TRUST CENTRE
A ranking is only worth as much as the rules behind it. These are ours, in the order that matters.
What money cannot buy
- · Position in any ranking, index or battle
- · Removal of an unflattering but accurate finding
- · Advance access to results before publication
- · Influence over methodology or evidence grading
What sponsorship is
- · Named, visible disclosure on the sponsored surface
- · Funding for research capacity, not for outcomes
- · Published even when the finding is unfavourable to the sponsor
- · Commercial clients are labelled wherever they appear
If you are ranked
- · See the evidence behind any score about you
- · Claim and verify your profile
- · Submit a correction with evidence
- · Publish a right of reply alongside a finding
If you are named
- · Only public professional signal is measured
- · No private data, no inferred personal characteristics
- · Factual errors are corrected, not argued
- · Removal requests are honoured where measurement is contested and low-confidence
Why you are seeing a sponsored placement
Some surfaces on Who’s Winning carry paid placements — Sponsored Crowns, category spotlights and the Sponsored Hall of Fame. They are always labelled “Paid attention”, always name the brand paying, and always carry a “Why am I seeing this?” explanation. A brand buys prominence, distribution and a campaign report for a fixed period. It never buys a rank, a score, an evidence record or editorial commentary.
Prominence and distribution
- · A clearly labelled placement on a category, city, topic, tool or programme surface
- · A sponsored profile placement and offer module
- · Campaign analytics: impressions, clicks and profile traffic
- · Named disclosure wherever the placement appears
Position, score or evidence
- · A rank on any independent leaderboard, index or battle
- · A change to a Signal Score, confidence grade or coverage figure
- · Creation, removal or re-grading of an evidence record
- · Priority, secrecy or leniency in a dispute or correction
How the wall is enforced
- · Sponsorship is recorded in a separate register from the evidence ledger
- · The scoring engine reads evidence records only — sponsorship is not an input field
- · Commercial staff cannot grade evidence; reviewers cannot see bid values while reviewing
- · Every takeover is published in the Sponsored Hall of Fame
Check the claim yourself
- · Open any score’s evidence drawer and read the source, date and coverage
- · Compare the independent order with and without sponsorship applied, below
- · Read the monetisation map: every paid surface and the guardrail on it
Sponsorship cannot move a ranking
The ranking order below is recomputed live from evidence-derived pillar scores, first with sponsorship ignored and then with every sponsorship recorded in this session applied. No crowns have been taken over in this session yet — take one in the Attention Market and return here to re-run the check.
| # | Independent order (Banking) | Score | Order with sponsorship applied | Moved? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Capitec | 87 | Capitec | No change |
| 2 | FNB | 85 | FNB | No change |
| 3 | Standard Bank | 79 | Standard Bank | No change |
| 4 | Absa | 74 | Absa | No change |
| 5 | Nedbank | 71 | Nedbank | No change |
| 6 | Discovery Bank | 69 | Discovery Bank | No change |
Every path money could take, and where it stops
- Input
- Bid amount, brand, crown, disclosure acknowledgement
- Writes to
- Sponsorship register only
- Read by scoring
- Never read by the scoring engine
- Input
- Winning bid replaces the labelled Sponsored Crown holder
- Writes to
- Sponsored placement slot and Hall of Fame register
- Read by scoring
- Never read by the scoring engine
- Input
- Same intake form, same reviewer queue as any other party
- Writes to
- Dispute record, reviewer notes, resolution outcome
- Read by scoring
- Sponsorship status is not a field in the dispute record
- Input
- Restated metric, revised confidence and coverage
- Writes to
- Evidence ledger and published correction log
- Read by scoring
- Applied identically to sponsors and non-sponsors
- Input
- Dated source, observed value, method, reviewer
- Writes to
- Immutable append-only record
- Read by scoring
- Sponsorship has no field, weight or flag in the record schema
Published corrections
Advertising volume for a telecom brand overstated by 11 creatives
Cause: Ad library duplicate records counted twice · Outcome: Metric restated, confidence lowered to B
Executive role title incorrect on a banking profile
Cause: Company submitted verified correction · Outcome: Corrected within 2 working days
Response Race entrant marked as no-reply
Cause: Reply landed in a filtered inbox on our side · Outcome: Entrant re-scored, method updated
How we publish information about named individuals
- · Public and professional information only. No sensitive personal information is collected or published.
- · Relevance and proportionality: a signal is published only where it relates to the market, the category or the organisation’s public position.
- · Evidence requirement: a dated source, an observation, a confidence grade and a published method for every record.
- · No subjective “best or worst” leadership ranking, and no scoring of integrity, honesty, morality, personal wealth, politics, health, private family matters, personality, employee popularity, personal competence, succession rumours or unverified allegations.
- · Higher human-review threshold: executive signals are AMBER by default and reviewed by an analyst before publication; potentially damaging individual-level claims are RED and escalate to senior governance and legal review. Nothing in this class auto-publishes.
- · Correction process and right to request review: any individual may request review, submit further public evidence, dispute a record or ask for removal of an out-of-scope entry.
If we get it wrong and do not fix it
Unresolved disputes escalate to an independent review panel that can order a correction, a re-measurement or removal. The panel’s decision and reasoning are published. This is a demonstration environment, so no live disputes exist.