This leads us to trust erosion because people stop believing the messages delivered by these "perfectly-optimised narratives", leaving us in a landscape where everything is polished and "perfect" — yet empty. 

Evolution, Devolution, Revolution

We worked through the phase in advertising where understanding consumers was all about data, information and research — and came out the other side understanding that the numbers were great for helping us understand where consumers were, but not how they connected with our work, so the industry went back towards understanding the people they were speaking to. Then everyone piled in on AI, which made it "easier" to generate advertising material, and we are now at the point where we need to roll back again and focus on what makes human beings connect with ads and brands.

This leaves consumers with a "gut feel" nagging sense that something doesn’t look or sound human or "right". As a result, scepticism is at an all-time high and trust is at an all-time low.

While AI can (imperfectly) mimic human behaviour, it doesn't have the thing that directs human behaviour: the nervous system. When a consumer interacts with an ad, their nervous system is affected — in the simplest possible form, they feel an affinity for what they're seeing, or they don't. Trust isn't built in the mind, but in the nervous system. 

Managing Consumers' Cognitive Capacity

Consumers' cognitive load has reached capacity with everything that is being thrown at them — and what the human brain does to protect itself when it feels overwhelmed is stop analysing, instead defaulting to fast, intuitive processing in the nervous system as a shortcut to fend off exhaustion. When the brain opts for that safety, it switches into this mode where we skim or avoid the messaging altogether. The nervous system is a threat detector and the brain is the logic machine. The result is that the brand message doesn't land because consumers are actively avoiding ads or their bodies are making them gloss over to avoid being overwhelmed. 

Because we have a nervous system and AI doesn't, we identify the fabricated empathy that has no real texture. It's a story, but there's no reality, humanity or friction to it — and our nervous systems pick that up quickly. Humans are constantly scanning for patterns and when the nervous system detects a disruption in a pattern, it alerts us. When that happens as an onslaught, it leads to an overload, which shows as fatigue. 

What regulates the nervous system are things which feel real to us. When we believe what we experience, we feel safe enough to engage and connect, in an attempt to understand it, rather than instantly dismissing it. Authenticity, therefore, resonates with and regulates the nervous system, giving people the space to pay attention. 

To capture attention, then, brands will need to go beyond "looking human" — they'll need to produce content that makes consumers' nervous systems feel regulated and safe by demonstrating emotional congruency and consistency over time. They need to rebuild that trust at a fundamental psychological and physiological level with the thing that currently feels most scarce of all: authenticity.

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*Image courtesy of contributor