(Article originally featured in Marketing Week)
The media industry faces a tough challenge as concerns around fake news rise, meaning advertisers associated with those media outlets could run the risk of being tarred by the same brush.
By Mindi Chahal 27 Mar 2017
Consumer confidence in media has taken a significant hit following the rise of ‘fake news’. New research shown exclusively to Marketing Week shows a marked decrease in the trust of mainstream media in the UK as a result of widespread misreporting and false information, which not only damages the media outlets themselves but could have an impact on the brands that choose to advertise with them.
Although the problem is perhaps more rife in the US, UK consumers are already feeling the effects of being subjected to and experiencing fake news in the media they consume.
In the past year, almost half (47%) of consumers have been suspicious that a story they have read may be fake, with 75% of people trusting the media outlet that carried those stories less as a result.
The survey, by Network Research of over 1,000 adults aged 18 to 74, shows trust in information from the media generally has dropped for 32% of people, increasing to 38% for 18- to 34-year-olds.
Three-quarters agree with the statement “you shouldn’t trust everything you read in a news article” and 63% believe the media industry needs more regulation – this decreases slightly to 59% for those aged 55 to 74 but increases to 65% for 35- to 54-year-olds.
Keith Grossman, global chief revenue officer at Bloomberg Media, says: “The consumer expectation is that they are reading ‘real’ news; nobody sets out to read ‘fake’ news. The onus is therefore on [media] brands to have the infrastructure in place – with quality journalists, fact checkers and concrete data, to be able to provide factually correct news to their readers.”
The extent to which news brands promote their reliability is “irrelevant”, Grossman says. “Fake news sites can win a few times before they are recognised for what they are. The best promotion any established brand can do to ensure trust is to always hold the trust of its readers sacred.”
The damage of fake news is that you get valued less in that environment as a brand
Dominic Carter, chief commercial officer at News UK
Building trust among advertisers
While brands, trade bodies and agency bosses wade into the debate surrounding malpractice in digital advertising, publishers are in a good position to showcase credentials and engender trust in cautious advertisers.
The most recent warning around fake news came from world wide web creator Tim Berners-Lee, who named fake news as one of three key challenges in an open letter to mark the 28th anniversary of his invention.
The letter highlights that people find news and information via “a handful of social media sites and search engines” that not only make money from the clicks they receive, but also show content based on algorithms that learn from consumers’ personal data, which “they are constantly harvesting”...