South Australia's advertising industry is crucial in furthering the state's economic growth as it delivers trustworthy information, says South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas on stage at AdNews L!VE.
But as the public's consumption of news media is now just notifications on their phone, Malinauskas worries a lot about the public's trust of media.
As a result, government's across the country need to invest in media, marketing and advertising skills to ensure a reliable democracy.
"Don't underestimate how much disruption to the media market is on the mind of the country's policymakers," Malinauskas said on the panel presented by Nine.
"Whatever the people's misgivings are about their consumption of news media from mainstream sources, print, radio, TV, their trust in the big Facebooks and Twitters is even less again.
"And I really worry about what is happening to our liberal democracy throughout the West, with the decline of the mainstream media news business model - it is a big problem.
"I don't come to you with a solution, but it is foreseeable that we have a political environment where it becomes possible for a more interventionist approach from legislators in regards to sources of news and digital media in a way that would become abhorrent to someone like myself.
"This is going to be a really interesting issue, because we cannot sustain a healthy democracy, which has been fueled exclusively by culture wars, misinforming people, with uneducated debates, I think that's something we should all be conscious of."
As of July, Facebook could be without mainstream news. The social media giant says it won’t renew its agreements to pay local publishers for their news appearing on Facebook. They can continue posting but they won’t get paid.
The agenda of government is to communicate to the public the successfulness of political activities, such as spending on building more hospitals, roads, schools.
But that only works with the support of the media industry.
"What we normally do in the political class is hammer people with what we're doing on the news," Malinauskas said.
"But what people need to understand is why we're doing it - for economic complexity, growing wealth, growing prosperity, improving people's standard of living - that's really hard to do when people's consumption of news media now amounts to [notifications] on their phone screens.
"So the reality is that governments do need to engage the sort of [marketing and media] skills that are in the room here to explain to people why it is we're doing what we're doing, because we're not very good at that most of the time.
"That's the approach that I have asked Jehad Ali [director of brand and marketing at Government of South Australia] and he's leading a bit of a reform in government to try and make sure we're structuring our effort to be better at that."
He said Adelaide could be a centre of excellence for the media and marketing industry - and the state is willing to deliver that outcome with the development of policy.
Malinauskas is supporting the creative industries more broadly, with the government investing $5.2 million into the South Australian Film Corporation over three years.
#L!VE Adelaide is powered by co-curators AADC, AMC. Supporting partners NINE, Quantcast and Foxtel Media. And associate partners TorchMedia.
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