Consumer trust in media is falling by the week, to the point where some of us feel a bit like polar bears, looking frantically on as the arctic ice cap melts away. Ideally, we need the media equivalent of the Paris climate accord to reverse the current situation; but I’d settle for protecting trust in the more contained world of commercial content, which feels somehow more achievable.

But is it? Are there failsafe ways of ensuring that commercial content is always worthy of trust?

A good place to start is to explore what makes humans trust other humans. After all, until robots decide that homo sapiens are useful for nothing but reality TV pratfalls, quality content will continue to be conceived and created by people.

Let’s start by looking at the qualities that engender trust, four of which deserve particular focus:

Affinity: understanding that the person across from us is actually a bit like us. Whether it’s the way we dress, utter devotion to the same footie team or a mutual appreciation of manga comics, affinity instantly creates trust.

Ability: if someone has greater expertise in a field than we do and they can demonstrate it, we will give ourselves up to their higher knowledge and experience.

Integrity: proof that someone does what they say they’re going to do, over and over again. They’re true to their word. They show up. Who wouldn’t trust someone who consistently demonstrates integrity?

Benevolence: perhaps the most compelling of the four qualities. When someone urges us to do something not just because they will benefit but because they care about the outcome for us, we trust them.

So, if these qualities are the cornerstones of trust in everyday life, the same should be true of trust in commercial content. How do we adapt these qualities for our world?

We live in an age of hyper media consumption. Whether as individuals or businesses, never before have we been presented with so many ways to communicate with each other. 

People now have access to constant communication and, in the digital landscape, a seemingly never ending choice of channels and devices to choose from. Businesses have taken advantage of a growing and increasingly sophisticated range of digital marketing solutions to converse with their consumers alongside traditional media.   

So are we facing communication overload? And how can businesses rationalise their comms strategies and make sure they are connecting with the right people on the right device at the right time? 

I recently came across a post on Facebook that was generating a lot of traction. No wonder – it linked to a story revealing a way to beat online casinos.

The rich narrative explained how Rob Lawrence, 28, was spilling the beans about his money-making strategy “to piss off the online casinos who shut his accounts”. He’d been told about the lucrative system from an uncle, a former casino employee now serving time in prison.

The first thing that raised alarm bells was the use of links in the explanation of how the scheme worked. You won’t find this in the original ‘Evening Mail’ story above because the strategy page it linked to has been removed, but you will find it in this other version of the campaign posing as a blog – there are several across the web.

Under ‘Step1 – Where to play’ it says: “The casino that let me get away with the most was Bwin – you’ve probably seen them advertised on the footy.” The word ‘Bwin’ was hyperlinked, which struck me as odd, but I carried on reading – I was curious to discover how the casinos could be beaten.

The game was roulette, and the advice was to pick a “rare event”, such as five of the same colour coming up on consecutive spins – the probability of which is 2.78% (on a roulette table with a single ‘0’). Once this happens, the recommendation was to bet on the opposite colour. So after five blacks in a row, you should then bet on red – and vice versa.

In a consumer world that craves personalisation and hates the sell, native should have been brands’ golden ticket to engagement and loyalty, by delivering key branded insight to consumers of online media to complement editorial.

In a highly competitive online media world dominated by clutter and intrusive advertising that’s driving away readers, native should have been publishers’ route to readability and working with brands not simply to increase revenues, but also to add value to the consumer experience through co-creating relevant content.

So what went wrong?

The answer is content.

The most important part of the native equation was neglected by brands, agencies and publishers.

As the industry evolves, native advertising is becoming a core component of digital advertising.

Publishers are leveraging this format because of its ability to match the form and function of an editorial or product experience.

For consumers, native ads provide less disruptive and more engaging advertising. For advertisers, there is a new way to communicate marketing messages more naturally. As digital consumption continues to increase and evolve, so will the opportunity for native advertising.

The next generation of digital experiences will be much more visual, feed-driven and personalised, and native ads will evolve in a similar way.

As an industry, it is important that we nurture this opportunity and do not to stifle the growth of native advertising by too narrowly defining the space. Native comes in many types, ranging from search advertising (the earliest form of native), to in-stream ads to in-game native formats and beyond.

Uncovering what is and isn't working is the bedrock of an effective campaign, but as customers now consume content from multiple sources, accurate measurement is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.

The last-click has been the unchallenged method for measuring how customers enter the sales funnel for a long time. However, last click models don't provide a comprehensive picture because the path to conversion is never linear, it's multi-channel and multi-device.

Consumers navigate many touch points, both online and offline and it is impossible to trace just one definitive trigger point for a sale, which in effect, is what last click does. This complex reality calls for a more sophisticated measurement solution.

Improving attribution is an industry work in progress and there are limitations, primarily because every advertiser is different and has different objectives which cannot be reduced into a "one-size fits all" attribution model.

This means a consistent standard for the actual methodology of attribution is highly unlikely.

What a genius David Bowie was. Not only was he arguably one of the most original and creative songwriters, musicians and performers, it turns out he was an incredible media futurologist.

One of the most fascinating recent TV tributes was his interview with Jeremy Paxman back in 1999. It’s the one where he predicts the internet. Another of his predictions from the same interview, which has yet to be picked up on, relates to the future of online content. Bowie tells Paxman that it won’t be a case of driving the audience to content, but rather creating the content to suit the audience.

Essentially what Bowie means here is personalisation, which is suddenly a hot marketing topic. From a content perspective, he pretty much predicted native, which is supposed to be the placing of journalistically driven – rather than sales led – branded content within editorial to interest and engage readers. Sadly this isn’t the reality of native.