October 7, 2026
The World Media Group (WMG) is at Advertising Week in New York this week to unveil ‘Building Trust Together’, new research setting out how trust in journalism can be factored into AI-driven media buying.
WMG CEO Jamie Credland joins Izzie Rivers, CEO of R-ai, and the R-ai team on stage to discuss how “Nobody Builds Trust Alone”, and how agentic buying can take trust signals into account in media planning.
Why it matters
Advertising in trusted news environments consistently delivers stronger results for brands. But as media buying decisions are increasingly made by AI agents, which tend to optimise for cost, reach and clicks, the white paper warns that trust and quality risk dropping out of the decision altogether.
Building Trust Together tackles that challenge by going straight to the source. WMG interviewed editorial and commercial leaders at some of the world’s most trusted news organisations, including CNN, The Economist and Fortune, about how they themselves judge whether a news source can be trusted.
The result is a new Trust & Quality Framework for evaluating news publishers, built around four pillars that agencies and buyers can score, alongside practical questions buyers can put to any publisher. R-AI is now integrating the framework into its AI media planning platform.
“As more media buying decisions are handed to AI, there’s a danger that the things that make trusted journalism so valuable to brands get left out. That’s why this is such an important piece of work,” said Jamie Credland, CEO, World Media Group. “Our access to the world’s most trusted news organisations puts WMG in a unique position to define what quality really looks like. But a framework only matters if it shapes real buying decisions, and that’s where R-ai comes in. We applaud them for taking this approach that enables trust to be built into their platform from the start.”
“Nobody builds trust alone,” said Izzie Rivers, CEO of R-ai. “We are experts in media buying and AI, but the people who understand trusted editorial best are the ones who produce it every day. Working with WMG gave us a deeper understanding of the criteria those journal use to evaluate news sources, and now we’re turning what they told us into something that can be considered with every recommendation we make.”
The full white paper, Building Trust Together, is available to download here.