At RESET in Sydney – now under the newly rebranded Marketing Association of Australia – ThinkNewsBrands CEO Vanessa Lyons shared the stage with journalist and author Nick Bryant. Here’s what she took from the conversation, and why marketers should be paying attention.
Nick Bryant has covered a fair few of the world’s messiest moments: Trump’s Washington, Britain’s Brexit, and elections that didn’t go the way pollsters said they would. So, when he stood up at RESET and told a room full of marketers that public trust is now the whole game, people listened.
I joined him on stage afterwards. Here’s what stuck.
Trust used to be a by-product. Now it’s the brief.
Over the last few decades, the industry’s priorities have been in areas such as reach, performance and attention. Fair enough, these metrics still matter. But Nick Bryant’s point was blunter than that: in a world flooded with AI-generated content, algorithmic noise and misinformation, audiences are getting choosier about what they believe.
Brands chasing short-term performance and attention are using yesterday’s playbook. Those who are steadily building credibility and authenticity are the brands positively remembered and trusted when the noise settles.
Where you show up says as much as what you say
When audiences are actively questioning what they can trust online, the quality of the environment around your brand stops being a nice to have, and starts doing real work. A trusted environment lends your brand some of its own credibility. Attention inevitably fades, reputation of your brand is built cumulatively over years and lasts.
It’s about actively choosing credible environments, such as Australian news media, that hand your brand some of their trust on the way through. It’s known as the news trust halo – when a media platform is trusted for providing verified information, audiences are more trusting of the brands within it too.
AI doesn’t make human expertise less valuable. It made it a scarce resource.
Nick Bryant wasn’t anti-AI in his address to marketers. He was clear that AI can be a great tool for analysis, productivity and content at scale. But AI can’t witness an event or build trust through lived experience. It can’t be held accountable. It can’t rival the bulldust radar of Australian journalists and audiences.
Generated content is about to get even cheaper and more abundant, so expertise, credibility, judgement will become the differentiator for authentic, trustworthy content.
Australia’s digital news sites aren’t a risk to manage. They’re an asset marketers under use.
Nick Bryant has worked across some of the largest media markets, so his read on Australia is worth hearing: we should be far more confident in what we’ve got.
Australian news media has strong editorial standards, quality journalism, and some of the most trusted news brands in the world. For marketers, this is a genuinely differentiated environment to build in, at a time when trusted environments are getting harder to find.
The takeaway
AI can generate information, but it can’t replace the human who witnessed the event and can tell you what really happened. As content gets easier to produce and harder to verify, the brands that win won’t be the loudest. They will be the ones that build their reputation in environments where people still trust the story being told.
