This article first appeared in Campaign.
As reports show that Brits are becoming more selective about where they spend their time online, brands are looking for environments that offer credibility, context and quality attention. Step forward, trusted editorial.
Something is shifting in how consumers relate to social media. Audiences are becoming more selective about where they spend their attention, more sceptical about the content they encounter and, in many cases, actively seeking out something better: content they can trust from sources they respect.
According to Ofcom’s 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report, the proportion of adult social media users who actively post, share, or comment has dropped from 61% to 49% in a year. Fewer adults believe the benefits of being online outweigh the risks (down from 72% to 59%) and only 36% now say social media platforms are good for their mental health, compared with 42% the year before.
Meanwhile, Deloitte’s Digital Consumer Trends survey found that one in five UK consumers deleted a social media app in the past 12 months, rising to almost one in three among Gen Z, the very generation raised on it.
For brands, this raises an important question. If trust is becoming harder to earn on social platforms, where can advertisers find the credibility and confidence consumers are looking for?
If consumers are stepping back from social, it’s time for advertisers to follow. Partnering with established magazine brands means better reach, greater credibility and, crucially, access to an audience ready and willing to engage with campaigns that sit comfortably within the context and content of a trusted editorial title.
Trust as the new targeting
Misinformation, content saturation and algorithmic unpredictability have made it harder for brands to guarantee where, and next to what, their advertising will appear. That concern is now feeding directly into how agencies advise clients on media environments.
Suzanne Morgan, account director at the7stars, says trust and brand positioning are now firmly intertwined. “It has to form part of the overall conversation around where and how we turn up for our clients and brands,” she says. “Trust and authenticity sit pretty much hand in hand, so showing up in already curated and respected editorial environments helps drive that credibility transfer to the consumer, potentially deepening the authenticity of your messaging.”
Trust and brand equity aren’t built through sheer volume of impressions, but through consistent, considered placement in environments that reflect a brand’s values back to its audience. And you don’t always get that on social.
“The advantages of trusted editorial brands hasn’t changed,” Allen Adamson, co-founder and managing partner at Metaforce, says. “Only the urgency has. Brands are a collection of associations, and a lot of those associations come from who you hang out with.
“Think Met Gala. American Express built itself in The New Yorker. Goldman Sachs lives in The Economist. Trusted editorial gives brands curated adjacency. Social gives them roulette. Your ad lands next to whatever the algorithm serves, and increasingly, that’s a problem.”
Earlier this year, Magnetic partnered with some of the UK’s leading trusted editorial brands (including Bauer, Hearst UK and Time Out) to launch Atria, a premium marketplace that allows advertisers and agencies to reach a range of readerships with a single campaign and book across trusted editorial environments at scale.
It’s an initiative that has been welcomed by the Conscious Advertising Network, which now boasts over 190 global brands and agencies, championing human rights-based advertising. Jake Dubbins, the not-for-profit’s founder, explains that a decade of scandals, from ad placements funding extremist militant groups to the rise of grock deepfake imagery, has prompted many brands to treat social media with far more caution: “Senior advertisers tell me how it keeps them awake at night worrying that they might appear next to something awful. Some of the platforms do offer better protection, but most have a business model that is all about driving attention; that it’s all fair game, because you can monetise anything that moves.”
Dubbins adds that it’s not just the marketing suite that should be asking questions. “I also think CFOs should know what their money’s being spent on; which creators, which channels, which hashtags, which AI chatbots… where is my money going?”
The credibility transfer
Trusted editorial environments command quality attention. Their readers are active participants; they have sought out content, paid for it or opted in, and they bring a level of receptivity that passive social scrolling can’t match.
“The general lean-in nature of magazine consumption, in particular, helps drive a trusted connection as you are seen to be part of that publisher environment,” Morgan says. “It’s ultimately a free of charge credibility transfer: appearing beside verified journalism can help increase your brand’s perceived legitimacy.”
Premium editorial brands also offer something that no algorithm can reliably replicate: audience precision. Established titles attract defined, loyal readerships, which means advertisers can align their campaigns with specific demographics, mindsets and interests in a way that feels native rather than intrusive.
