The Power of Parasocial: the trust hiding inside your media plan
By Flora Williams, Head of Planning
The definition of ‘parasocial’ sounds faintly clinical: a one-sided sense of connection with someone we have never met. But the idea has become so widespread that Cambridge Dictionary named ‘parasocial’ its 2025 Word of the Year.
At some point this morning, probably when they walked out the front door, people across Britain pressed play on a voice they know better than most of their colleagues. They know the presenter’s dog’s name, what really grinds their gears and the full saga of the kitchen extension. If they passed each other on the street, the listener would probably recognise them instantly. The presenter, of course, would not know the listener at all. That asymmetry is the opportunity.
In practice, parasocial names something that has become so ordinary we rarely notice ourselves doing it. The presenter whose judgement you trust on subjects unrelated to the show; the creator whose recommendation you acted on without even considering the brand; the channel that feels less like a broadcaster and more like a room you keep coming back to. If you look around, you will see that parasocial relationships are everywhere in Britain, and this is a huge opportunity for brands; not simply to buy space in trusted environments. It is also to understand the relationship already in place and adapt the way the brand shows up within it.
The creator economy has been trading on this for years. Our latest Belonging in Britain research shows how far beyond creators it now runs: 81% of people feel a sense of community through at least one media channel, 79% say a channel gives them a sense of belonging, and 74% say the media they choose contributes to their identity. Whether you lose time in subreddits, tune into Capital Breakfast every morning or chase Strava’s Queen of the Mountain, these relationships can become part of what makes us who we are.
We tend to describe media in the language of consumption: hours, impressions, share of attention. However, people experience it in the language of relationships. The live final that spills into the group chat and the next morning’s Reddit thread. The podcast that begins as a companion on the commute and ends up, three years later, as two tickets to the live show. These attachments form the same way all attachments form, through time, repetition and the feeling of being in on something, and they behave like attachments too. Something feels off if you miss a week.
That kind of attachment is even more valuable in a media landscape defined by avoidance. Nielsen has found that 64% of consumers take deliberate action to avoid advertising, and every planner has watched attention become harder to earn.
And yet, the same people skipping the pre-roll are queuing for a podcast’s live show and defending a presenter in the comments. Avoidance and attachment are rising together, in the same person, aimed at different things. People are not avoiding media, they are avoiding whatever arrives uninvited.
The commercial weight of all this sits in a single word: trust. YouGov found in September 2025 that 79% of UK adults have lost trust in at least one brand, and 66% say they have boycotted one as a result. Read alongside our findings, the picture is less that trust has drained out of British life and more that it has moved. It sits with the host, the presenter, the creator, the channel people feel close to, and it extends to whoever earns a place beside them.
Consider a listener three hundred episodes into her favourite podcast. She has heard the host get things wrong and own it, watched the running jokes form over years, taken restaurant recommendations, book recommendations, even tried a new energy provider, from a person she has never met and feels she knows completely. When that host reads an ad in their own voice, at their own pace, with their own jokes folded in, the brand arrives the way a friend of a friend arrives at dinner: vouched for. The same brand dropped into the same episode as a skippable slot arrives as a stranger clearing their throat.
Both versions appear in the post-campaign report as impressions delivered, which is why this nuance is so easy to miss. A host read that sits inside the conversation earns trust, while an interruption spends it. Precision will find the audience either way. The relationship decides how you are received when you arrive. That is the opportunity. But it does not mean buying any chart-topping podcast and calling it intimacy. Parasocial trust is precise: it belongs to that host and that audience, on those terms. An audience that knows a presenter well enough to finish their sentences can hear a misjudged read instantly, and the same closeness that makes a welcome brand land makes an unwelcome one conspicuous. The focal question is “would this audience understand why we are showing up here?”
So, as the next brief takes shape, I would suggest three steps for earning a place in these relationships:
- Map the relationships your audience already has. Identify the hosts, creators, communities and channels where they feel connection. Then investigate the connection your audience might have with them. Some hold intimacy; think community social (like Strava, Reddit or SheerLuxe) or host-led audio. Some hold proximity trust, and local media does far more of this than its price suggests. Some hold shared cultural moments at a scale nothing else can match. Our research found that no single channel dominates community, belonging or identity, so the answer will differ by audience, which is rather the point.
- Ask what each relationship gives your brand permission to do there. An environment built on intimacy rewards a brand that talks like a person and exposes one that talks like a press release. For example, a space built on local trust rewards specificity: the street name, the fixture, the detail only a local would know.
- Adapt the creative, not just the media plan. Allow flexibility in your brand book to unlock authenticity. Give hosts and creators room to say it their way, accept that the best performing read will rarely sound like your brand guidelines, and judge success by whether you were welcomed as well as whether you were seen.
“Parasocial” sounds almost like a diagnosis, but our research reveals it looks more like a map of where attention and trust now sit.
Tomorrow morning, probably as they walk out the front door, your audience will press play on a voice they trust more than most institutions. When your brand shows up beside that voice, the question that matters is whether it feels like it belongs there.
To explore the key insights from 2026’s Belonging in Britain, and be the first to receive the full report, click here.