Authenticity Over Perfection: Why “Polished” Might Be Hurting Your Brand

The best equipment is the equipment you have. The best camera out there is the one that you have with you when you need to take the shot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Beyond Social Podcast, the show where we go behind the scenes on how we’re building an awesome tool for marketers. Today, we’re taking a step in a different direction than the social product and all the tools that we’re working with to help marketers and strategies to help marketers. We’ve got an awesome guest on our episode today. We’ve got Sabrine, our head of social, you guys, or head of marketing, excuse me. Sabrine, who’s been on our episodes here before. And we’ve got John Stephen. If you haven’t seen our episode with him, where we talked about community engagement, definitely make sure to check it out. He is, I mean, I’m going to say award-winning, because man, I’ve seen some of your stuff. He’s an award-winning social media consultant. He’s a speaker. He’s worked with brands. His experience ranges from working in higher education with universities all the way through most recently working with brands like Prime Video and shows Invincible, Lord of the Rings series.

The 10/90 Rule: Content vs. Engagement

So we’re going to focus on that tip of the iceberg then, kind of work the reverse. We talked about the below the sea level and now we’re going to, but I want to explore the concept and we’ve been seeing this a little bit more often now and I’m not exactly sure why this changed recently, but produced content, right? Brands will maybe hire out an agency or a marketer who’s going to get a nice camera, get things looking super pristine, crisp audio, all that great stuff and then on the other side, same brand, maybe recording something on their phone, a little bit more, maybe less polished, let’s say, and somehow that’s performing really well, sometimes even better than more polished content.

The Vulnerability Factor in Authentic Content

Yeah, it’s, and it’s something I think we’ve seen for a long time, where, you know, we keep saying authentic content and what does that mean? Because, you know, what makes something real and authentic? Personally, I think it requires a bit of vulnerability, which scares brands. Like, you got to be a little vulnerable and you know, that authenticity. Sometimes we lose that in the production, right? We get focused and I’m the same way. I can be like a video file or audio file and just be like, oh man, this picture has to be absolutely perfect, everything has to be just right. But your audience doesn’t care about that so much if the story and the feeling and the emotion isn’t there.

Speed and Agility vs. Perfect Production

Absolutely. So it’s funny because right before this episode, John and I were having a conversation and I said to him like, you know, everybody’s trying to build a presence on social media and even from a thought leadership lens, in order to build thought leadership, you have to have a thought and you’re only able to have that thought if you’re taking the time to think, right? But not so much that you want it to be perfect to the point that when that wave has passed, you’re not able to kind of capitalize on it. So I think it is definitely a hot topic. It’s a very big debate, which is, guys, which one is it? Because you look at Instagram and TikTok and the guidelines are very much, make sure Rule Number One that your content is really good quality. I think we over index on that sometimes, which is it doesn’t have to be like 4K all the time or whatever, you know?

The Cognitive Overload of Over-Produced Content

And actually, John, to build on that, I was reading this research, um, a couple of days ago about cognitive overload, which is when people are producing video to tell the brand story rather than their own and they’re like very buttoned up videos beautifully made, um, we associate that quality with paid ads, right? So what happens is you’re like, whoa, this is like too well done to inspire me. So this is probably somebody who has like a ton of money just sitting on the side and they’re privileged and so they’ve produced this content verses, I see someone who, and Vital and Reggie and I were talking about the guy who has an entire Instagram feed of sneezing and he just sneezes real funny and he has a ton of followers.

Case Study: Higher Education’s BS Meter

Um, one, especially within in higher ed, you’re, you’re dealing with much younger audiences for the most part and the, those audience is they, their, their BS meter is very high. They can, they can tell. They like, they know when they’re being marketed to. They, they know when they’re being sold to. So they they’ve already kind of, especially hearing from a university, they’ve got kind of a bit of skepticism a little bit, like of course, the university is going to say that. So, and so a lot of times, you know, universities, they love their polish. They want to make it look as clean and as beautiful and crisp as possible.

The River Jump: When Unpolished Content Wins

But what’s really unique about it is there’s a river flowing through the campus a small the San Marcus River, it’s spring fed, it’s 72 degrees year round. It’s beautiful. Um, and the tradition is at graduation. The students jump into the river with their capping gowns on. It’s a big deal. They’ve done it for years. And, um, one, one year year for graduate are videographer of course, they want the big, you know, administration wants the big graduation video of, you know, people getting their diplomas, all that. We spend a lot of time on that but he’s like, while I was filming it, I grabbed some B-roll of these students jumping into the river and we had it was about 30 seconds long. He threw, I mean, he just threw it together, you know, made a few shots in slow motion and then, you know, put some music over it. and that did better than anything. That was the highest performing content that year.

