The communications industry has a fundamental problem that it has been reluctant to name directly. Despite increasing investment — Edelman reports that global communications spend has grown consistently year-on-year, with social media alone attracting over $220 billion annually — organisations are producing less influence per dollar spent. Reach is up. Belief is down. The industry is confusing the delivery of messages with the production of influence, and the difference is costing organisations enormously.

Influence is the ability to shape what audiences believe and do — without coercion. This definition matters because it distinguishes genuine influence from the appearance of it. Reach produces the appearance of influence. An advertisement seen by a million people has reached a million people. Whether it has changed what any of them believe or do is a separate question — and one that the industry has systematically avoided asking, because the honest answer is uncomfortable. Edelman's 2025 Trust Barometer shows that only 31% of audiences say advertising captures their attention. The $220 billion is producing, at best, 31 cents of attention per dollar.

The trust deficit compounds this problem. Edelman's data shows that trust now equals price and quality as a driver of purchase decisions. This means that for a significant segment of the market, organisations cannot buy their way past a trust gap — they have to earn their way out of it. And trust cannot be bought. It is constructed through consistent, credible, long-term communication that demonstrates alignment between what an organisation says and what it does. This is precisely the kind of communication that the industry's investment in paid social media does not produce.

“Reach is up. Belief is down.”

The organisations that have maintained genuine influence share several characteristics. They have invested consistently in building the trust infrastructure — the relationships, the credibility, the stakeholder architecture — that makes influence possible over time. They have resisted the pressure to optimise for short-term metrics at the expense of long-term influence. They measure their communications against whether audiences actually moved — not whether content was published or impressions were served. These are not small adjustments to how communications are managed. They are a fundamentally different operating model.

The path from the influence deficit to genuine influence requires a clear-eyed assessment of where your influence capital currently stands — what your audience actually believes about you, what channels they trust, and what communications history you have built with them. Most organisations do not know the answers to these questions. They know their reach. They know their impressions. They don't know their influence. That is where the work begins.