The biggest threat to authenticity in ads is sameness

Trends move quickly through advertising. A visual language catches on and before long, brands with nothing in common start to look and sound alike. 

The style starts doing the work the idea should be doing. That’s the sameness we mean: work built around what feels current instead of what is true to the brand. If you can change the logo without changing the idea, it was never ownable to begin with.

More ways to make things doesn’t automatically lead to more original thinking.

As more of our world becomes digital and perfectly produced, people seem to crave things that feel human, tactile, imperfect and unpredictable. Things we can feel in our hands. That isn’t a rejection of technology. AI has made anything we can imagine easier to create. That’s incredibly powerful. But more ways to make things doesn’t automatically lead to more original thinking. Without something true and ownable, convincing work can feel interchangeable. 

That puts more pressure on the choices behind the work. Everything we make in advertising is constructed or curated. We develop the story, build the scene, cast the people, choose the camera and shape the performance. Those choices don’t make it fake. They create the conditions for something real to happen. A pause. A shift in someone’s voice. A truth people can feel before they have the words to explain it. Something human.

Find the brand's truth

We start with a question: what is the ownable truth connecting this brand to someone’s lived experience? Not just a universal emotion, but a connection the brand has earned the right to make. That question comes before how we film it or what technology we use, because the idea should determine which tools make sense.

Human truths are often universal. People want to protect their families. They feel joy or relief when someone they love comes home. But those truths are only the starting point. Specificity makes them meaningful. Who are these people? What have they lived through? What detail makes someone recognise a piece of their own life? And why does this brand belong in that moment? Without those answers, even an emotionally true story can feel interchangeable.

A campaign can look exactly like reality and still feel empty.

That’s where docu-style filmmaking can be powerful. It isn’t an authenticity filter. It gives us a way to observe behavior, create space around the performance and let something unplanned find its way into the story. A campaign can look exactly like reality and still feel empty. The stronger test is whether people recognise something of themselves in it and believe the brand has earned its place there.

Above: During the shoot for Omaha Steak's America's Table hero film, an actor's unplanned emotional gesture brought extra authenticity to the scene.  

Leave room for what you didn’t plan

For Omaha Steaks' campaign celebrating America's 250th birthday, we created a scene around a soldier returning home from war. On the page, we experienced the homecoming through him: the comfort of returning to a place where he finally felt safe. But as we began blocking the scene, the actor playing his mother brought something different to it. The emotional centre shifted toward the distance between them and everything she had been carrying until he walked through the door. Her performance was unplanned, raw and instinctive. It felt real. We recognised the truth in it and made room for it.

Audiences stop being people with something to gain and become wallets, impressions or clicks.

Leaving room for what we didn’t plan doesn’t mean giving up control or making the work rough to look authentic. It means knowing when the unexpected has given you something more honest than what was on the page, then having the judgment to leave it alone.