Experience Still Matters: The Skilled Eye Behind “Simple” Content

It’s unpolished, but it doesn’t mean that it’s easy, right? Because it’s definitely not easy. It was always as simple as picking up an iPhone, shooting something, and putting it on social, everybody would get tons of followers. It’s, there’s so much more than that and that’s what you’re saying there too. It’s like the experience that you and your team have had in the years of figuring it out trying or you know, getting successes, but also learning from failures.

Exactly. I think it’s, you know, we see a lot, people talk about reactive content trends now, you know, and like, oh, what are we going to do on this trend or last night, you know, um, you know, it was, it was the Oscars or whatever. What are we going to, you know, this photo is trending, how are we going to use it? And sometimes that can be really effective. But, and you can create content that does really well very quickly. But it takes those years of experience to be able to identify it and go, oh, there’s something there that works for our brand or on the flip side, be able to look at it and go, that’s something we don’t need to touch with a 10 foot pole.

Brand Size and Agility: The Duolingo Example

That’s probably a whole another episode on that of not touching that one. But… And sometimes you know, it’s a combination of thinking from different people. So, which is somebody spots an idea and says, wouldn’t it be so cool if we did something with this? That’s still an idea of something that could be done. Then somebody from the design team is like, you know, what if we like, for example, during the Olympics and I’m completely missing like I can’t remember her name, the one of the gymnasts. Um Simone. Yes. She had there’s shot of her, we’re just midair and one of her hands is kind of up in the air and then her you know and Mercedes took that and kind of placed her right in the center of the rim.

The Shifting Platform Guidelines

Oh yeah. It feels like the social platforms change their opinions like all the time. like it, it just goes back and forth, you know? Um, if you read the the book Uh No Filter, it’s like the about the origin story of Instagram, you know, when Instagram started they were very posh. It was very like, we don’t want brands here. We want this to be a place for beautiful photography. You know, they wanted everything kind of pristine and and and clean and now I, I hate to say it, I feel like Instagram feels like like, like The Bargain Bin at TJ Maxx. It’s just a little bit of everything just thrown in there now.

High-Profile Client Challenges

Oh, that’s a huge challenge especially in the entertainment industry because they’ve been doing it for so long and and can you blame them? You know, you’re you’re trying to promote a movie that’s going to be premiering in IMAX and have like amazing special effects and all of these things and to it, you want to do a a cell phone video of, you know, the cast holding puppies. You know, like what’s the you know, so trying to talk studios into to to to doing that can be a challenge but also showing them that you know, hey, unfortunately this is just what always happens is you have to point some one person has to do it for them to agree and go, oh, well this other, you know, look at this and this performed really well.

Practical Tips: Finding Your Authentic Voice

Oh, oh, that’s a tough question. I would say here here’s one of the first questions I ask when I get a new client is what about our brand can we make fun of? Are you okay with making fun of? Um, because then you know where you can kind of humanize yourself, you can be a little self-deprecating, you can be real and and honest and not get fired. Um, you know, for example, back back to Texas State University, the university does have a river through it, but it’s also built on a hill. So like, they’re stairs that the students say every day is leg day at Texas State because you’re climbing stairs all the time. And that was our what we could make fun of.

Start Now, Fail Fast, Learn Faster

Well, I mean, just I think that that’s it. Like, you’ve just got to start. You’ve got to do the thing. Like, get out there and and and do it. You know, and you’re gonna fail. like that’s that’s part of it. Like, I’ve I’ve made so many posts both like both high production and low production value that I thought, oh man, this is going to take off, this is going to take off and it falls flat. And you learn from that, right? And that makes you better down the line. So, you’ve got to have those successes and those failures in order to to succeed in the long run.

That’s how we learn.

Absolutely. Thank you so much again, John for being here with us. Thank you Sabrine. We appreciate appreciate you for flying all the way from Boston to New York to be with us today. All right. Well, thank you guys for watching. We appreciate you guys as always for sharing and commenting. Let us know if there’s an episode idea that you have or if you want to join us in the studio here for an upcoming episode. Just head over to vsl.com Beyond Social. And, uh, we’ll see you next time.