Corporate marketing
Inside large organizations, Jay saw how easily a brand promise can separate from the teams, data, decisions, and experiences that have to make it true.
Read the corporate lesson
Open Trust Gap Marketing Accountability Council · A developing idea
Marketing earns trust through what it does.
The Trust Index is a Marketing Accountability Council concept for evaluating marketing more broadly than campaign metrics. It asks whether marketing creates value, keeps its promises, treats people with respect, and can show the evidence behind its choices.
How the sites connect
Trust Gap is the Trust Index. The rest of the work explains why it exists.
My corporate career taught me that marketing problems are rarely only messaging problems. They are often leadership, data, ethics, incentive, and operating problems. The Trust Index brings that learning into one question: how should marketing earn trust through the product, price, place, promotion, and experience people actually encounter?
The through-line
A corporate career became a system for solving bigger trust problems.
This ecosystem of products, services, and organizations is designed to make accountability practical. It helps you become accountable to yourself and your company: what you believe, what you choose, what you invest in, and what people experience because of those choices. It also keeps Jay accountable to the partnerships, products, writing, and field-building work he has chosen to invest in.
Institute for Advertising Ethics
Jay’s work with the IAE Governance Lab connects ethical principles to the operating and technical questions that make advertising systems inspectable.
Read the IAE case studyMarketing Accountability Council
MAC gives the accountability conversation a public home: marketing should be examined by its effects, promises, evidence, and respect for people.
Read the MAC case studyClean Data Alliance
Clean Data Alliance extends the work into permission, provenance, quality, governance, and responsible AI/data use because trust depends on the information underneath decisions.
Read the CDA case studyCoaching and consulting
This is Jay’s new era of work: helping leaders name the real problem, align the people who can change it, and make the promise hold in practice.
Work with JayWhy a broader view
A trusted campaign cannot make up for a broken promise.
Marketing is bigger than promotion.
A brand’s trust is shaped by what it sells, what it costs, where and how people get it, and how it is promoted. Looking at advertising alone leaves much of the customer experience out.
Metrics can miss the human result.
Reach, clicks, and conversions describe activity. They do not, by themselves, show whether a promise was clear, a customer got real value, or the organization acted responsibly.
Trust needs things people can examine.
Teams need to explain the choices behind marketing, the evidence they used, and how the experience matched what they told people to expect.
A useful lens
Look across the marketing mix. Ask what people actually experience.
01 · PRODUCT
Does it deliver?
Does the product or service provide the value people are led to expect?
02 · PRICE
Is the exchange fair?
Can people understand what they will pay and what they will receive?
03 · PLACE
Can people access it?
Do the channels and experience make it possible to get the promised value?
04 · PROMOTION
Is the promise honest?
Does communication represent the offer clearly and help people make informed choices?
These are plain-language questions for exploring the idea, not a published Trust Index rubric, score, certification, or assessment.
Where the idea stands
A concept to develop in the open.
In a July 2025 interview, Jay described the MAC Trust Index as a pilot idea: an evaluation scorecard drawing on themes from MAC writing and examining marketing as a whole. This page summarizes that premise. It does not represent a current live tool or claim that a final methodology has been released.
Trust Gap is the MAC Trust Index experience. It connects to Jay’s wider work on marketing accountability, clean data, and advertising ethics. It is separate from the developing AI Advertising Trust Stack described on the VRFD page.
Trust is built in the experience.
What a company offers, what it promises, and what people experience should hold together. Trust Gap is the Trust Index experience.
Open Trust Gap Talk with Jay about marketing accountability