The Advertising Association turned a hundred this year, and when Andria Vidler stood up to deliver the centenary address at its parliamentary reception, she could have picked any theme going, AI or measurement or a well-earned lap of honour around a century of British advertising, and the one she chose was trust.

Her argument, published in The Media Leader under the heading “Proving the value of trust”, is that we are moving out of the attention economy and into a trust economy, and that trust itself is not the soft measure we have always treated it as, sitting quietly in a brand tracker somewhere between perception and sentiment, but the thing holding up every other number on the page. She called it the King of KPIs!

Reading further and a few other things stuck. Trust in advertising is apparently at a five-year high, which genuinely surprised me, and ChatGPT reached a hundred million users in two months, which didn’t. All of it set something off, because I have been here before, in a different industry, with considerably more hair and a signed deal I was far too pleased about.

In 1991, on “Check the Rhime”, Q-Tip of Tribe Called Quest delivered what is still to me the most unfortunately accurate sentence in the history of the music business:

“Industry rule number four thousand and eighty, record company people are shady….”

I hated that line for years. In an industry I loved, as an artist it was cool, but as I moved in to the industry side I didn’t want to be thrown in to any ‘shady’ camp. After twenty-odd years in the business I slowly understood the authenticity of the line.

I signed things I didn’t fully understand, I got dropped by Universal, and I have read royalty statements that appeared to have been designed by somebody who really didn’t want them read. Nobody lied to me exactly, they simply arranged the world so that the truth was expensive to find, and it took me a long time to work out that the opacity was never a bug in the system, it was the system, because if nobody can see what is happening then nobody can argue about what is happening.

It seems the music industry isn’t alone in the art of shady. Media too has its equivalent artistic P&L ideology, and we all know the vocabulary by now: share deals being the major ‘ick’.

I’m not being sanctimonious about it, because plenty of good people work inside those structures and would change them tomorrow if the choice were theirs to make, but for a long stretch of my career the clever money was on complexity, and transparency was what you offered when you couldn’t afford a smarter accountant.

In the race to the bottom in terms of actually paying for things, AI has made content, copy, images, music and decks effectively free and effectively infinite; and when anything at all can be generated or faked or flattered into existence in about nine seconds, the only genuinely scarce things left are judgement, taste, and somebody whose word still holds after the meeting ends. Which makes it all the more remarkable how quickly we decided to trust the thing. Two months to a hundred million users, and somewhere in there we quietly (probably) stopped checking. I’m not sure we ever actually made that decision, we just got tired of verifying, which is not the same thing at all, and it’s worth remembering that the machine has never once been on the hook for being wrong. Probably (in the UK anyhow) worn down by thousands of website cookie acceptances.

And that, I think, is why Vidler’s point lands now rather than twenty years ago. Trust was always valuable, it simply wasn’t measurable, so nobody ever put a number against it, and things without numbers against them tend to get talked about warmly and funded badly, a bit like my music career actually. The moment you can measure something you can trade it, and the moment you can trade it the people who have been quietly accumulating it for two decades discover they are sitting on an asset that was never once mentioned in a credentials meeting.

At Mostly Media, transparency isn’t a slide in the credentials deck, it’s the reason clients stay and the reason they tell other people about us. With Revflo I’ve been a part of a platform whose entire purpose is to fix the thing that made me hate that Tribe line in the first place, with splits agreed openly and up front, before there is anything worth falling out over. Not because I’m noble, but because I have been the person on the wrong end of a contract nobody would explain to me, and I would quite like to run out of ways to feel that particular feeling again. Plus, independents need tools.

Trust isn’t a positioning statement, you can’t buy it, you can’t rebrand your way into it, and you certainly can’t write it into a manifesto and expect it to stick; it’s almost as twee as “it’s 6pm somewhere” complete with cork popping wine bottle graphic. Trust is the accumulated residue of doing what you said you would do, over and over, on all the occasions when it would have been considerably more profitable not to.

A hundred years of the Advertising Association, and the headline is that we should probably be trustworthy. I’m not being sarcastic about that, I think it is the most useful thing anyone has said at a centenary.

Industry rule number four thousand and eighty-one: be the exception.

#Independence #Trust #Transparency #MediaAgency #MusicIndustry #TrustEconomy #revflo #AMI

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