I produced a video once where the most expensive shot was the one that looked like nobody had thought about it.
Ten rounds of script development. Eleven takes. Four days in edit. And then a meeting, a genuine, scheduled, multi-stakeholder meeting, to discuss whether the result still felt sufficiently off-the-cuff.
I am not embarrassed to tell you this. Or rather, I am slightly embarrassed, which is probably why it is worth saying out loud.
The illusion of the unplanned
We have built an entire aesthetic grammar around the performance of spontaneity. The slightly off-centre framing. The ambient noise left in. The sentence that trails off in a way that has been carefully written to trail off. The thought leadership post that reads like it was dashed off at six in the morning and was, in fact, reviewed by four people over a fortnight and quietly rewritten by each of them.
The reason we do this is not cynical, or at least it didn't begin that way.
Audiences had become fluent, rightly, in the visual language of institutional communications. High production values had become a reliable signal of managed messaging, and managed messaging had become a reliable signal of something worth being sceptical about. So we adapted.
We learned to speak a different visual dialect. We reached for the rough cut and the imperfect take because these carried a different signal: this is real, this is unmediated, this person is just talking to you.
The limits of looking 'real'
The problem is that signal has been so thoroughly colonised by professional communicators that it barely functions anymore.
Audiences feel the effort behind the effortlessness even when they can't name it. And the gap between what the aesthetic promises, directness, authenticity, genuine human communication, and what it is actually delivering, a carefully managed performance of those things, is precisely the kind of gap that erodes trust slowly and without a single identifiable moment of failure.
I wrote in an earlier column about the way organisations have enthusiastically embraced the language of authenticity while remaining perfectly, carefully, strategically safe. This is the visual version of that same problem. We are not being more direct. We are making increasingly sophisticated use of the aesthetic codes of directness. Those are not the same thing, and the distinction matters more now than it ever has.
Because AI has changed the economics of this in ways the profession has not yet properly absorbed.
AI has broken the old visual shortcuts
For years, visual quality was a rough but functional proxy for institutional seriousness. High production value signalled resources, which signalled credibility, which gave audiences a reason to pay attention before they had processed a single word. The rough cut worked in the opposite direction for the same reason: it signalled the absence of that machinery, which felt like the absence of spin. Both proxies were imperfect. Both broadly worked.
But AI is dismantling both simultaneously.
The cost of producing visually sophisticated content has collapsed. Which means polish no longer reliably signals credibility, because almost anyone can produce it now. And the cost of producing convincing roughness, the compression artefact, the authentic-feeling imperfection, the appearance of a single unplanned take, has also collapsed. Which means the rough cut no longer reliably signals authenticity either, because that too can be generated, adjusted, and optimised at scale.
What we are left with is a visual environment in which the proxies our audiences have been using to calibrate trust are becoming progressively unreliable, and most of the communications industry is responding by producing more content faster using the same proxies, without stopping to ask whether those proxies still mean what we think they mean.
McLuhan’s observation that the medium is the message has been invoked so many times in our industry that it has almost stopped being useful. But it is genuinely clarifying here. Because if the rough cut, the handheld frame, the unpolished register, if these are the medium, then the message they carry is one about authenticity and approachability. And if that message is being manufactured, the medium is lying.
Not in any single detectable moment. Just steadily, quietly, at scale.
What organisations should ask before the brief
The organisations that will navigate this well are not, I think, the ones that crack the code on what authentic-looking content looks like in an AI-saturated environment. They are the ones that develop the judgment to ask, before the shoot, before the brief, before the meeting about whether it looks casual enough: what does our choosing this aesthetic actually say, and is it true?
Aesthetic judgment in strategic communications has always been present. It has rarely been explicit. It has almost never been treated as a strategic competency in its own right, something to be developed, interrogated, and defended in the same way we defend a key message or a media strategy.
That needs to change. Not because beauty matters for its own sake, though it does. But because in a visual environment where the old signals are failing and the new tools make every register equally accessible, the question of what your content looks like, and what that appearance communicates before anyone has processed a single word, is no longer an aesthetic question at all.
It is a trust question. And trust, as this column has been arguing for a few months now, is the thing our profession exists to build and has developed a remarkable number of sophisticated ways to quietly undermine.
Matthew (Matt) Thomas is Founder and Chief Catalyst at Stake The Reputation Company, a Melbourne-based consultancy working across brand, reputation, communications, and public affairs. He has advised some of Australia’s largest private companies and has worked extensively with global organisations localising their storytelling and narratives for Australian audiences. His experience spans consumer, government, health, infrastructure, technology, and corporate reputation, including advisory work at all levels of government in Australia.
Matt’s work sits at the intersection of communications, behaviour change, and institutional strategy. He is also a contributor to the The Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose, writing on reputation, legitimacy, and the growing gap between organisational messaging and operational reality.
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