Morgan points to tangible results from campaigns that have exploited this precision. Over the past year, the7stars has run a series of campaigns with a trusted media partner aimed at a relatively niche but key audience. “The need to align the brand’s ethos, stature and audience targeting in a sympathetic environment has been paramount to the client,” she says, “Having that level of trust when working with an established publisher has meant we have had the confidence to push our ideas forward.”
The results spoke for themselves: longer dwell times, stronger click-through rates, double-digit positive shifts in both awareness and consideration. Morgan cites the example of a campaign with Princess Cruises, which included features in Good Food magazine (with accompanying digital hub). “We wanted to work with a partner that helped us create interest and drive consideration of the brand and tell the story of a beautiful new ship, while aligning with the target audiences’ passions,” she says.
“It enabled us to drive authentic connections with cruise-passionate readers, leveraging trusted editorial, precise targeting and creative formats to deliver strong performance and commercial results. Readers were immersed in the Star Princess story, inspired by interactive formats, and consistently reminded of the value of travelling with Princess Cruises. This resulted in a 50% increase on estimated bookings over the campaign period.”
Emma Kirkby, programmatic account manager at the7stars says that working with Atria was a key part of the campaign’s success: “It enabled us to reach our target audience across premium, trusted environments at scale. The set-up process was seamless; one deal ID that opened the doors to an effective activation across high quality publisher inventory. The activity delivered a 40% stronger CTR than what we typically see from upper-funnel display campaigns, pushing an engaged audience through the funnel to help deliver incremental sales for the client.”
Getting the balance right
Not that any of this is an argument for abandoning social. Both Morgan and Adamson are clear that social remains an essential part of the media mix and that magazines can be the deeper, tangible expressions of identities and messaging that is presented in shorter form on social platforms. A trusted editorial brand can work as a sustainable multiplier, one able to develop social interactions into long-lasting relationships.
Adamson expands on the way the two media can work in tandem: “Trust is a brand-building play. Credibility rubs off on you because the reader already trusts the source. Social is a megaphone. It puts your existing brand story in front of eyeballs, hoping it gets shared. One builds equity over time. The other rents attention by the impression. Smart brands need both, but should never confuse them.”
Where the conversation gets more complicated is around measurement. Social media has conditioned clients to expect real-time metrics and near-instant feedback loops, and the longer-term, survey-based measurement frameworks associated with editorial can feel like a harder sell.
Where the conversation gets more complicated is around measurement. Social media has conditioned clients to expect real-time metrics and near-instant feedback loops, and the longer-term, survey-based measurement frameworks associated with editorial can feel like a harder sell.
“How you measure trust is the critical thing,” warns Dubbins. “Yes, we should be focusing on trust, but we should also be focusing on genuine effectiveness and transparency. With trust comes transparency. Is your platform or media genuinely transparent in terms of business practices and where ads are placed?”
Morgan agrees that, as a metric, trust can be tricky to nail down. “You can’t just tell someone to trust you, you need to prove it by your actions and that’s no different for a brand telling a consumer to trust them. So, it’s about acting accordingly, operating in those key trusted environments and behaving in a way that a trusted brand should. And then, from a measurement point of view, taking those all important quality reads from the likes of brand uplift studies and quality research pieces.”
Morgan adds that it’s important for clients to know that all measurement frameworks have their uses. “Where social media can tap into those quick-read metrics, most clients appreciate the value of the longer-term awareness and consideration-driving role that editorial partnerships can deliver on,” she says.
“For most clients, it will be about making premium environments a strategic complement to social, with premium environments driving upper-funnel equity while keeping social for activation and rapid testing. Social remains essential for scale, community and performance.”
In an era when consumers actively curate their content consumption and are retreating from the noise, that balance matters more than ever. “Over the next two to three years, the agencies that win will be the ones who can hold two conversations at once,” Adamson says.
“Short-term performance and long-term equity. Social isn’t going anywhere – it’s part of the mix and always will be. But the job you hire it for is amplification, not equity. Equity gets built somewhere else, in the company a brand keeps.” And the best sort of company for any discerning, mindful brand is always to be found within the trusted editorial practices and values of magazine titles.
