WHY TRUST IS BECOMING ‘THE NEW BLACK’ OF ADTECH

IIn the adtech industry, trust is becoming a precious commodity. The extent of the crisis of trust is clear from the key issues facing the industry worldwide. And this is due to three central ‘construction sites’:

 

  • The protection of personal data, which has been processed non-transparently by the advertising & eCommerce ecosystem for many years, whether by government-regulated data protection authorities or supposedly by corporations such as Google and Apple,
  • Brand safety awareness campaigns (Stop. Funding. Hate. Now!) - in particular the fact that many campaigns appear on sites that spread disinformation, discrimination, sexism and fake news, with the result that advertisers finance the operators of these sites with their advertising budgets, and
  • Furthermore, the billion-dollar problem of ad fraud creates mistrust in the AdTech industry (How Cybercriminals Are Stealing Your Ad Dollars)

 

‘What we are seeing in our #StopFundingHateNow campaign is just the tip of the iceberg. The proportion of online advertising money that ends up on fake sites or is delivered to bots exceeds this many times over. Trust needs to be redefined from the ground up for digital advertising.’ - Thomas Koch

 

In marketing, the importance of building trust between companies and customers is fundamental and is taken into account in all measures. The holy grail of marketing is ‘real’ word-of-mouth marketing (recommendation, word-of-mouth or consumer-to-consumer marketing), because potential consumers trust recommendations from other people the most.

 

Because word of mouth can rarely be enforced in direct personal communication between consumers, advertisers often try testimonials and influencer marketing. Authenticity and credibility play a decisive role in ensuring that people trust these communication approaches, as they determine how much trust people have in the statements of their idols, artists, athletes and stars.

 

Focus groups and other qualitative market research methods are often used in strategy and creative production in order to understand and overcome consumer scepticism towards product promises and advertising messages. All this in the hope that the results will inspire customer confidence.

 

Basically, trust is gained and earned - but it cannot be commanded or assumed. Trust and communication form a basic framework for human coexistence.

 

Without trust, communication is also difficult. Understanding people builds trust. You strengthen the trust of the person you are talking to by listening to them. It is easier to destroy trust than to build it. And last but not least: trust is built over the long term.

 

The fact that some media managers are now also taking care not to destroy people's trust when displaying adverts helps the ad tech industry. For years, media tactics such as imposing unsolicited advertising messages on people or following them around the internet (retargeting) have stood in the way of the above-mentioned trust-building marketing measures, yet many advertisers continue to rely on mass instead of qualitative contacts that create trust.

 

This development has become clear through the mass use of ad and tracking blockers, falling content quotas and, above all, the popularity of ad-free content offerings such as Spotify and Netflix.

 

In the areas in which the industry includes the target groups when playing out advertising, the results of advertising effectiveness studies and campaign KPIs have been speaking a clear language for years - and thus also in favour of a new approach: brands are more likely to be trusted (+18%), more credible (+17%), more authentic (+22%) and more likely to be recommended (+32%).

 

In my work at the W3C Improving Web Advertising Business Group, I also recognise a change in the new proposals from global tech companies: it has long been about how to engage users and their individual needs, while in Europe they are still trying to keep the old, not very user-centric targeting world alive with new technical solutions to continue to place the message with potentially irrelevant mass contacts.

 

At Welect, we will continue to enable user self-determination in every session and not only generate maximum advertising impact, but also contribute to making AdFraud and brand safety events disappear and, above all, respect people and their personal data. In this way, Choice-Driven AdTech builds trust in advertisers' brands session by session. Because this is about