There's no need to fake authentic content, you have it in spades

Something strange is happening with social media (again). Many of the biggest and well-funded brands have started making their ads worse, seemingly on purpose.

Shakier footage, grimier lighting, noticeably less polish than their budgets would ever suggest. What some are calling 'de-produced' content because the scruffier version has better audience engagement than the beautifully produced one it has replaced.

You may have also taken note of the little conversations Claude or GPT has with itself when researching an answer for you. Watch closely and you will see “discarding templated content”.

What’s happening here?

If you're spending real money to make your marketing look lo-fi, you already know exactly what your customers trust and it wasn’t the polished version.

Similarly if you’re cranking out AI slop for a perceived cost and time saving, you are being ignored. By everyone. Humans and machines.

Authenticity is hard to scale?

Creator marketing has been the go-to for more authentic content, though as discussed here in TheCheckout, it has a scalability problem. The channel that seemingly wins on returns is still starved of budget, purely because it's harder to run at scale compared to opening a Meta ads manager and setting your daily spend.

Audiences, meanwhile, have become more agile at spotting a paid placement, AI generated content, or a creator tapping their fingers on a face cream they supposedly always use, when they couldn’t possibly have finished the contents of the other product they were tapping last week.

The scepticism that follows, mine included most days, is not isolated. The most recent survey from Business of Fashion of 10,000 consumers, hits home.

Keep it real

Any brand's best marketing has always been a real customer talking about them to the people who actually trust that customer's opinion. The original power in honest ‘word of mouth’ recommendations simply didn't get treated as marketing in the formal sense, because it turned up in someone's Stories or tagged Reel rather than on an approved media plan. It also arrived on its own wholly unpredictable schedule rather than on a strategic campaign calendar and there was never a tidy way to put a CPM, CPC, or ROAS against it. So it sat entirely outside the budget, just quietly doing some of the most valuable work for a business while nobody even bothered measuring it.

Customer Media has arrived.

Rather than renting attention from creators for as long as the invoices keep getting paid, brands are now recognising the customers with instant currency for sharing what they already use or frequent, and are disbursing that brand currency through smart fintech to be spent straight back into the business through regular payment rails.

The same pound/euro ends up doing several jobs at once: it produces content, it distributes trusted impressions, it brings a customer back to buy again, it forward-books revenue and it often introduces someone entirely new to the brand through a community/network the brand never had access to before. Every one of those newly acquired customers can then step into the same loop themselves, creating more advocacy, more content and more repeat purchases.

What’s more useful, 100,000 followers on social, or 1,000 customers creating content for you every day?

Linking social graphs, to smart phones, to checkout, means the performance outcomes are now measurable. Across more than 250 global DTC and retail brands, Customer Media has generated over 75 million organic impressions, at average CPMs of $2.48 (about 1/5th of equivalent paid media cost) with an average return spend from the same customer of 4.2x their reward.

A creator's relationship with a brand tends to end the moment the invoice clears, but a real customer keeps buying and advocating long after that. It’s a virtuous loop. So the same post that earns a brand reach also earns it a repeat order and that second half is where a media channel turns into a measurable growth loop instead.

When I speak to a Head of Influencer Management, their first question is

“How do we control the brief?”

When I speak to a Head of Performance Media, their first questions is:

“How quickly can we get a customer-creator in every post code?”

None of this needs more fakery or manufactured authenticity, I think most people are all media fluent enough to see through the majority. Brands must be willing to look properly at the customers already buying from them and decide that what those customers are doing entirely unprompted is worth building an ‘always on, compounding channel’ around, rather than something to route quietly past on their way to the next expensive campaign brief or influencer partnership.