Merriam-Webster named authentic the word of the year on the twenty seventh of November, citing a spike in lookups driven by arguments about artificial intelligence and celebrity. Three weeks later I have seen it on eleven separate year end trends slides, four of them from agencies I used to work with, one of them over a stock photo of a woman laughing at a salad.
That is the whole joke, and nobody presenting the deck seems to have noticed it.
People looked the word up this year because they stopped being able to tell what a person had made. Generated copy, generated voices, generated product photography, a flood of text that reads like it means something. The lookups were a symptom of doubt. Brands read the same headline and concluded that the correct response to widespread doubt was to describe themselves using the doubted word.
A word that has to be claimed out loud has already stopped being true.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, so I know how it happens. Someone puts authenticity on the positioning slide because it tests well and nobody argues with it. It survives every round of review precisely because it means nothing, which makes it the safest thing on the page and the least useful.
Look at the brands people actually believe. Duolingo has never once told you it is authentic. It behaves consistently in public, including when it is being deeply annoying. Patagonia does not claim integrity, it publishes the supplier list and lets you go check. Salt & Straw tells you which farm the pears came from and the pears do the arguing.
The pattern is boring and it is the entire trick. Authenticity is a verdict the audience returns after watching you do things. It is never a claim you can enter into evidence on your own behalf. The second you say it, you have moved from doing to describing, and people hear that shift the way they hear a lip sync.
So keep it out of the 2024 deck. Put in the specific commitments that would embarrass you if you broke them. Publish a number. Name a tradeoff you actually made. Say what you will not do for money, then get asked about it in eighteen months and still be able to answer.
Authenticity is a verdict the audience returns after watching you do things.
Portland has a hundred coffee shops that never once told me they were real. Ovation just kept making the coffee, in the same room, with the same people, for years, and I was never once asked to believe anything.