The Post-Truth Business summary

Introduction

The Post-Truth Business by Sean Pillot de Chenecey In a world of distrust, brands must rebuild authenticity to connect with consumers. What happens to advertising when consumers stop trusting the media, institutions, and brands that once shaped their choices? Advertising has transformed dramatically since its mid-20th century heyday. Back then, advertising professionals focused on bright ideas.

Once they had their concept, the rest was straightforward. They made their ad and ran it on television or in print. That worked because people had limited media options. An ad in a major newspaper or on a top television station could reach millions.

More importantly, people trusted these media outlets. They also trusted the brands those outlets publicized. But that has all changed. Today's consumers are harder to reach.

They have a vast array of media channels to choose from. They are also deeply distrustful of institutions that were once respected. This is bad news for advertisers who rank low in trustworthiness surveys. So how are brands responding to this widespread skepticism?

The Post-Truth Business by Sean Pillot de Chenecey explores this new advertising landscape. It shows how leading marketers are rebuilding brand credibility through authentic connections.

trust collapses in the post truth era

Trust Collapses in the Post-Truth Era. Stable societies require people to accept shared truths. That is why people must be able to trust the media. If people do not believe facts are true, they will not compromise.

But this system of generating commonly accepted truths has broken down. Call it the post-truth era. This is shorthand for today's chaotic media environment. Here, truths are manipulated and misinformation has become a growth business.

So what went wrong? How did we end up here? The term post-truth dates back to an essay from the early 1990s. Playwright Steve Tesich wrote it in response to a revelation about the US government.

It had been selling arms to Iran to fund an anti-government guerrilla group in Nicaragua. The group was known as the Contras. President Ronald Reagan had strenuously denied this. Remarkably, Reagan supporters continued defending him after the truth emerged.

Why did they continue to defend him? Emotions had trumped facts. Reagan stated that his heart told him the accusations were false. For many Americans, that was good enough.

Others lost all faith in government. It was an early sign that citizens no longer agreed on basic truths. As people searched for alternative facts, trust in mainstream media plummeted. According to Gallup survey data, 72% of Americans trusted the media in 1976.

By 2016, that number had fallen to just 32%. The arrival of the internet amplified this trend. A 2018 Brookings Institution report shows that so-called truth decay now affects countries worldwide. These countries include the US, Germany, Turkey, and India.

Members of the same societies increasingly believe opposing accounts of reality. Social media plays a major role. Posts are easy and cheap to produce. They are rarely, if ever, fact-checked.

The result has been a torrent of fake accounts pushing partisan propaganda disguised as news. We have come to know this as fake news. In 2018 alone, Facebook disabled 520 million fake accounts. That happened in just three months.

Add these factors together and you have extremely fragile societies. But this is not just a political story. It also affects economic life. Distrust has eroded consumers' relationships with brands.

Companies are struggling to reach their target audiences. Brands have not escaped the wider collapse in trust. In 2017, Havas Group surveyed 300,000 consumers across 20 countries. A majority believed 60% of company content was poor or irrelevant.

Advertisers themselves do not fare much better. According to the Ipsos Mori Veracity Index, nurses and doctors are among the most trusted professions. At the other end of the scale are representatives of the advertising industry. So if people distrust mainstream media, governments, and brands, who do they trust?

Pretty much just their friends and family. This marks a major change from the past. Trust once flowed horizontally toward peers and vertically toward institutions. Today, people's trust increasingly flows sideways.

A 2014 Nielsen report backs this up. It found that 83% of consumers across 60 countries trusted friends and family over advertising. McKinsey estimates that a full 50% of consumption is driven by word-of-mouth recommendations. That is a massive problem for brands.

Many industry experts say the skip ad button has become a metaphor for our relationship with advertising. Mark Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, highlights the scale of the problem. People spend just 1. 7 seconds watching an average digital ad.

Only 20% of ads are viewed for more than two seconds. Today, consumers regard ads as a bothersome distraction at best. At worst, they can feel like a hostile act of information warfare. No wonder the marketing sector struggles to generate strong growth.

It invests around $800 billion every year. So here is the crucial question for brands. How are they supposed to reach their target audiences? More companies are abandoning the old-fashioned approach of exaggerating potential product benefits.

That worked when consumers trusted brands and institutions. These days, people cannot be taken for granted. Brands have to work at creating meaningful connections. How can they create those connections?

Consider the Singaporean government. It builds emotional connections with citizens through social media channels like TikTok and Facebook. It shares content that is useful to the average Singaporean. This includes humorous infomercials about local services and warnings about common scams.

The point is simple. Trust is no longer automatic. It has to be earned.