Every brand wants attention, but many fail to carefully consider whether the audience believes what they’re saying once they’ve gained that attention. The gap between being seen and being believed is where media trust lives and it’s one of the most commercially important ideas in marketing. Brand trust is now the second most important brand attribute linked to profit growth, beaten only by perceived quality, and that link has strengthened markedly over the past two decades.
This is particularly good news for three particular types of advertising: television, audio and out-of-home (OOH). Together they form something the MEERKAT team calls ‘the trust triangle’: three long-established, heavily regulated, hard-to-fake media environments that consumers consistently rate among the most credible places to encounter a brand. For new entrants, challenger brands, and anyone launching something the market hasn’t seen before, that credibility is worth more than reach alone.
What we mean by media trust
Media trust isn’t the same as brand safety, though the two are related. Brand safety is about whether your ad ends up next to something embarrassing or something at odds with your brand. Media trust is broader: it’s the degree to which an audience believes what a medium tells them and, by extension, how much credibility ‘rubs off’ on that medium’s advertising. A consumer who trusts the environment they’re in is more receptive, more attentive and more likely to act on what they see. This is important because advertising doesn’t work in a vacuum. The same advert, shown in two different contexts, can land completely differently. Thinkbox research found that ads shown within professionally produced content were rated 44 per cent more trustworthy and 39 per cent more entertaining than the same kind of ad shown in user-generated or unregulated environments. The environment shapes the message before a single word of copy is read.
Trust isn’t spread evenly across media
Ask consumers which advertising they trust most and the answer is very consistent. YouGov research cited by Thinkbox found that trust in advertising is consistently higher for TV, cinema, radio and out-of-home than for digital alternatives, with social media ads and video streaming services ranking among the least trusted of all. Ofcom’s 2025 News Consumption survey tells a similar story: regular users rate television as highly trustworthy at 82 per cent and radio at 78 per cent, while social media sits at well under half that figure, even among its own regular users. Thinkbox’s research, drawing on Ipsos data, puts television as the UK’s single most trusted advertising channel at 35 per cent, against just six per cent for social media and four per cent for YouTube. And the trajectory is moving in the right direction: the 2025 Credos Trust Tracker found that trust in TV advertising grew faster than any other medium between 2021 and 2025, reaching 46 per cent – comfortably ahead of online ads at 31 per cent, social at 27 per cent and influencer content at 25 per cent.
It’s worth noting that the trust advantage of TV is specific to Ofcom-licensed broadcast channels: ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky and their peers. Every ad that airs on those channels must be pre-cleared by Clearcast, the industry’s independent clearance body, before a single second reaches the screen. In 2025 alone, Clearcast reviewed over 26,000 scripts and 103,000 filmed ads against the stringent BCAP Code. Streaming platforms – Amazon Prime Video, Rakuten and others – don’t go through the same process. They fall under the CAP Code rather than the BCAP Code, with no mandatory pre-clearance requirement.
The regulation behind every trusted ad break
A big part of why TV, radio and OOH earn so much consumer confidence comes down to something quite unglamorous: regulation. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), working through the Committee of Advertising Practice Code (CAP) and UK Code of Broadcast Advertising (BCAP Code) alongside Ofcom, has overseen UK advertising standards for decades and broadcast ads in particular go through pre-clearance before they ever reach an audience. This means that every TV and radio ad is checked against the rules before transmission. This fact, more than any clever creative device, does more for everyday advertising credibility than most marketing teams manage on their own. This regulatory backbone is also why traditional media advertising tends to avoid the scandals that have periodically dogged parts of the digital ecosystem: ad fraud, inappropriate placement, opaque algorithm targeting. Consumers may not consciously think about the CAP Code when they see a billboard, but they behave as though they trust it.
Meet the trust triangle: TV, audio and out-of-home
Put television, audio and OOH together and you get three different routes to the same outcome: borrowed credibility. Each works slightly differently, but all three lean on regulation, scale and an inability to be scrolled past.
Television: advertising’s original power move
Television’s trust advantage isn’t accidental; there’s a well-documented psychological effect at play: audiences intuitively read heavy investment in visible, shared media as a signal that a brand is serious and here to stay. Research from Thinkbox has found a direct relationship between how expensive people perceive a channel to be and how trustworthy and high-quality they rate the brands advertising on it. Even though TV remains exceptional value for the audience it delivers, the perception of cost works in advertisers’ favour. This is why so many online-only and direct-to-consumer brands eventually make the leap TV: it’s now one of the medium’s biggest advertiser categories, because nothing else confers credibility quite as quickly. It’s one of the clearest examples of TV advertising effectiveness running deeper than simple reach and frequency.
