In a piece for Campaign, Newsworks director of communications Rupert Smith highlights advertisers’ vital role in supporting trusted news brands to combat rising misinformation.
With senior marketers raising the alarm about the prospect of ever more misinformation being allowed to propagate online, Smith encourages them to take seriously the pursuit of facts and the truth: “Unchecked, fake news spreads far too quickly across the industry. And often with the most serious of consequences, and none of them good.”
He points to statistics from Newsworks’ ‘Trust’ and ‘Fact not fake’ research that demonstrate the importance Brits place on news brands in verifying stories they see on social media. Quoting ‘Fact not fake’, he writes: “74% of people said they turn to newspaper websites or apps to verify stories they read on social media.”
He then highlights Peter Field’s IPA Databank findings in ‘Trust’, which reveal that advertisers including news brands in their campaigns saw an 88% uplift in profit versus those that did not between 2018 and 2022.
Smith adds: “Interestingly, that growth has been stronger since 2016, around the time that trust issues began to explode — think Trump, Brexit and Cambridge Analytica, and the emergence of the fake news era.”
