Trust: shaken, but heard in the latest PWC media outlook
In a year of unexpected shake-ups, break-ups and make-ups, PwC's Entertainment & Media Outlook 2018-2022 brought some home truths into the room: trust will define the market for the next four years.
Halfway through and 2018 has already swerved out of its lane. Revelations from the Royal Commission into banking have shattered consumer confidence, the unsteady wake of Brexit has left the UK bruised and a surprise meeting between the US President and the North Korean Supreme Leader has built tentative talks of nuclear disarmament between the two long-term enemies.
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From the chaos, it’s difficult to predict what might happen next, admits Megan Brownlow, telecommunications, media & technology (TMT) national industry leader at PwC Australia. “It’s getting harder to forecast your futures,” she says, “and it’s not that we all change in a flash, it’s just that there are more black swans now.”
But in this flock of black swans is the core belief trust built as an asset will provide brands with opportunities to grow from disorder over the next few years.
“When we looked at the research across three different consumer environments – physical, digital and mobile – it was very clear that trust or the absence of trust drives consumer behaviour,” says Brownlow. In physical retail, consumers shopped at brands they trusted. In the online realm, survey respondents said they reduced online risk by only using credible sites and payment providers they trusted. And in the mobile segment, 86% of users indicated they would act punitively – “deleting your app, warning family and friends, leaving a negative review” – if they had trust concerns.
The message is clear: whether or not consumers trust your brand will determine whether or not you’re likely to succeed in the coming years.
Brownlow says it’s important to note that trust is a mix of different traits and that consumers weigh each of them differently. The four pillars of this framework are Advocacy, Consistency, Transparency and Success.
Advocacy: Are you acting in my best interests?
Consistency: Have you proved credible before? “This is a great benefit for incumbent businesses, traditional media, because you have legacy and history where you’ve proved credible before,” Brownlow mentions.
Transparency: Do I really understand what you’re doing?
Success: “This is a capability question, where they assess you based on whether or not they think you have what it takes to achieve their goals,” she explains.
The higher you score on each of the questions, the stronger your trust assets. Trust, however, is complex. Weakness in one pillar can be traded off for strength in another, Brownlow notes. An example of that in action is the financial Royal Commission. The revelations have not resulted in an exodus of consumers changing their banks, even though customers are unhappy with the industry’s untrustworthy behaviour. “If people are sticking, it’s because those organisations have rated higher on other pillars. They’ve proved credible before. Or it’s believed they have capability, they meet the goals of the consumer.”
Brownlow notes, however, that the financial institutions cannot rely on stores in these other pillars for long. “You’d want to be focusing on how you rebuild your stores of trust, particularly on the transparency pillar.”
Another key point is that trust changes over time, so brands need to keep checking in with consumers, especially in long-term relationships. This is happening in the superannuation space where the question of ‘Are you acting in my best interests?’ is answered differently by generation. Ethical investment in businesses who are thinking about longer-term social cohesion and the environment drives millennials’ trust, but, for Baby Boomers, ethical investment is not important at all.
This focus on trust means the media landscape is set to change. The print industry, still under pressure, is starting to diversify and having a strong brand is a good asset for the ‘consistency’ pillar, as Vogue recently discovered. “Not only is it an incredibly strong brand, but it’s also diversifying, and the activities it’s doing are bringing in new revenue streams as the core business comes under pressure,” Brownlow describes.
It’s the same with radio, she notes, where a traditional sector has leveraged its trust asset and combined it with new technology to find growth. Podcasting has seen extraordinary uptake, both in listener numbers and in agency bookings. Interestingly, when Southern Cross Austereo partnered with big US platform PodcastOne to offer some of the top US podcasts, it saw an adherence to local content. “The majority of content that consumers are listening to is Australian in the podcast environment,” Brownlow reports. “That’s a great thing for marketers because it’s easier to integrate our messages.”
Consistency is also a key factor in TV, where sport continues to deliver for channels and popular show revivals are set to trend. New Network Ten owners CBS “has five reboots on their schedule this season,” says Brownlow, including Murphy Brown and Magnum PI. “It solves a marketing problem because you don’t need to establish these brands in people’s minds.”
On the other hand, ‘transparency’ will be the next big phase in music, Brownlow forecasts. When iTunes debuted 17 years ago, music shed the sleeve, the artful vinyl, cassette, or CD insert that also contained vital information about the people who worked on the album. Restoring transparency is the mission of Jacqui Louez Schoorl, who has worked for five years to collate metadata for the music industry in the style of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Her startup, Jaxsta, is set to provide a trusted data stream to new digital providers, from music streaming services that want to improve their playlist algorithms, to digital assistants who field questions about music more than any others. It will also be a vital resource for creatives who will receive verified credit for the music they’ve worked on, enabling careers that are more often than not freelance. “She’s solving new and old problems by solving the transparency problem,” says Brownlow.
Jaxsta’s Jacqui Louez Schoorl
Of course, the big spending will happen in the online space, set to take 63% of the entire ad market by 2022. That’s due to the ‘success’ pillar, notes Brownlow, as digital has been very effective. The growth opportunities, however, are in quality inventory.
“What if only quality inventory was bought? Scarcity would be reintroduced to the market and those publishers with fewer, better ads would actually see a rise in their rates – but it requires everybody to be aligned, and a recognition that trusted quality inventory is worth more and you should pay more for it,” she says.
Supporting the online channel, and other media channels will be the growth of 5G. “It’s going to supercharge entertainment and media, agribusiness, health, education, everything,” says Brownlow. “It’ll be a great driver of productivity if we get it right, and it’s going to underpin the 43 billion ‘internet of things’-connected devices by the end of 2022.”
This expensive investment will prompt diversification for telcos, she predicts. They’ll “look to build services and applications that sit on top of the pipes”.
The thing about leveraging trust to drive growth is that organisations currently fail to view it as an asset. It needs to be nurtured, Brownlow recommends. “It takes a long time to build really healthy trust drivers. Boards are used to thinking about risk and trust, so you will get a good reception if you can get it up that high. But it is useful to have trust be seen as an asset that everyone owns across the organisation. Take the long view. And when you’re celebrating your wins, acknowledge trust’s role in the win.”
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