I’ve spent over 25 years in this industry, and I’ve staked the last eight of them on a simple bet: a business rooted in responsible practices isn’t at odds with commercial success. It’s hard for me to watch what’s happening right now and stay quiet.
Hims & Hers built its business on patients trusting it with their most private information. It was recently sued by the FTC for allegedly sharing customers’ medical and health care data with advertisers. This isn’t a one-off. We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again if nothing changes. The industry that claims to build trust for brands can’t seem to hold onto its own.
And it’s not just data. Whether the promise is privacy, sustainability, ethical products, responsible AI or just plain honesty, we keep treating trust as a line in a marketing deck instead of an operating principle.
Survival mode is not a strategy
We’re in a chaotic environment right now, and a lot of businesses are struggling. That kind of pressure leads to bad behavior. Companies start trying to monetize in any way they can, whether that’s out of need to survive or just plain greed. Either way, the mindset shifts. It becomes about revenue, about getting through the quarter, instead of about the customer.
Survival mode and trust mode pull in opposite directions. One is reactive. The other requires patience. Right now, too much of our industry is reacting to chaos instead of making decisions based on data.
I’d tell anyone in this industry right now: Take the healthy pause. Look at what the data actually says instead of what the panic is telling you to do. It’s not enough to just protect the trust you’ve already built. The companies that figure out how to actually build more of it, not just defend what they have, are the ones that will pull ahead.
Time to retire the rhetoric
Aside from what we say, it’s also about what we do. Recently, Check My Ads shared how a DSP backed out of giving it a platform seat to audit inventory, even after both sides had signed an agreement. The DSP cited concerns about protecting its “vendor and supply partners” without saying from what. It’s easy to put a watchdog’s logo on your website. It’s a lot harder to actually let them open the hood.
Moments like these keep piling up. An FTC enforcement action here; data mismanagement and user privacy violation for the sake of sales there. A plastic-reduction pledge that disappears from a website with no announcement, right as the weather gets more extreme.
This year’s Cannes Lions was one of the hottest on record, and while there may have been some sustainability focus, it didn’t feel anywhere near the level of discussion that’s been had in the past.
That’s the pattern I keep coming back to. The problems didn’t go away. It’s that talking about them became inconvenient, so the industry just stopped. Silence has a cost, too; we just don’t put it on the balance sheet.
Trust and performance were never a trade-off
We don’t have to choose between doing right and getting results. I’d argue the two are more connected than most marketers want to admit.
Even companies that get it wrong can recover when they respond in line with their values. After the foodborne illness outbreaks that hit Chipotle in 2015, the company invested heavily in food safety and transparency while recommitting to its “Food with Integrity” positioning. Rebuilding trust became part of its business strategy. Today, analysts often point to its customer loyalty as a competitive advantage.
Privacy might be the clearest example of a trade-off that was never really there. Our industry has become obsessed with knowing the customer down to the individual, convinced that’s the only path to performance. But privacy and performance were never actually in conflict, any more than trust and results are.
We built an entire industry on the ability to influence people. It’s worth asking why we so rarely point that same skill at making things better for the people we’re influencing.
We need to build trust every day, not when a crisis hits or because it’s trendy to talk about. Then we’ll still have someone left to influence.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Visit Givsly’s website and follow AdExchanger on LinkedIn.
For more articles featuring Chad Hickey, click here.
