There's a new app blowing up with the college crowd and I have thoughts. BeReal sends you one notification per day at a random time, gives you two minutes to take an unfiltered photo with both cameras simultaneously, and that's it. No filters. No editing. No followers count. No likes.
The premise is radical in its simplicity: what if social media was just... real?
I love this concept. I also think it's going to fail. Or rather, succeed just long enough to get acquired or copied, then die the death of every authenticity play that confronts the fundamental tension at the heart of social media.
Here's the tension: people say they want authenticity, but they consistently choose curation. Every single time. It's not hypocrisy. It's human nature. We are social creatures performing identity for an audience, and we have been since long before the internet. Social media didn't create performance. It just gave us better stages.
BeReal is fun right now because it's novel. Taking a photo of your messy desk or your sad lunch feels rebellious when everyone else is posting highlight reels. But novelty fades. And when it does, people either stop using the app (because showing your real life every day gets boring fast) or they start gaming it ("accidentally" only posting when they're doing something interesting).
We've seen this before. Remember when Instagram was just artsy food photos with Valencia filter? When Snapchat's whole thing was impermanence and rawness? Both evolved toward more production, more polish, more performance. Not because the platforms forced it, but because users demanded it.
Authenticity in marketing is like "cool" in high school: the moment you try to manufacture it, you've already lost it.For brands watching BeReal: please don't rush in. I'm already seeing think pieces about "how brands can show up on BeReal" and it makes my eye twitch. The entire value proposition is the absence of brands. Your presence there is definitionally inauthentic. You are a corporation pretending to be a person. Everyone can tell.
The deeper lesson isn't about BeReal specifically. It's about understanding that consumer desire for "authenticity" doesn't mean what marketers think it means. People don't actually want to see your CEO's unfiltered lunch. They want to feel like the brand they're buying from is honest, consistent, and not trying to manipulate them.
You achieve that through product quality, transparent pricing, honest advertising, and responsive service. Not through a two-minute daily photo of your office dog.
But the office dog content is pretty cute, I'll give you that.