What is trust?

It’s a word we hear fairly often. Generally, we hear about how trust has dissipated or that it has gone entirely and must be brought back to politics, news, democracy, dating – pick your poison.

But what actually is trust? I would argue that trust is having faith that an individual, entity or counterparty that we are considering exchanging something with has only good intentions towards oneself, acting almost altruistically. If I trust, then I trust that they have good and honest intentions and aren’t looking to take advantage or defraud me. And if trust is based on belief in intentions, well belief can be misguided and trust misplaced.

In business we trust suppliers to deliver on time, and we trust clients to pay us as agreed. However, we create contracts between parties to reduce the reliance on trust. If a client or agent doesn’t pay us for work carried out, and there’s clear contract in place, then we would reserve the right to take them to court in order to ensure we get paid. Lack of trust is the reason lawyers have jobs.

At advertising conferences around the world there have been multiple speakers openly saying that trust in the advertising ecosystem is low – “murky at best, fraudulent at worst” – yet within the industry, we have generally had good people at fairly benign companies and clear contracts in place that state all rules of engagement, and are signed by the counterparties. Yet trust is still low.

The buzzword of the past few years has been ‘transparency’ due the total ubiquity of companies with black box business models that the industry has grown up with. The thought is that if all suppliers can only be transparent, then they can be trusted.

Blockchain has become the more recent buzzword for “proving” that transparency, however you may find that if you attempt to force transparency onto a supply chain, you might only get shown what they want you to see, even if that information is recorded on a fancy database forever more.

Transparency, like most things in business, cannot truly be coerced but must spring authentically from an actual desire to be open, and a genuine want to be trusted based on real life actions.

I think there’s two important points to be made here:

1.      Transparency may not be profitable.

2.      Transparency and trust are not synonyms.

Now we can question what is transparency? Really, it’s the ability to see independent verification that any given claim is true and accurate.

As the conduit between publisher and demand, EMX can deliver wide and deep data transparently for buyers – log level data with all the data on auction transactions they could ever need. Buyers who are open with us about what’s important to them, how they want and need to transact, who can guide us around their own tech roadmap and intended clients spends for a given period are able to buy through our pipes with complete and total access to all log level data - it’s a value exchange. 

So because we can provide transparency, does that mean that clients and agencies should simply trust us? Absolutely not. It’s our job to make sure that we are honest with all our partners, by delivering what we say we are going to, and being honest when we can’t.

This is the yardstick to be judged by.

Transparency simply creates the right environment in which trust can grow. Trust, like brands, takes years to develop, 80 milliseconds to destroy, and forever to repair.

If you want to know more what sets EMX apart, drop me, or any of my colleagues a line and ask the tough questions.