If you want to earn an audience's custom, you have to earn its trust. Every brand knows that.

But what exactly is trust, and how does the environment in which a message is delivered shape it?

To find out, Newsworks, an organisation representing national news publishers, commissioned effectiveness expert Peter Field to analyse the IPA Databank, a source of ad campaign intelligence. The results are worth reading.

The link between consumer trust and business profit is growing...

But, for many research professionals, the current method of defining brand trust - simply asking consumers whether they trust a brand - is too simplistic.

So Newsworks, together with Map the Territory and Tapestry, has developed a new trust metric, arrived at by measuring four individual "pillars"...

Using this new, more detailed measurement, according to Newsworks: "The results showed trust is 1.5x higher when a brand advertises on a news brand website compared to a
non-news brand website."

We think there's a clear reason for that. In what is described as an era of "trust crisis" that includes social media misinformation, news brands continue to be amongst the most trusted sources for news content...

That fact leads to a positive halo for brands, according to the analysis. Brands that advertise in trusted news media see stronger growth in profit and market share than those that do not.

And there is a valuable multiplier, too. Marketers that took advantage of the multiple channels offered by news brands found even greater growth...

As research author Peter Field says: "Trust and quality perceptions are interconnected as vital brand metrics, and their importance to advertisers has doubled over the last 20 years.

"This study shows the case for advertising in news brands, which has always been strong, continues to strengthen at a remarkable rate."