In a feed, polish looks like an ad

Will Wade rented an Aston Martin for £500. He spent £750 on a suit, £750 on a videographer and £250 on a hotel, and recreated a famous image from the Bond film Skyfall. He posted it on TikTok with the bill as the caption, ending: “Re-creating the famous James Bond Skyfall image: Priceless.” It has 6.8 million views.

Around the same time, one of Aston Martin’s dealers was posting the kind of video luxury car brands usually post: slow passes along the paintwork, engine noise, low sun. The captions went like this.

We collected 100 of the dealer’s posts and 100 videos about Aston Martin posted by other people, mostly fans with phones. The fans’ videos had almost four times the views.

The two sets look nothing alike. Two-thirds of the dealer’s posts were shot to look cinematic, against one in ten of the others. Four in ten of the others were shot casually on a phone, something the dealer did twice.

Why people scroll past polish

In 1994 two consumer psychologists, Marian Friestad and Peter Wright, described what they called persuasion knowledge. Over a lifetime, people learn what selling looks like. Once they recognize something as an attempt to sell to them, they treat it differently: they discount it, look for the catch or move on. Friestad and Wright called this a change of meaning. The same content means something else once it has been recognized as a tactic.

In a feed, the fastest way to recognize an ad is how it looks. Smooth camera moves, color grading and a voiceover belong to ads. A handheld phone, a face and a joke belong to people. The dealer’s videos were well made, and being well made told viewers exactly what they were.

AI is about to make this matter more

AI video tools are making the polished look cheap. Soon any brand will be able to produce cinematic footage on demand, and feeds will fill with it. When polish costs nothing, it stops saying much about quality and mostly says “ad.”

Brands shouldn’t stop making beautiful work. On TV, in a cinema or on a billboard, people expect an ad and judge it as one. The feed is different. The brands that do well there either give people something to make themselves, the way a rental car and a Bond film did for Will Wade, or they show up looking like a person.

Knowing which of those suits a brand starts with what people already post about it and its competitors, and which of those posts get watched. We track that for the brands we work with.