Ask 10 marketers what their biggest challenge is these days, and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. AI. Fragmented media. Declining organic reach. Privacy. Rising customer acquisition costs. Measurement. Content overload. Proving ROI. They’re all valid. But I believe they’re symptoms of a larger issue. The biggest challenge facing marketers today is earning enough trust to get people to pay attention—let alone prove that attention led to a business result. That’s what’s truly disrupting marketing.
We have more marketing technology—and less certainty
Consider the irony. Modern marketers have never had more data. Never had more technology. Never had more ways to reach and interact with their customers. We can micro-target our audiences. Personalize messages. Automate campaigns. Create hundreds of creative variations. Optimize our media buys in near real-time. But for all of our technology and data, we’re still struggling to answer what CEOs and CFO’s care about most: How did all of that marketing activity help the business?
HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing Report found that 33% of the 1,505 marketers surveyed worldwide said measuring marketing ROI is their organization’s biggest challenge. That surpassed keeping up with industry trends (29.8%) and generating quality leads (29.6%).
According to a Nielsen study, another group of marketers struggles to quantify marketing success because they lack stakeholder alignment around key metrics. In its 20th Annual Global Marketing Report, 22% of marketers said stakeholder alignment around key metrics was their biggest challenge when measuring ROI.
Another 19% of respondents cited unclear KPI’s and too much data. Wow. The marketing industry has poured billions of dollars into developing an advanced measurement ecosystem, and many marketers still can’t agree on what to measure. The challenge isn’t a lack of data.
It’s a shortage of clarity.
But there’s an even bigger problem: consumers don’t automatically believe us anymore
For many years, advertising worked like this: If you reach enough people enough times with the right message, some percentage will eventually convert and buy. That formula is crumbling. Reach is no longer creating credibility.
According to Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer, which surveyed close to 34,000 consumers in 28 countries, 70% of respondents said they are wary of or unwilling to trust people who have different values, get their information from different sources, have different ways of solving problems, or who simply have a different cultural background.
This isn’t just a cultural problem. It’s a marketing challenge. Audiences are flocking to smaller tribes of information they trust. Family. Friends. Celebrities. Experts. People who think as they do. Brands have to earn their place in those tribes. They won’t get automatic entry just because they bought a 30-second spot or served a programmatic ad.
The old equation was reach + frequency. The new equation is trust + relevance.
Edelman’s 20Bet on Purpose survey found that brands are expected to create connection and relevance, or risk losing customers. Its 20Beyond Branding study found that people don’t see brands as something they purchase, but as crucial elements of their identity. Perhaps most enlightening is its Brand Growth in an Insular World research.
It polled 17,688 consumers across 15 markets and found that belonging has become top of mind for consumers when it comes to brands. Over half of respondents said they feel connected to others who use the same brands—up eight points in just five years. And this nugget should be the cornerstone of every brand marketer’s next presentation: Only 36% of consumers say they will stick with a brand that doesn’t inspire trust or relevance as the brand broadens to include people who are different from them. Trust or relevance increased that number to 48% and 53%, respectively.
But move both trust and relevance into the column, and you’ll see your potential customer reach soar to 71%. Marketers: brands need to grow by being seen AND believed IN.
AI is making the problem worse—and better
AI is typically framed as the productivity panacea of marketing. And it is. In a matter of hours, a marketing team can produce what used to take days or weeks: Twenty headlines. Fifty social posts. Hundreds of personalized emails. Dozens of banner variants. Video scripts. Product descriptions. Images. Research summaries.
The marginal cost of creating marketing content is dropping toward zero. But that leads to a counterintuitive conclusion: When content is almost free to produce, marketing content itself will become less valuable. If every brand can produce a flood of marketing at scale, we’ll all simply be overwhelmed by mediocre marketing.
The competitive advantage goes from who can create the most content to whose content people actually believe. That makes your reputation, expertise, unique brand assets, customer experience, and third-party voices more important — not less. Edelman’s trust research supports this. Of consumers with insular trust patterns (those who trust a smaller, more tightly connected group), unpaid voices are considered to have the biggest impact on their willingness to trust a brand by 46%.
Friends and family make up 82% of trusted voices, and “someone like me” is trusted by 76%. Unpaid voices could be five times as powerful as paid brand messaging for these influencers. Here’s the paradox: AI will make it easier than ever before to enable your brand to say something. But it will make it harder than ever before for your brand to be heard.
And AI is changing discovery itself
Think of another funnel getting disrupted? Search-first didn’t just describe online user journeys. It was the digital funnel. Consumer has a question. Consumer googles it. Consumer sees links and ads. Consumer visits websites. Marketer measures traffic and conversions. Add AI to the mix. Generative AI inserts another layer between the consumer and the brand.
Consumers are increasingly asking an AI system to research, compare, summarize, and eventually recommend. That means the battle for customers isn’t just for Google’s first page anymore. Brands are increasingly fighting to be considered by AI assistants as part of the answer. Once mentioned, AI tools will likely consider those brands as candidates in the recommendation process. Edelman’s recent 2025 brand research found that of the 55% of respondents using generative AI platforms today, 91% used them in some way for shopping-related activities.
That includes activities like researching brands, comparing products, and summarizing reviews. Marketers should focus less on SEO and more on building enough authority, credibility, and relevance across the information ecosystem to be mentioned by AI systems.
Meanwhile, marketers keep buying more media
None of this means advertising is going away. Far from it. Earlier this month, IAB increased its U.S. advertising spending growth forecast to 12.3% for 2026. Businesses are spending more money than ever. They’re investing in more technology. They’re creating more content. They’re gathering more data. They’re implementing more AI. But throwing money at the problem doesn’t fix the underlying dilemma: Why should a person trust you? That is the question that marketers should be freaking out about.
Marketing needs to rediscover what marketing is supposed to do
Digital marketing has asked brands to equate activity with success. Impressions became success. Clicks became success. Engagement became success. Followers became success. Traffic became success. Heck, even “conversions” became success, regardless of whether they produced incremental revenue or profitable customers. The result is dashboards full of numbers that make about any campaign look successful.
The next generation of marketing organizations will need a much tougher metric to judge success. Ultimately, every major marketing investment should answer three questions: Did we change what people think or believe about the brand? Did that change in turn influence behavior? Did that behavior create incremental economic value? If marketers can’t connect those dots, another million impressions will not fix the problem.
The brands that win will stop trying to shout louder
The knee-jerk reaction to fractured attention is “produce more messages” and “purchase more reach.” I believe the right reaction is almost the opposite. When there is a glut of AI-written blogs, videos, podcasts, advertising, and everyone screaming, “Hey, look at me!”, scarcity is no longer about information. Scarcity is about trust. Reputation becomes the commodity. Customer experience = marketing. Employees = marketing. Subject-matter experts = marketing. Creators = marketing. Testimonials = marketing. Community = marketing.
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