Brands Pull Back On Highly-Produced Corporate Video As Audiences Prefer Real, Unfiltered Content

As generative AI makes it effortless to produce flawless corporate content at scale, perfection is losing its impact. Audiences are growing wary of slick, overproduced videos and responding instead to content that feels human and immediate. In response, many brands are easing off the polish and letting imperfection show, not as a flaw, but as a way to rebuild trust in an increasingly synthetic content landscape.

After more than a decade inside large enterprise organizations, Robin Joseph knows how corporate standards are made, and how they can get in the way. Now the Creative Services Lead for Video and Interactive at global consulting firm ZS, with prior experience at Honeywell and EY, he brings a pragmatic view on how brands can stay credible while loosening their grip on polish.

According to Joseph, the very technology that promised infinite creativity has led to a sea of sameness that can erode brand identity. "With the influx of AI, anyone can create their own stock footage. The result is that everything seems random and templatized, with less personal branding. Thought leaders need to better integrate their own message on top of that," says Joseph.

• Raw vs. refined: The philosophy favors simple tools as a deliberate choice, helping to achieve an unpolished look that many in the audience now perceive as more trustworthy. "There's too much refinement happening now. Earlier, opinions didn't have to go through an LLM. They were raw, and people loved it."

• The diamond is the rough: "The focus moves to capturing authentic moments with accessible technology, a strategy rooted in a change in audience expectations that accelerated during the COVID era," Joseph explains. We became fine with raw, unpolished footage as long as the content was good. A video can be shot on an iPhone. It doesn't have to be super high-res, but it needs to be authentic."

For more advanced use cases, Joseph points to a clear division of labor. Humans stay front and center where trust, credibility, and presence matter most. AI steps in where speed and scale make the difference. It’s a practical model, but not a free-for-all. The efficiency AI brings only works when it’s paired with clear ethical boundaries and explicit consent.

• Human at the heart: "Our thought leaders need to be in front of the camera," says Joseph. But AI comes in only after that human core is established. "Imagine a thought leader has a piece that he wants to share, and it needs to be localized. So right now, in his voice, it can be in multiple languages at a click of a button." But the capability comes with a hard line: "If you're cloning someone’s voice, you absolutely need legal approval."

• Trust and transparency: Once legal consent is in place, the next obligation is to the audience. For Joseph, transparency is a trust signal. "It's mandatory to disclose that content is generated by AI," he says. "The goal is to build trust, and passing off AI-generated content as your own would be counterproductive."

• Crawl, walk, run: For leaders wary of moving too fast, Joseph advocates a gradual on-ramp. "You can start with just using text. Take snippets of content and make them more engaging by adding context or data visualizations, then run it as a campaign on a platform like LinkedIn," he advises. From there, brands can ease into richer formats. "If leaders are hesitant about video, audio is a great alternative. People consume content via podcasts all the time, while driving or doing other work."

In the end, Joseph sees the metric itself changing. As more content lives and dies on social platforms, clicks matter less than connection. "The goal is to have something within the video that starts a conversation," he says, "because that’s what kicks off the entire lead generation process." In a feed full of perfect content, the work that earns a response is the work that feels human enough to invite one.