Keeping it Real /

From the carefully curated world of Instagram influencers to deepfakes and artificial intelligence, the online world feels increasingly artificial. So some brands are responding by anchoring their communications on the authentic reactions, feelings and stories of real people.

This trend explores how brands can build trust through transparency, showcasing genuine reactions to their products and shining a light on personal stories to foster deep, authentic connections with their audiences.

Some things don’t change 

Casting real people in ads isn’t a novel idea; beauty brand Dove has been featuring real women in its communications since 2004 when it launched the Campaign for Real Beauty. Despite Unilever’s initial fears that women wouldn’t buy a beauty brand that didn’t promise to enhance attractiveness, the strategy proved successful, enabling Dove to foster a deeper connection with its audience. The Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004 led to a 700% increase in sales for Dove creams, and the brand’s share of the firming lotion market in the UK rose from 1% to 6% (read our Dove Brand Spotlight to learn more).

On a lighter note, supermarket chain Aldi used street casting for its Gold IPA-winning campaign series, Like Brands, which launched in 2011. In these popular vignettes on British life, ordinary people, such as gin-loving granny Jean Jones, compared branded products to their cheaper Aldi counterparts. ‘At the time, there was a whole raft of really expensive ads being shot with celebrities,’ Dave Price, ECD at McCann Manchester told Contagious of the campaign. ‘We thought it would be nice to do the opposite of what they’re doing. If you could shine a light on the people that actually shop there – people like you – that’s the sort of place that you feel comfortable.’

Dove and Aldi’s approaches resonated with their audiences because they reflected their customers’ real lives and circumstances and stood out from the artifice of most advertising. Today there is an even greater appetite for brands to share stories of real people to counter the deception of our increasingly digital world.

Trust in an inauthentic online world

The online world often appears as a curated façade, making it difficult to trust what you see. Social media is rife with carefully crafted personas that promote products and lifestyles that don’t reflect their true selves, but there is now a heightened scrutiny of paid endorsements. For example, in December 2023, Italy’s most popular influencer, Chiara Ferragni, who boasts almost 30 million followers on Instagram, was fined €1.075m ($1.16m) for falsely claiming that sales of her pink pandoro (an Italian Christmas cake) with cake producer Balocco would fund a children’s hospital in Turin. A growing cynicism towards influencers who shill brands merely for a paycheque also inspired the deinfluencing trend in 2023 where TikTokers began sharing products they didn’t like instead.

This issue of online inauthenticity is further exacerbated by generative AI, which perpetuates unrealistic portrayals of humanity. In April 2024, Dove pledged not to use AI to portray people in its ads with the campaign, The Code. The brand speculates that by 2025, 90% of online content will be created by artificial intelligence and we’re beginning to see more ads replace real people with generative AI. Financial services brand Etoro, for instance, created an ad that launched during the 2024 Paris Olympics, featuring a cast of AI-generated characters representing fictitious Etoro users.

Why trust matters

Brands must work harder today to earn consumer trust, but this effort will be rewarded with added business success. The Advertising Association’s think tank, Credo, identified trust as the second strongest driver of brand profitability and effectiveness in its 2024 Value of Trust Report, while a decade of data from the IPA Effectiveness Awards shows that trust is linked to better business outcomes. Between 2012 and 2022, the percentage of IPA entries citing trust as a key communication objective more than doubled, from 11% to 25%.

To build this trust, brands are moving away from paid actors and celebrity spokespeople and turning towards real people. According to Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer Report, 64% of consumers consider ‘people like myself’ to be the most credible brand spokesperson, emphasising that relatable voices carry more weight.

One way that brands are appearing more authentic, and thereby gaining the trust of their target consumers, is by giving more voice to real people in their communications and allowing them to share their genuine feelings and experiences with the brand and its offerings.

Documenting real experiences /

In 2020, Renault released a documentary-style TV series to promote its ZOE car and dispel myths about electric vehicle performance. The 100% Electric Vehicle campaign, by OMD France, followed real people using electric Renault cars in the remote village of Appy, France. Renault turned the content into a series of spots that were seen over 63 million times and resulted in €1m ($1.13m) earned media. ZOE sales increased by 50%, making Renault Europe’s best electric vehicle seller.

The documentary format enabled Renault to promote genuine user feedback about the car, then business director at OMD France, Vincent Renonciat, told Contagious. ‘Documentaries have roots in reality, this authenticity ensured that we could demonstrate how electric vehicles can have a positive impact on the lives of day-to-day users.’

Real moments, real reactions /

Depicting real reactions to your brand can also be a way to appear more authentic. By capturing actual moments when real McDonald’s customers received their orders, the fast food brand was able to remove the veneer of advertising.

For the 2023 campaign, A Second of Happiness, McDonald’s in Colombia got its delivery crew to surreptitiously take photos of customers using cameras installed in their caps when handing them their McDonald’s orders. Having acquired the necessary releases from the subjects, these pictures were then displayed in out-of-home ads.

John Raúl Forero Manrique, president and CEO of DDB Colombia (the agency behind the campaign), told us that capturing genuine customer reactions was central to the campaign’s success. ‘McDonald’s refers to something known as “happy chaos”, which happens when the delivery person rings the doorbell, immediately triggering a multitude of emotions upon the arrival of the order… The impact is authentic, it’s a genuine reaction from real McDonald’s customers, and that was the core of this campaign.’

The campaign triggered a 20% growth in delivery service through its own channels during the campaign activation days.

