Edelman Makes the Case. The Interest Is Worth Noting.

A May 2026 Fortune article by Jonathan Jordan, Edelman’s U.S. Head of Corporate Reputation, argues that trust has become one of the most important assets a company holds, but sits unowned across most organisations. Responsibility, the article contends, is fragmented across communications, legal, compliance, HR, government affairs, and security, each operating with different incentives and time horizons. The result, in Jordan’s framing, is inconsistency between what companies say, what they do, and how stakeholders experience them.

The proposed solution is a Chief Trust Officer: a dedicated C-suite executive whose sole mandate is earning and protecting stakeholder confidence.

The article is persuasive and its evidence is grounded in Edelman’s own research. It is also written by a senior figure at a firm whose commercial model depends on selling trust-related services to corporations. That context does not invalidate the argument. It is worth holding in mind.

Matt Bourn read it when it first appeared in late May. His reaction was immediate, then revised on reflection.

Thirty Years Communicating for an Industry That Runs on Credibility

Matt Bourn is Director of Communications at the Advertising Association, where he leads the public narrative for the UK’s fifty billion pound advertising industry. He co-authored Trusted Advertising and Sustainable Advertising, both published by Kogan Page, and has spent thirty years working across public policy, commercial economics, and reputation management. He is also a co-author with the Advertising Association’s think-tank, Credos, which has tracked trust in advertising across multiple research cycles.

His position inside this debate is specific: he has been building the evidence base for trust as a commercial driver, and he has been measuring the gap between what the industry claims and what it delivers.

The Distinction Jordan Gets Right: Reputation Is Not Trust

The Fortune article draws a distinction that Matt considers one of its most valuable contributions. Reputation, Jordan argues, is how a crowd feels about you at a given moment. Trust looks forward. It reflects confidence in how a company will behave tomorrow. It is the reason someone takes a chance, stays, and recommends.

Matt endorses this framing without reservation. “There’s a huge difference between being liked and being trusted.”

His own research has found that most companies, when asked whether trust matters, say yes without hesitation. When asked how they measure it, they point to brand awareness, saliency, share of voice, favourability. None of those metrics capture forward-looking confidence. The closest proxy Matt has encountered is the Net Promoter Score: the likelihood of a customer recommending the business to someone they care about.

That act of recommendation, he argues, is a genuine expression of trust rather than merely of satisfaction.

His working example is Giffgaff, the mobile provider, which refers to its customers as members and derives one in five new business leads from friend and family referrals. That twenty percent figure represents trust converted directly into commercial growth.

Where the Article Gets the Problem Right and the Solution Wrong

The Fortune article’s structural diagnosis is, in Matt’s reading, largely accurate. The Edelman Trust Barometer research it cites suggests that sixty-one percent of people globally now hold a grievance mindset, believing institutions serve narrow interests while making their lives harder. Seven in ten people worldwide are described by Edelman researchers as having an insular trust mindset, reluctant to extend confidence to those outside their immediate circle. Among multinationals, the research identifies a thirty-one point gap in Canada, twenty-nine points in Germany, and twenty-nine in Japan between trust in domestic companies versus foreign ones.

These findings, if they hold, describe a structural problem, not a communications one. Trust is fragmenting. The localisation of confidence creates specific exposure for any organisation operating across geographies.

Where Matt diverges is on the proposed remedy. Creating a Chief Trust Officer concentrates accountability for trust in a single executive. His counter-argument is that this misunderstands the nature of the problem.

“I would push back on the reality of it. The leadership team has a collective responsibility to make sure it’s the most trusted business in its sector. And that’s across everything that it does.”

Trust that sits in a dedicated role is trust that the rest of the C-suite has been relieved of managing. The very diffusion Jordan identifies as the problem, responsibility spread across multiple functions, is not solved by adding a new function. It may simply give each existing function a reason to defer.

From the Attention Economy to the Trust Economy

The broader argument Matt draws from his own research and the Trusted Advertising book is about a structural economic shift. The attention economy, as he describes it, was built on acquiring attention at the lowest possible cost per acquisition. The trust economy, which he argues is emerging to replace it, is built on winning customers through the confidence they have in a brand relative to its competitors.

“Get trust on the plan. When you’re thinking about your next advertising campaign, trust should be in the brief. We want to be trusted for this. That’s the promise we’re making.”

The practical implication is that trust is not a function to be owned by one executive. It is a discipline to be embedded in every commercial decision. The Giffgaff example is, in his framing, what the trust economy looks like in operation: a brand so trusted by its members that acquisition becomes self-sustaining.

Self-Regulation Over a New Title

Matt’s magic wand answer is, characteristically, structural rather than personal. He would not create a new C-suite role. He would invest in the strongest possible self-regulatory framework the advertising and communications industry can build.

“I would encourage everyone to really understand and support and invest in the strongest self-regulation that we could find. Not just the ASA, but setting the standards. Because governments have so many problems to deal with that we as an industry should be capable of delivering brilliant, responsible advertising ourselves.”

The argument connects to the Fortune article’s third claim: that staying silent on societal issues is, according to Edelman research, interpreted by fifty-three percent of consumers as concealment, and that seventy-three percent say a brand reflecting the culture around it builds more trust than one that ignores culture.

Matt’s version of that insight is more focused. An industry that self-regulates effectively demonstrates trust through its structure, not through its communications. A Chief Trust Officer cannot substitute for the credibility that comes from a sector holding itself to account.

The episode’s open question, left without resolution, is whether self-regulation is sufficient in an environment where Edelman’s own research suggests institutional trust is in structural decline.