AI Strategy · 2026-07-30 · Michael Ditter
Trust Is the Infrastructure: Inside the ANA's AI Transparency and Provenance Principles
I co-led the ANA working group behind the new AI Transparency and Provenance Principles for Marketers. My view: trust is the scarcest asset in marketing, and no single company can rebuild it alone — this is an infrastructure problem, and the industry has to build it together.
Trust is the scarcest asset in marketing right now. Consumers move through feeds where they can no longer be sure what is real, who made it, or why it is in front of them — and generative AI raises the stakes every month.
That is the problem the ANA set out to address. Over the past year I co-led a working group within the ANA's AI Committee — alongside Michael Therrien of Kyndryl, with Jacqui Stephenson (Mars), Rinita Datta (Cisco), and Simon Duncan-Watt (CARE) — to answer a deceptively simple question: when and how should marketers disclose the use of generative AI?
The result is AI Transparency and Provenance Principles for Marketers (June 2026). Two ideas anchor it:
- Transparency is the above-the-glass experience — disclose AI use when it could mislead, judged by its impact on the message and the context of what is being advertised.
- Provenance is the below-the-glass technology — a verifiable chain of custody for creative work, aligned with the C2PA's Content Credentials, that protects brands from knockoffs and consumers from confusion.
The public record already carries the position. In the ANA’s announcement of the provenance framework, I put it on the record: “We applaud industry efforts through the ANA to advance content credentials and a verifiable chain of custody in AI-enabled advertising.”
Here is my personal conviction, and the reason I gave this work the hours: the key is not what any individual company does — it is the infrastructure we build at the industry level. One brand disclosing honestly while the feed around it stays synthetic and unlabeled does not rebuild trust. Shared standards, shared provenance rails, and voluntary principles adopted ahead of fragmented regulation can. That is how an industry earns back the benefit of the doubt.
My thanks to Jeff Minsky and Michael Donnelly at the ANA for driving this effort, and to every member of the working group and the AI Leadership Council who pressure-tested it.
Read it: the report page at ANA.net · download the PDF · the companion piece on AI provenance.