Why low CPMs in digital advertising are no longer a suitable payoff for unethical advertising   

Ellie Reeves, Effectiveness Manager at Talon, recently attended (and spoke at) Media360 – one of Campaign’s flagship events where industry trends, challenges and the future of media is discussed. In this blog, she shares the key learnings from the day for brands and agencies.

OOver the last two years, trust – perhaps a more antiquated metric in modern marketing – has worked its way back into becoming a buzzword. Demonstrations of its commercial impact by the likes of Peter Field have certainly contributed to this, but a growing dissatisfaction with digital players has also turned up the volume on the conversation.

For those in the audience at Future of Media in November 2025, the session with Esther Ghey alongside Simon Kilby of Bauer Media and Sonali Shah of Magic Radio is one that will have stayed with you. The discussion focused on the impact of media on young people and the industry’s role in creating safer environments, and delivered an emotive plea for a reassessment of marketers’ investment in the digital ecosystem.

Our industry’s simultaneous investment in and growing unease with aspects of digital channels is potent, with the AA’s All In Census highlighting that 60% of us don’t trust the industry we work in. At Media360 a few weeks ago, Dan Geneen of British Heart Foundation, also highlighted the scale of the challenge, noting that 10% of Meta’s revenue comes from fraudulent ads (Reuters).

This continued to be a key theme across Media360’s speakers. Alex Baker of Bauer Media noted consumers’ growing scepticism towards social media – a space where people spend huge amounts of time without always trusting what they’re seeing, creating vulnerability that bad actors can capitalise on. As a one-to-one media channel, digital experiences a unique vulnerability to distrust, whereas the visibility and shared experience of broadcast media can lend greater credibility to advertisers.

Baker called for greater regulation of digital platforms, in line with traditional media, not only in the content they approve and the inventory they sell, but also in how they are structured as media channels. This interestingly connects to wider conversations on industry currencies we’ve seen across 2026 – while the role of JICs is increasingly debated, they remain another example of how accountability and transparency are built into traditional media channels.

Against this backdrop of mistrust, OOH can provide a real-life legitimacy to campaigns and advertisers. Where consumers may question what they see in digital spaces, OOH’s visibility has fostered long-standing accountability. We’ve worked for decades with local councils, authorities and landlords to ensure the safety of advertising in this channel, which translates to real consumer trust.

That trust has a measurable impact. On average, we see a +19% increase in brand trust when purpose-led adverts are used in OOH (Talon Benchmarks). Interestingly, this metric doesn’t operate in silo – campaigns that drive trust see a holistic impact across brand performance, with an average +90% stronger uplift in brand metrics (Talon Benchmarks). This is seen across advertisers and sectors – whether brands are leveraging high trust or trying to build it, OOH is playing a key role as a as a trust-driver in a trust-poor landscape.

This is consistent across advertisers and sectors. Whether brands are reinforcing existing trust or looking to build it, OOH is playing a key role as a trust driver in an increasingly trust-poor landscape.

As a burgeoning channel for advertisers, LLMs show the initial warning signs of ethical uncertainty. Sam Tomlinson, MediaSense, highlighted that challenger brands are already pedalling misinformation into the likes of Reddit to influence their competitors’ representation in these models. And importantly, Guy Rogers, Lenovo, highlighted that as LLMs become monetised, we need to start with the ethical questions we should have had 15 years ago when digital started its rise.

Consumer’s growing interrogation of how and why they’re being targeted by advertising hasn’t just created a key challenge for fostering brand reputation, it’s enforced regulation and limited the efficacy of digital targeting precision. OOH has never relied on what data can be scraped. Instead, our proprietary technology harnesses safe, anonymised and transparent datasets, putting both safety and longevity at the heart of audience targeting.

But, as the age of signal collapse has shifted us from “who are you” to “where are you, when are you there, and what mindset are you in?,” OOH is primed for this context-led shift in media. It has always been a contextual medium, where environmental nuances, contextual triggers and dynamic messaging act as key levers to unlock relevance.

The advantage of audience-led digital activations – cheap CPMs and high ROIs – is becoming less critical to advertisers. This echoed across Media360. Rebecca Burchnall of PHD, reminded us that ROI often just measures how cheaply you’re doing something. Jerry Daykin of Restaurant Brands International, noted the danger of this metric is underspending purely for efficiency purposes; while Ben Brown of Allwyn pointed out that driving meaningful conversion and commercial growth often comes at a higher CPM, simply because it requires greater effort to achieve.

As old-fashioned as trust, long-term brand-building and media investment is back on the agenda. With audiences becoming harder to reach – driven by media fragmentation, ad blockers, and increasing privacy and content restrictions like LHF – broadcast reach has never been more important. However, alongside its traditional strengths, OOH is increasingly demonstrating full-funnel capability, with contextual messaging, audience targeting and point-of-purchase presence driving both desire and action.

It’s a channel that is both old and new, utilising programmatic for audience targeting, real-time bidding and in-flight optimisation, without sacrificing on broad reach and long-term commercial growth. At the heart of all this is safety, for advertisers and consumers alike – a channel that garners trust, rather than degrades it, in a world where trust has never been more scarce, or more valuable.