By Matt Bourn on the 29 September 2026
A huge thank you to Koenraad and the team at CIM Belgium for inviting me to speak at their State of the Union event in Brussels earlier this week.
It was a brilliant event from start to finish. The venue was stunning – an art deco museum right in the heart of Brussels – and the event featured smart keynotes, lively one-minute pitch debates with live audience voting, a DJ dropping walk-up tracks, and cartoonist Pierre Kroll producing brilliant satirical sketches (I managed to snap a quick photo of mine!). They’d even arranged branded Polestar EVs to ferry delegates around.
Speakers moved between Flemish, Dutch, French, German, and English – often in the same session! My own language skills aren’t quite up to that level, but thanks to Petra from ACC Belgium, I kept track through translations. A few key themes were crystal clear across every language: AI, LLMs, local media, and trust.
My keynote had a simple message: Trust is central to advertising success, now and future…
We aren’t launching campaigns into a vacuum. Research (from the likes of Credos, Edelman, Kantar, Ipsos and more) continually shows that today’s audiences are sceptical, less trusting of the institutions we once invested a great deal of trust in, and, when it comes to online, guarded and wary of frauds and scams. But the good news is that the public looks to business to be a reliable force – one of the few major institutions seen as both competent and ethical today. There’s a massive opportunity for advertising to build on that, but only if we treat trust as a genuine commercial driver, not just a nice-to-have.
And the numbers back this up… IPA effectiveness data shows that campaigns designed to build trust consistently outperform those that don’t. They deliver better profit margins, grow market share, and protect brand value when times get tough. And what’s the single biggest thing that makes people trust an ad? Enjoyment. Great storytelling, humour, and genuine craft make people feel good about our work. Without these, the work is less effective and delivers lower ROI as a result.
Which brings me to the way our industry works. I’ve long believed the most important customer is the public and often wish we were as obsessed with customer service as marketers are for their individual brands. We have to protect our audiences. That means supporting self-regulation (like the ASA’s work in the UK), setting proper frequency caps, and choosing trusted media environments that signal real credibility to brands.
Getting all of this right is particularly important, given how generative AI is reshaping our day-to-day work. AI can help us process data and speed up workflows, but it doesn’t have human intent, empathy, or ethics. That’s why we created our Best Practice Guide for Responsible Generative AI at the Advertising Association, focusing on core
principles like transparency, human oversight, and data fairness. This new tech can go one of two ways – powering the next Industrial Revolution or bringing about the next Renaissance. I know which one’s more exciting and offers more promise to everyone who works in advertising.
The debates in Brussels also struck a chord with a topic very much on my mind as I prepare for a debate at Westminster later this month. There was much discussion about advertisers’ role in funding (or not) Belgian’s local media. I’ll keep their views under wraps for now and look forward to sharing them in the debate… It was a clear reminder that we’re all tackling the same big questions, no matter where we might be working.
That said, everybody can win when we focus on protecting and building trust in advertising – making great work, respecting people’s attention, and using new technology responsibly. The result is a profitable industry that people enjoy, respect, and value.
