AI Could Shatter Trust in Advertising (What’s Left of it)

"In the age of AI, will people trust advertising more or less?"

That was the question posed to the audience at the Advertising Association’s LEAD conference. The results were near unanimous as 85 per cent said they believed the tech would have a negative impact. 

Trust in itself is a wide open topic, but add AI to the mix and it’s complexity goes tenfold. It only takes looking at Elon Musk's X and its controversial Grok AI tool to see why as it produces unwelcome fake imagery that is mistakeably realistic.

Spanning across a period of just two weeks, Grok generated near 3 million sexualised images, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, after the tool allowed users to upload images and digitally remove people's clothing down to underwear or bikinis. This peaked on January 2 with 199,612 requests alone.

Instances like this cloud general judgement on AI when its potential purpose isn’t for malice. Sitting down at LEAD 2026 to discuss the influences AI has on trust and advertising were Alex Dalman, VCCP and faith’s head of social and innovation, Suresh Balaji, Lloyds Banking Group’s CMO, Dr Daniel Hulme, WPP’s chief AI officer, and Sean Betts, OMG UK’s chief AI and innovation officer.

Trust Is The Real AI Battleground

Execs have been quick to claims that AI is a support tool, not a replacement for people - but it’s already reshaping expectations. Although still in its infancy, it's already becoming clear that when brands use AI tools, transparency is needed for the trust to be built, especially as it's adoption widely is inevitable.

“Fast forward a few years, the default assumption amongst everyone is that AI would have been used in the production of an ad,” says Betts. “We have to be responsive about that, and to make sure that as a public-facing industry, we are transparent about the fact that AI is being used - especially if it is the common product as well - and that the content being seen is pure.” 

Much conversation in this tech-driven world surrounds question - "Was the music created by AI?" or "Was the writing by AI?" But just how many consumers have that question at the forefront when making purchase decisions? 

“How much are our customers looking at an ad going, ‘Is it AI or not?’” asks Balaji. “My team is called brand marketing experience. A third of my team, nearly 400 people, are UX/UI designers. I could create shining advertising. I could create the most amazing, award-winning ads at Cannes, but if the experience doesn’t follow through and if it falls flat, that’s where the trust breaks.

“When was the last time you read through the terms and conditions of anything? People land up trading all of the things that they think they don’t trust, or they trust, for convenience," he continues.

Human Creativity Gains Superpowers When Paired With AI

AI isn’t a vessel to destroy humans’ ability to create. It’s an unlock to reach creative heights yet to be discovered. 

For VCCP’s Dalman, the potential of AI is "extremely exciting” - as seen through the agency’s AI creative arm, faith. 

“We set up faith three years ago and we’re still talking about it,” she begins. “We’ve literally scratched the surface of the creative potential of what we could be doing.” 

It’s award-winning work for VMO2 with Daisy - the AI bot that targets scam callers - is an industry-leading example of the potential of AI being tapped into; for Dalman such work shows the potential of how AI can assist humans.

“It’s up to everyone to think about how much we allow automated, branded AI slop to permeate the world. Daisy was created with a lot of care and craft, and that’s what we’ve got to remember when we’re making things. We are putting them out into the world, and that takes a lot of consideration - making something that’s interesting or thought-provoking or respects the audience," adds Dalman.

She continues: "We’ve got lots of brands and branded characters made from CGI - a very lengthy process, very expensive. It kind of priced out a lot of people from using CGI characters before. What’s really great is AI can now help with the CGI process and make more of those characters for those around the world,” she continues. “Being able to keep even precious assets in our advertising will be able to be made in more ways with AI at mass. Really exciting.”

However, Hulme is quick to point out that humans have intent - AI doesn’t. 

“It’s always the intent being scrutinised: ‘Is this the right thing to do?’ Perspective. And we’ve all heard the rhetoric: marketing is there to exploit your unconscious bias to sell you stuff you don’t need. I think we should really challenge this assumption,” says the WPP executive.

Balaji cites Lloyds’ work with WPP to investigate the opportunities for humans with AI: the ‘Marketing Turing Test’; is AI actually going to take over advertising? The findings, he said proved exactly the potential in place. 

“We took a new brief, gave it to an AI plus human team, and then we gave it to just the human team," he explains. "Yes, AI can do research faster, can produce lots of insights faster. All that is fine. But it also found the creativity faster. But what was awesome was the winning combination was the AI-human team.

“The unexpected thing in that was we all think we prompt AI but there was a point where the AI was prompting the human to think differently and go to new places that they didn’t go before.”

Trust Is The New Currency

While AI is being used to amplify capabilities it so far cannot fabricate trust for consumers - that is one role humans may forever be relied on. 

Lloyds Bank’s recent ‘Bank on Lloyds’ brand strategy looks to build trust with its customers of the banking services it provides. The financial services category, according to Balaji, relies on trust.

“In very complex categories, customers do research before they buy: choose, buy, use, deepen. The ‘choose’ phase is very important from a financial services perspective, to maintain the narrative of trust in the end-to-end," he outlines.

“Every CMO I speak with in financial services - they’re putting all their data on the cloud. Everyone has performance marketing to keep them calm. Everyone’s hired the best social media marketer. But in the end, it all goes full circle; trust is quite important in this category. It’s people’s money, it’s people’s financial futures, it’s their families, memories where memories will be made for their family. There’s a lot of emotion connected.

“One of the main narratives I figured out for Lloyds is: yes, there’s a whole story of everything going digital - and we have 20 million customers using our app. We’re the biggest digital banking group. We’re also the most trusted banking group.”

The idea of trust being the future currency means AI has a role to play in learning what its consumers want and what works best. 

“There’s a lot of emphasis at the moment in our industry around personalisation and personalised ads,” outlines Hulme. “Arguably, there’s a constant unconscious human bias called homophily, which is that we tend to like and trust people who look and sound like us. So in some respects, if we optimised ads, you might end up with a world of ‘you selling to you’. 

“But if I asked you what ads you remember the most, they probably weren’t personalised ads - they were ads that connected you to a macro event, again, emotionally. And I think it’s those things that are going to win out over personalisation."

Hulme believes that AI can play a role in creating connections to help understand consumers’ core values, such as sustainability. 

Balaji agrees that if not careful the role of agents will purely be task completion: “So what happens to my brand then? Your personal agent is not going to have any residual memory of black horses, green color, beautiful advertising Bank on Lloyds. It’s just going to operate algorithmically: ‘Best savings account, maybe AAA rated 5.5 per cent.’”

He continues: “The age of AI has also created macro conditions that are contributing to a lack of trust. That is why the role of marketers, big advertising agency networks, and agency partners is to think about how we ensure that trust doesn’t erode in our human way of life."

As AI technology continues to develop and grow across varying pockets of the industry, the subject trust has never been more important and it will inevitably grow as an industry focus once again.