From The New York Times.
Under daily 'fake news' attack, the Times had to make people pay for something they were taught was free and told was a lie. A claim of trustworthiness from the party seeking trust is worth nothing.
Make the ad out of the reporting itself: no narrator, no actors, no music, just the words a reporter actually typed, on black, in order, while you hear the room they were in.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Building a national brand campaign out of search queries, notes and dead ends, with no voice telling you how to feel.
Smart: A thirty-second ad of nothing but typing sounds like a non-ad, until you have sat through the eighteen months of dead ends and realise you were shown the receipts instead of a promise.
Only an institution whose entire product is the labour of reporting can let the labour be the ad, because the receipts are real and theirs.
You cannot argue someone into belief, but you can show the cost and let them do the arithmetic, which is why the work convinces where a credibility boast cannot.
You are not told the work is hard. You sit through it, and arrive at the truth having paid for it in attention.
Idea-poweredIt works when you describe it out loud. You could brief this. Survives paraphrase.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: