Every brand wants to be authentic now. Authenticity has a strategy. It has a budget line. It has a content calendar, a tone of voice guide, a set of approved emojis, a crisis comms protocol for when the authenticity doesn’t land, and a quarterly review where someone presents data on “authentic content performance” against benchmarks for “authentic content performance” set by a team that spent two weeks deciding what authentic looks like for this particular organization in this particular vertical.
The word “authentic” appears in more marketing briefs than any other adjective except, possibly, “innovative.” It has been applied to campaigns produced by committees of forty people, to brand voices developed by global agencies over six-month processes, to influencer partnerships governed by seventeen-page contracts specifying exactly how the authentic experience should be described. It is, with very little competition, the most ironic word in the industry lexicon.
What Authenticity Meant Before Marketing Got Hold of It
Authenticity, in its philosophical sense, refers to a quality of being genuinely aligned with one’s values and character — acting in accordance with what one actually believes rather than performing for an audience. Sartre used it to describe the condition of confronting existence without self-deception. It implies a kind of inner coherence that is not, by definition, strategically constructed for external reception.
The moment you try to be authentic for an audience, you have introduced a performance dimension that changes the nature of the thing. You are no longer simply being — you are being in a way that is designed to communicate being. This is not inherently fraudulent; theater is valuable and human communication has always been performative. But calling the performance “authentic” is a category error that the industry has decided to stop noticing.
What brands mean when they say “authentic” is usually one or more of the following: unpolished aesthetics (which can be and frequently is highly produced); real people rather than actors (governed by casting calls, styling, and scripted talking points); genuine values (stated in brand guidelines and rarely operationalized); or honest communication (that has been approved by four internal stakeholders and a legal team). None of these are inauthentic, exactly. None of them are what the word originally meant.
The Market for Performed Naturalness
TikTok built a billion-dollar cultural format on the aesthetic of authenticity — raw footage, direct address, unedited moments, the appearance of someone just talking. It took approximately eighteen months for brands to colonize this format so thoroughly that the “authentic TikTok video” became a production category with its own brief template, its own creator briefing process, and its own performance benchmarks.
The irony is perfect, and the market has entirely absorbed it. Audiences know, on some level, that the “candid” moment in the influencer’s kitchen was planned, lit, and uploaded on a Tuesday afternoon after three takes. The performance of spontaneity is now a genre, and the genre has its own conventions as rigid as a Shakespearean sonnet. The authenticity has been scheduled.
This is not a cynicism argument. Audiences are sophisticated. They understand that branded content is branded content. The parasocial warmth they feel for the creator they follow is real, even if the “authentic moment” that generates it was technically manufactured. The emotional response is genuine; the authenticity framing is a convenient fiction that both parties have agreed to maintain.
The problem is not that the fiction exists. The problem is that the industry takes it seriously as a strategic objective rather than acknowledging it as a tone of voice choice. “Authentic” on a brief should mean “sounds like a person rather than a corporation.” Instead it’s often treated as a property of the content itself — as if the word, strategically applied, could make a sponsored post into an unmediated human moment.
The Brands That Get It Right (And How)
There are brands whose communication genuinely earns the word. They earn it not by performing naturalness but by having built actual organizational cultures, actual product philosophies, and actual relationships with their communities that precede the marketing. The communication is consistent with the internal reality — which means when things go wrong, the response is also consistent, because the values are real rather than decorative.
Patagonia’s environmental activism is cited endlessly because it preceded the marketing era that would have manufactured it — the positions were taken when they cost something, before “brand purpose” was a trend that consultancies could sell. The authenticity is not a tone of voice; it’s a track record. You can’t brief authenticity into existence. You can only communicate it after you’ve built it.
Most brands cannot do this, because most brands are not built around a genuine point of view — they’re built around a product category and a target audience and a share-of-market objective. This is not a criticism; it’s a description of how most commercial organizations work. The criticism is asking those organizations to communicate as if they were Patagonia when they are, in fact, a yogurt brand. The yogurt brand can communicate with warmth, clarity, wit, and humanity without invoking authenticity as if the yogurt has a soul.
What to Put in the Brief Instead
Replace “authentic” with what you actually mean. If you mean conversational: say conversational. If you mean self-aware: say self-aware. If you mean transparent about limitations: describe what the transparency looks like. If you mean content that uses real people in real situations: specify the format, the casting, the context.
The discipline of replacing “authentic” with precise language will produce better briefs and better creative. It will also surface the moments when “authentic” was doing work that the strategy hadn’t done — when “be authentic” was a way of not deciding what the brand actually believes, what it actually does, and what it actually wants the audience to think and feel and do.
The Fuck The Brief instinct applies here with particular force. A brief that says “we want an authentic campaign” is a brief that hasn’t answered any of the actual questions. Push it until it says something specific. What is real about this brand? What does it do that others don’t? What relationship does it have with its community that isn’t manufactured? Start there — and if there’s no answer, that’s the most authentic thing the strategy process will have produced all year.
Honesty is rarer than authenticity. NoBriefs — for the people willing to use it.
