What synthetic media revealed about brand communications.
For years, brands decided what “genuine” looked like. It was written into guidelines, checked in approval rounds and shot by crews who knew exactly what the brief wanted. Audiences went along with it because they had nothing to compare it with.
Generated imagery has changed that, though not in the way most people assume. People can’t reliably tell a synthetic face from a real one; in one study they did slightly worse than a coin toss. So they can no longer trust their eyes. What they have left is suspicion.
In our experience, that suspicion lands hardest on anything that looks too finished. That’s awkward for brands, because the marks of good production are the same marks: even lighting, a steady tone, people who never drift off message, locations that look like the brand rather than anywhere real. Those used to signal quality. Now they signal control, and control reads as made up, whether it was or not.
Guidelines can’t fix this, because guidelines are part of the cause.
Most content passes through legal, brand, comms and leadership before it goes out. Each round takes something away: the line that was too direct, the moment that wandered off message, the answer that didn’t match the values document. What survives is safe, consistent and on brand, and nobody believes it.
The viewer now decides what’s real, not the brand or the agency. They aren’t looking for production value. They’re looking for proof that something actually happened in front of the camera: someone being themselves, a place that exists, a sentence nobody wrote for them.
You can find that inside a real brief, with real stakeholders and real sign-off. But you have to work backwards from the audience: start with what someone watching would believe, then find where that meets what the brand needs to say.
That’s hard to see from the inside. Repeat your own messages long enough and what you need to say starts to feel identical to what people will believe. It isn’t.
That’s where we come in. We don’t rewrite the brief. We look for the true moment already inside it, because that’s the part people will actually believe.