones proved the promise. “There is one of the world’s best film directors doing that with one of the greatest horror movies. That is great commercial communications - how do you find that thing that you want to be trusted for, and then show how you deliver it?”
You’ve Lost Control (Whether You Realise It or Not)
“No marketer that we spoke to said it’s getting easier to manage where your brand shows up,” Bourn said. The customer journey is 24/7, personal, and one-to-one. Compared to building brands in the 1990s, “it’s so much more complicated.”
Jessica Tamsedge, a creative leader at Dentsu, coined the phrase "from controlling trust to conducting trust." The idea, as Matt described it: you have to accept that your brand is part of the conversation, and people will talk about your brand and either build or reduce trust in it.
Brands used to broadcast what they wanted to be trusted for. Now they’re participants in a conversation they don’t control. The power dynamics have shifted in other ways, too. “The spend was concentrated in the agency buying groups, and now that spend is really in the big tech platforms,” Bourn said.
AI Makes It Easier to Lie at Scale
Bourn and co-author James Best disagreed about AI’s impact on trust. Bourn thought AI-generated ads would create problems. Best argued AI could make advertising more trustworthy.
“The fundamental truth of being trusted in advertising is: don’t lie,” Bourn said. Use AI for legal, decent, honest, and truthful advertising, and you’re fine.
The problem is deception. “If you present someone to me as a real human being, and I go on to find out that they’re not, I’m probably going to feel like you lied to me.” H&M digitised models and used them across multiple campaigns. Consumers figured it out and felt manipulated.
AI makes it easier to lie at scale. People are already worried about AI everywhere. Advertising is just one more place they’re watching for manipulation.
Useful or Creepy? There’s No Middle Ground
Bourn expects more personalisation by 2030. The tension is obvious: we want relevant ads but don’t want to feel surveilled.
His example of useful personalisation: “I want my bank to be able to go, Matt, we’ve seen that your home insurance is coming up for renewal. We’ve done the work for you. These are the best offers out there. We recommend this one.”
That’s a valuable commercial relationship. Done wrong, it’s surveillance capitalism dressed up as customer service.
AI agents buying on your behalf raise new questions. “If an AI agent is buying something on my behalf, what’s the commercial machinations behind that purchase that’s making sure I’m genuinely getting the best thing for my money?”
What This Means for Your Brand
The Advertising Association was founded on a principle: “Advertised goods are the goods to buy.” A century later, that’s still the ambition, but the mechanics have changed completely.
The IPA data backs what Bourn is arguing: honesty, consistency, and quality delivery build trust that shows up in the P&L. In a fragmented media landscape with AI reshaping the industry, those principles still work.
But here’s what’s changed: you can’t control the conversation anymore. You can only participate in it. Your brand appears across dozens of channels and thousands of touch-points. The influencers with the worst regulatory compliance are the ones driving sales. AI enables both better personalisation and easier deception.
For brand managers, the practical implications are clear:
Product quality comes first. Great advertising can’t fix a bad product. Consumers will find you out.
Consistency outperforms innovation. The brands building trust aren’t chasing shiny objects. They’re evolving long-running campaigns slowly.
You’ve lost control of your brand narrative. Work out where you fit in people’s lives and how to join conversations that matter, rather than broadcasting what you want to be trusted for.
Choose where you show up. “Damn right it matters where you show up,” Bourn said. Sponsoring Love Island says something different about your brand than sponsoring Wimbledon. Both are fantastic properties. Both send different signals.
Don’t lie with AI. The tech enables new forms of deception, but the old rules apply: get caught lying, lose trust, damage the brand.
Forty per cent isn’t sixty per cent. But it’s climbing. And in an era when people trust almost nothing, that’s worth paying attention to.
Brilliant piece on the influencer paradox. The quote "nobody trusts influencers, but everbody has an influencer they trust" nails why brands keep doubling down despite the compliance issues. I've seen this in tech where micro-influencers move product better than polished ads becuase they feel like real recommendations rather than paid placements. What struck me most is how consistency beats novelty in actual trust building even though the industry constantly chases the new shiny thing.