The attention economy has been flipped on its head. Creating highly polished, precisely targeted ad campaigns was once an expensive endeavor, requiring teams, time, and budget. But suddenly, artificial intelligence has flooded the channels with cheap content that’s mass-produced and poorly valued.

Trust is now almost as important as awareness, said Renaye Edwards, the global chief operating officer and managing director at the ad firm Ammunition, and it’s relevant earlier in the buying cycle. 

Consumers have grown skeptical of brands that make grand promises, whether about product value, environmental responsibility, authenticity, or workplace culture. Companies that published road maps toward five- and 10-year goals about corporate values tended to invite scrutiny, opening themselves to accusations of “greenwashing,” “diversity washing,” or “pinkwashing”—labels for the gap between what a company says and what it actually does.

Consumers in 2026 are savvier and maybe a little more cynical. Tired of handing their attention to disingenuous companies, they’re looking for brands they can trust, but proving credibility is harder than it’s ever been.

‘Today, Customers Own the Conversation’

In the trust economy, marketing no longer covers for a brand’s operational or ethical failures. “If your brand is promising something it fundamentally can’t deliver, then you have a much more systemic problem,” said Robin Harrison, CMO of customer-experience technology company Concentrix. 

Some brands make loftier promises than others, simply by the nature of the business: While a budget airline may be able to get away with an AI-powered chatbot, a home security company would not. “When you’ve got a brand that is premium or it’s high-value or it’s quirky, letting AI do the work for you feels like the wrong thing.”

Achieving authenticity is a matter of hewing closely to brand values, according to Angela Johnson, the CMO of Edible Brands, the parent company of Edible Arrangements, known for its fruit bouquets. “Edible has its ‘wow’ factor to protect,” she said. “We have a $75 check average, and it comes in beautiful wrapped branding, red packaging. It’s handcrafted, it’s very personal, and it’s hand-delivered.”

While Edible is active on social media and often comments on cultural moments like the World Cup and Love Island, it passed on the 2025 Labubu craze, which didn’t feel elevated enough for the brand, as well as this year’s tongue-in-cheek “bad news for my wallet” meme in which content creators confess their indulgent spending habits. High quality doesn’t mean high-polish, though, and given the personal nature of gift giving, Edible has found better success working with content creators that deliver candid, unpolished exposure. As it builds awareness among Gen Z consumers, the brand has increased its influencer marketing budget by 27% since the initial investment in 2024, while at the same time pulling budget from linear-TV ad buys.

“Years ago, companies owned the message. Today, the customers own the conversation,” said Diana Sanicki, head of marketing in North America for construction technology and materials firm Doka, during a From Day One panel discussion in July on authenticity in marketing.

Consumers are quick to scold companies that show up uninvited. Just a few years ago, social media users might get a kick out of a witty comment from Oreo’s official Instagram account on another brand’s post. But tolerance for this attention-seeking behavior is now incredibly low. Comments from brands are often met with a string of replies from annoyed users.

If the public no longer really believes the stories that brands tell about themselves, trust can be borrowed from the people consumers already know, like creators and peers. Of course, “the risk of working with content creators and user-generated content is that it requires some surrender of control,” said Sandra Moerch at 3D-software company Autodesk, during the July panel discussion. But when it works, the trust is more likely to last.

Highly digital consumers are hungry for the real world and its flaws. Edwards, of the ad firm Ammunition, said that her recent appearance on an uber-polished video podcast didn’t garner nearly as much engagement as an off-the-cuff, low-fi video she made with her front-facing camera. “It feels like we’re almost regressing back to the unpolished version of everything,” she said. “The two are night and day in terms of the way that they perform.” Now that AI makes it possible for a brand to do anything, “everybody’s questioning whether something’s real or not.”

Where Trust Is Lost

If authentic companies don’t deliver what they stand for, then trust erodes in the gap between the two. AI is proving most valuable in operational infrastructure, not as a substitute for original content or brand identity. In many cases, AI shouldn’t be customer-visible at all, says Harrison of Concentrix. “Remember that AI can make operations more efficient and more effective by sitting in the background.”

Companies using AI to generate content or marketing insights are just on their way to irrelevance, he says. If everyone is getting their ideas from the same place, then everyone will begin to look and sound the same.

As campaigns, products, and even companies become easier to replicate, “the only thing that then differentiates you is your brand and the people you’ve got within the business,” said Edwards. Consumers are easily fatigued, and they’re quick to spot copycats. Once a trend catches on—whether as a meme, a product, or a claim—“people are like, ‘it’s kind of everywhere, so it’s like anything, isn’t it?” she said.

In an environment where brands are looking more and more alike, the ones that deliver on their brand promises will stand out. The problem is that when money’s tight, companies often spin up quick campaigns and neglect the hard work of brand-building, which may need a rebrand itself, said Edwards. 

Given the choice between “brand marketing” and “performance marketing,” which would an executive choose? The temptation is to go for the latter. But Edwards believes the focus on performance is short-sighted, especially when content is abundant but credibility is scarce. “These short-term kind campaigns feel like a means to an end,” she said. “A race to the bottom.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.

(Photo by atakan/iStock)