The Numbers Behind the Disconnect
Kantar published its Media Reactions 2026 study on September 30, based on interviews with more than 800 senior marketers and 23,000 consumers globally. The headline finding: a staggering gap between marketer investment and consumer trust.
- 62% of marketers expect GenAI to play a pivotal role in brand recommendations.
- A net 75% plan to increase investment in AI assistants in 2027.
- Only 32% of consumers use AI assistants to research brands and products.
- Only 23% of consumers trust AI recommendations.
This is not a small gap. It is a chasm.
Why the Gap Exists
Gonca Bubani, Global Director of Media at Kantar, framed it bluntly: "There's a lot of money moving towards AI on the assumption people will use it the way the industry expects. The reality is that marketers don't yet have a firm grasp of the nuanced feelings people have about AI environments or how they work within their wider media mix."
Several factors drive consumer distrust:
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Source opacity. Consumers do not know where AI-generated answers come from. If a recommendation appears in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, the consumer has no visibility into why that brand was suggested.
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Brand preconceptions. Consumer trust in AI recommendations is influenced by what they already think about specific brands. If an AI recommends a brand a consumer has never heard of, trust drops.
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Presentation format. How AI answers are presented matters as much as the answers themselves. A confident, authoritative tone can feel manipulative if the source data is thin.
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AI skepticism. A Newsweek study found that the more young people use AI, the less they like it. Early novelty is wearing off.
Marketer Confidence Is Declining
The trust gap is not the only problem. Marketers themselves are losing confidence in their own media planning at the same time they are increasing spend.
- Only 50% of advertisers are confident they have the right balance between brand-building and performance marketing (down from 60% in 2025).
- 57% feel confident their organization has the right media mix (down from 64%).
- Only 51% feel they are extracting actionable intelligence from their data.
Paul Zwillenberg, CEO at Kantar, put it this way: "Marketing has never been harder to navigate, right when businesses need every dollar of investment to work harder. AI now shapes how people discover and choose brands, so strong brands have to earn the right to be recommended, by people, and by the machines guiding them."
Where Marketers Are Spending
Despite declining confidence, investment patterns are clear. Marketers are backing a small group of digital platforms, with Instagram, YouTube, and Google leading trust scores among both marketers and consumers.
The Creator Economy Shift
The creator economy is undergoing a significant shift from reach to relevance:
- 66% of marketers plan to invest in micro-creators (down from celebrity reach).
- 61% plan to invest in nano-creators.
- Only 48% plan to invest in macro-influencers.
- Only 42% plan to invest in mega-influencers.
Kantar's Creator Game Plan found that platform engagement and brand-building potential only align one-third of the time. Predicating creator choice on engagement stats alone was a common trap. Follower count does not guarantee effective reach; what matters is how creators help brands communicate meaningful difference to their audience.
AI Assistants Get the Biggest Investment Push
The net 75% of marketers planning to increase AI assistant investment in 2027 represents the largest planned increase across all channels in the study. This is happening despite the trust data showing consumers are not ready.
What This Means for Marketing Strategy
The Kantar data suggests three strategic moves for marketing leaders:
1. Test Before You Scale
The 23% consumer trust number is a warning. Spending heavily to be recommended by AI assistants when only a quarter of consumers trust those recommendations is a bet, not a strategy. Start with controlled experiments: measure whether AI-driven visibility actually moves your brand awareness, consideration, or purchase intent before committing budget.
2. Earn Trust Through Source Transparency
Consumers distrust AI recommendations partly because they cannot see the source. Brands that make their own data, reviews, and product specifications easily accessible and clearly structured are more likely to be accurately recommended by AI systems, and more likely to be trusted when they are.
3. Shift Creators from Reach to Relevance
Move budget from mega-influencers toward micro and nano creators. Engagement numbers are not the same as brand-building impact. Prioritize creators whose audiences genuinely align with your brand and who can communicate your differentiated value.
The Good News Hidden in the Data
Despite their insecurity, marketers are actually getting better at making fragmented channels perform. Kantar's LIFT+ data shows that between 2020 and 2025, 43% of campaign performance came from channels working together, compared with only 18% pre-2014.
This means the solution to the AI trust gap is not to wait. It is to experiment carefully, measure honestly, and build the evidence base your organization needs to invest confidently.
Read Next
- OpenAI Dots: Always-On Agents Are Here — OpenAI's agent platform that marketers may want to target.
- OpenClaw Enterprise: The Open-Source Agent Control Plane — The open-source alternative for agent governance.
- The AI Product Discovery Playbook: From 66% Searching to 23% Trusting — How consumers use AI for product research and what brands should do.
- AI Visibility 2026: Which Platforms Matter — Our earlier analysis of where to focus AI visibility efforts.
Need help measuring your brand's AI visibility or building a test-and-learn framework? Talk to Vivid about AI visibility audits and marketing experiments.
