My creative writing professor once told me that an idea for a book starts out like a small boat floating on a wide, open ocean. It drifts about, buffeted by the waves. To turn it into a story that matters, she said, you have to throw an anchor out. Where it lands is the time and place from where the story needs to be told.

When James Best and I set out to write Trusted Advertising, we found ourselves in a unique position. We didn't just have one anchor point; we had two. And they were separated by exactly one hundred years.

The first anchor drops in London, in early 1926. It landed in a banqueting hall filled with the ‘press barons’ of the day - men in stiff collars debating the future of a rapidly growing industry.

These men weren't discussing algorithms or influencers. They worried instead about ‘miracle cures’ and patent medicines. But their anxiety was one we can relate to. They realised that if the public lost confidence in the advertisements they read, they risked the revenue coming into their newspapers. They understood that the commercial media sector was powered by ad spend that relied on something more than just the paper it was printed on: public confidence.

That year, the Advertising Association launched with a set of principles including to protect and promote public confidence in advertising.

For a century, our industry’s leaders have continued to pay close attention to public confidence (or trust) in advertising, but as we approached the book, James and I realised that, while the goal remains the same, the pitch we’re playing on has changed dramatically.

We are living through what author Rachel Botsman calls "one of the biggest social transformations in history." We have moved from an age of vertical trust - where we looked up to institutions, experts, and CEOs - to an age of horizontal, distributed trust. We trust strangers on eBay more than we trust politicians. We trust ‘people like us’ more than we trust regulators.

We also live in a time where trust has become a form of high-stakes entertainment. One of the biggest cultural phenomena of recent years is The Traitors - a show format that has turned deception into box office gold. We watch it obsessively because it dramatises the very thing we are all struggling with: the difficulty of knowing who is telling the truth.

Meanwhile, the Edelman Trust Barometer’s review of the first 25 years of the 21^st Century explains how and why trust in government, media, business and even NGOs has plummeted. These are difficult times to know who to trust.

This brought us to our second anchor point: Right here. Right now.

We wrote this book because the concerns of 1926 are a commercial imperative in 2026. In a world of near-infinite content, AI and battle for attention, trust in your brand and its advertising is a key competitive differentiator.

The data supports this. New analysis from the IPA reveals that the most effective trust-building campaigns are 41% more effective at driving business growth than the average. They are nearly twice as likely to reduce price sensitivity.

While the principle of 1926 remains true — "the manufacturer who makes a public claim must be able to prove it" — the practice has become infinitely more complex. How do you prove a claim in the age of Generative AI? How do you build confidence when your primary spokesperson is a TikTok influencer you’ve never met? How do you maintain safety when your ads may be served programmatically on sites you’ve never visited?

Trusted Advertising is our attempt to take one of the Advertising Association's founding principles and provide a roadmap for the modern practitioner.

We interviewed over 70 industry leaders to answer the question: How do we build trust through advertising today? We found that trust matters to everyone, but that it requires constant attention and management to maintain. And that some brands know how to do this better than others, and they are often the ones that win.

We wrote this book for the marketing director trying to justify a trust-building advertising budget to a CFO. We wrote it for the agency planner navigating the ethics of data use. And we wrote it for the student who wants to enter an industry that adds value to the world, not just noise.

Ultimately, trust in your advertising is an anchor for every brand and its promise to the customer. Without it, you are just drifting – spending (wasting even) money on attention that evaporates the moment the ad is gone.

As the Advertising Association enters its Centenary year, we are looking back at those founders with respect. They knew that a life and an industry without trust is impossible. Our job now, one hundred years later, is to ensure that trust in our work holds through the 21^st century.

Trusted Advertising: How to harness the power of trust in your brand, by Matt Bourn and James Best and published by Kogan Page is out now. Order your copy here.