Radio: the medium people let into their lives
Radio’s trust comes from a place of intimacy. People invite radio into their kitchens, cars and headphones, often alongside presenters they’ve listened to for years and that familiarity transfers to the advertising. Research found that adding AM/FM radio to a media plan lifts brand trust by 58 per cent, alongside a 28 per cent uplift in market share and a 23 per cent improvement in return on marketing spend – evidence that radio advertising effectiveness runs well beyond reach. Radiocentre, the industry body for commercial radio in the UK, commissioned research that put radio’s average advertising return at £7.70 for every £1 spent. It’s no coincidence that challenger banks such as Monzo and Starling used radio heavily alongside established players when growing their businesses. In a category built on trust, the medium does some of the credibility-building before a single word of script is read.
Podcasts: growing fast, building trust
Podcasts share some of radio’s ‘intimacy’ – with hosts that listeners invite into their week, often for hours at a time and ad reads that land in a familiar voice. UK podcast ad spend reached £90 million in 2024, up eight per cent year on year, and podcasts were the main driver of growth across digital audio overall. Regulation plays a part here too; podcast ads fall under the ASA’s CAP Code. The ASA has published specific guidance on disclosing host-read ads, but the format doesn’t go through the same pre-clearance process as broadcast radio before it airs. For brands, this makes podcasts a genuinely strong channel for reaching loyal, engaged niche audiences, if not yet quite the same credibility shortcut that linear radio offers.
Out-of-home: the ad you can’t scroll past
There’s something refreshingly honest about out-of-home advertising – it can’t be skipped, blocked or closed. Outsmart shows the channel reaches 98 per cent of the UK population every week and UK OOH revenue hit a record £1.4 billion in 2024, up 7.7 per cent year on year, with the first quarter of 2026 up a further 15 per cent. It’s a vivid illustration of why OOH advertising earns so much consumer confidence as it exists in shared public space rather than a personalised, algorithm-curated feed. For a challenger brand trying to convince a sceptical market, a presence on the high street does something a banner ad can’t: it shows you exist at scale.
Trust pays off fastest for challenger brands
Every brand needs trust, but it matters disproportionately for businesses without an established reputation to fall back on. New entrants, challenger brands and anyone launching a new product are essentially asking consumers to take a leap of faith. Borrowing credibility from a trusted medium is one of the fastest ways to shorten that leap. This is why brand trust has become such a strong predictor of profit growth. It’s also why it’s risen on the priority list for advertisers precisely as concerns over misinformation and platform safety have grown elsewhere. A challenger brand that shows up confidently on TV, radio and OOH is borrowing decades of audience confidence in those media and then asking its own brand to live up to it.
The best campaigns combine trust with targeting
None of this is an argument for abandoning digital and we’d never suggest it. The strongest media strategies treat trusted advertising channels and digital activation as complementary, not competing. Thinkbox’s Staying Power research found that television campaigns don’t just hold their own value over time, they actively boost the effectiveness of other channels in the same plan by an average of 26 per cent and slow the decay of purchase intent across the whole campaign. OOH is similar – improvements in digital OOH targeting and measurement mean the channel is becoming more accountable without losing the public, unmissable presence that built its trust in the first place. At MEERKATworks we often see trusted channels as laying the foundation, while digital activation builds effectively on top.
Building a media strategy that earns its keep
Attention is easy to rent, but trust must be earned, and it pays dividends long after a campaign has finished running. For brands trying to build credibility quickly, whether that’s a start-up entering a crowded category, a challenger taking on the established players or a business launching something genuinely new, television, audio and OOH offer something that ‘newer’ media are still working to replicate. That doesn’t mean ignoring digital; it means being deliberate about which channels are doing the trust-building and which are doing the targeting, then planning a strategy that uses both well.
If you’re thinking through where trust fits into your next campaign or just want a second opinion on your media plan, the MEERKATworks team is always happy to talk it through. Get in touch and we’ll help you build a media strategy that combines trusted reach with results you can measure.