Details
As we gear up for Native Advertising Days 2026, we’re chatting with some of our speakers about the pressing issues they’re seeing in branded content; the challenges, the opportunities, and the research that’s informing their action.
Karim Meggaro, Global Content Strategy Lead at Reuters Plus, is first up, as we talk about the B2B and B2C divide, the origins of the metrics we’re familiar with today, and the place of brand trust amongst it all.
Karim will be expanding on this topic at Native Advertising Days 2026 and you can still find tickets here.
The talk you'll be giving at Native Advertising Days is about trust in branded content, can you tell us a bit more about that?
It's about the issue we have in B2B, which is that the system for measuring the performance of content is borrowed from the world of B2C. We're all in this system and we're all guilty of using it, because it's there, it's free, it's convenient, and it tells us something.
But actually, it's not getting to the heart of what B2B marketers are trying to do, and what they are uniquely positioned to deliver: building trust and changing hearts and minds.
Why do you think this issue has come about?
It stems from the advent of Google Analytics, which was given away for free in 2005. At this time, everyone was just getting on board with digital marketing and content marketing. Suddenly, we had all these tools available in terms of reach and impressions, and it became the default way to measure the success of content.
Here at Reuters Plus, clients of all shapes and sizes come to us as a publisher with global reach, so they're expecting those metrics to perform. They usually do. We bring in the eyeballs, the content gets looked at, easy win.
I sense a 'but' coming up...
But we should be looking at specific business objectives and marketing objectives for why the campaign exists in the first place. Those objectives almost always boil down to wanting to become credible in a certain topic area.
We want our customers and potential consumers to associate us when they think of a particular topic.
And we also want a change of perception - whether that's moving from unknown to known, or as simple as: I didn't know these guys were interested in that topic, and now I associate them with it.
So where should B2B start?
Brand studies are the practical answer for measurement - they capture the things that actually matter in B2B: familiarity, favourability, consideration. But that's the easy part. The harder problem is upstream, in how briefs get answered in the first place.
We're all guilty of this - every hammer sees a nail. A brief comes through, the audience match looks right, and the conversation skips straight to how we put our audience in front of it, and how we prove we did. We rarely stop to ask what the content itself needs to do - what perception it has to shift, what association it has to build.
The best campaigns are the ones where the marketing objective is held tightly from the start, and the channel question comes second. That sounds obvious. It's almost never how the work actually flows.
What do we need to know when rethinking content for this?
Right now, everyone is talking about the attention economy, and it feels like the dialogue is moving ever more in the direction that attention is scarce. The predominant view is that you really have to embody tactics that go after it and don't ask too much of the audience.
In B2B, the typical buying decision takes around seven months and pulls in roughly seven people - not the kind of choice anyone makes off a skim. What you actually want is to build trust. And the formats mentioned previously were not created for building trust.
Your audience is more capable of consuming deep, meaningful content than the prevailing view assumes - provided it aligns with their interests, or offers them something genuinely new.
Our data shows that when this is a match, audiences do go deep, they do spend time with the content, and it does change how they think about things.
It's where I see the biggest potential for improving the whole conversation around what your content is doing, how it aligns to what you need to do as a business, and - crucially - how you prove that it's doing that.
Anything else you'll be digging into on the day?
Yes - and it's the piece I think is most underrated of all. Where the content actually sits matters as much as what the content is. The environment you publish into is doing a huge amount of work on whether people trust what they're reading, and on whether your campaign builds equity for your brand or quietly chips away at it.
I'll save the numbers for the stage, but the gap between content that lives in a trusted environment and content that lives in an untrusted one is bigger than most marketers realise - and it's been widening, not narrowing.
If this sparked your interest, come and hear more of the full talk from Karim on June 11 at Native Advertising Days in London.