Featuring genuine customer feedback – good or bad – can be a powerful strategy to build trust with your audience. Plant-based food company NotCo, leveraged honest customer feedback by flipping the traditional taste test on its head with the Mayo Haters campaign in 2024. To prove how similar its NotMayo product tastes to traditional mayonnaise, the brand invited a group of self-proclaimed mayo haters to taste test the product in sandwiches, burgers and fries, while assuring them there was no real mayo in the food. Some testers reacted with such disgust that they spat out the food, with a few even retching.

While it’s unorthodox to feature people grimacing at the taste of your product in your ads, 'The key to this was authenticity and to show that the hate for NotMayo was real and unscripted,’ Danielle Watts, associate director of plant-based meats and condiments at The Kraft Heinz Not Company, told Contagious.

The campaign generated a 14% increase in purchase intent and a 96% increase in brand trust. Working with genuine mayo haters and employing a light-hearted approach produced an honest product campaign and added a sense of authenticity to the brand’s declaration that its mayo is as good as the real deal.

By shining a light on personal stories, brands can stand out and show empathy, which is crucial for earning people’s trust. As Stanford Marketing Professor Jennifer Aaker notes, ‘Stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone.’  

It is much easier for individuals to form emotional connections with personal stories rather than broad themes, as these narratives can resonate on a deeper level. Richard Huntington, chair and CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi, commented in the Contagious Radar Report 2024, ‘Telling stories about individuals – not groups of people, not segments, not cohorts, not personas, not made-up stuff, but real people – that’s how you touch reality.’ He added, ‘It’s about getting your nose pressed close up to the glass, so you can see inside people’s lives.’

Make it personal /

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty began with featuring real people instead of models, to portray a more authentic image of beauty. The strategy then developed to capture people’s genuine reactions to beauty ideals, such as the 2013 Real Beauty Sketches, which became the most-watched online ad at its release, amassing over 163 million views and winning 19 awards at the 2013 Cannes Lions.

Today, Dove highlights people’s personal stories and experiences around beauty and self-image. In April 2023,  the brand released a campaign with Ogilvy called Cost of Beauty, which featured found footage of a young girl called Mary, as she navigated adolescence and battled with the negative impact of social media on her self-image.

By tying the campaign to a real story and spotlighting the issues of body image and eating disorders, Dove reinforced its positioning as an empathetic brand that understands and reflects its audience’s realities. This approach not only resonated deeply with viewers but also resulted in 28 million organic views on Dove’s channels, indicating the powerful connection that genuine, emotionally driven storytelling can create.

Underline your positive effect /

Telling people’s personal stories allows brands to showcase how they positively impact lives. Xbox’s ‘Beyond’ platform, for instance, used real-life stories to demonstrate how the gaming console can connect people emotionally.

In 2021, the brand worked with McCann London to create two documentary-style films that depict elderly people learning to play video games remotely with the help of their younger relatives, highlighting the loneliness experienced by many senior citizens. The authenticity of these real-life interactions illustrated how the gaming console brand can bring people together, a story which wouldn’t have been possible with conventional casting.

‘The isolation problem is a real one that thousands of families around the world are facing,’ Sanjiv Mistry, executive creative director at McCann, told Contagious.  ‘A conventionally cast ad, with actors, just wouldn’t have done that reality any justice. I don’t think the initiative would’ve had the same heart and soul either if we’d gone down that more conventional route. Instead, viewing what unfolds through the lens of reality gives it more poignancy and importance.’

This commitment to real stories continued with the Beyond Xbox: Therapeutic Play campaign, which promoted the brand’s partnership with the charity Gamers Outreach, which provides therapeutic gaming tech to hospitalised children. The campaign’s emotional resonance was evident, generating 922,000 impressions on social media and driving a 100% increase in traffic to the Gamers Outreach website on launch day.

A human touch /

Sharing people’s true stories and experiences can help humanise brands, making them more relatable.

Australian insurer NRMA, for example, used real testimonials to personalise an otherwise faceless, corporate entity. Its Help Like No One Else campaign promoted the real work and stories of its claim assessors: the 60-second hero spot featured Judi, an assessor with 32 years of experience, responding to an urgent claim. Additional stories of dedicated assessors were shared through various media, with employee profiles and customer testimonials available on NRMA’s website.

Asking viewers to trust Judi, the personable claims assessor, instead of NRMA, a corporate insurance provider, is an easier task – especially in a functional, low-interest category like insurance. By highlighting the real work of its employees, NRMA reminded customers that they’re not just paying for financial compensation but will be met with a friendly face and a cup of tea in times of crisis.

Bringing attention to real people’s stories can also help humanise a cause. Suicide prevention charity CALM and UK broadcaster ITV recognised that the public had become desensitised to statistics about suicide. For their campaign, The Last Photo, they shifted focus to the human stories behind the numbers. The organisations worked with families who had lost loved ones and created an exhibition featuring the last photos of those who had taken their own lives – which attracted 500,000 visitors in seven days and increased donations by 400%.

By highlighting real people’s personal experiences with suicide rather than abstract data, CALM and ITV showed that authentic storytelling is a powerful tool for building connections and reinforcing trust.

Zig when others zag / In a world where a lot of advertising can feel artificial, ads that feature real people’s personal stories stand out because they feel more authentic and genuine.

Anchor advertising to real people’s stories / Connecting your brand’s messaging to relatable, real-life experiences fosters deeper, more meaningful connections with your audience.

Showcase genuine experiences / Highlighting both positive and negative aspects of people’s interactions with your brand in an unscripted, authentic style adds credibility to your communication.

Focus on personal stories / Telling individual stories rather than dealing in broad themes makes it easier for audiences to connect with your brand, and are a great showcase for how your offerings have positively impacted real lives.

Humanise your brand / Moving away from impersonal statistics and figures and spotlighting real people’s experiences, makes your brand more relatable and personal.