Let’s start with a truth I’ll die on a hill defending: Mike Shields is one of the last real journalists in this industry.

He’s got the mind of a detective and the patience of someone who’s been watching marketers reinvent the wheel for twenty years straight. But here’s the thing—he’s also absolutely terrible at self-promotion. You could drop him into a conference full of brand managers bragging about their “personal brands,” and he’d quietly write the only story worth reading while everyone else films themselves talking about “authenticity.”

So yeah, I’m promoting him.

Because someone should. If I could buy Mike’s work, his newsletter, his brain—whatever—I would.

But he’s the kind of fiercely independent journalist who’d politely tell me to shove it, then publish something so piercing that it would make my own coverage feel like finger painting.

And maybe that’s the perfect metaphor for YouTube right now—a platform that everyone’s trying to own, control, and package neatly, but that stubbornly resists being boxed in.

YouTube is the mirror the industry can’t stop staring into, each buyer seeing exactly what they want reflected back. For one marketer, it’s television with data. For another, it’s social with longer attention spans. For a third, it’s the creator economy’s Wall Street, where influence is currency and attention is the market cap.

The result is chaos disguised as opportunity. CMOs sit in boardrooms declaring, “YouTube is TV now,” while their agencies whisper, “It’s still digital,” and the performance team in the corner mutters something about CPAs. Everyone’s technically right—and simultaneously missing the point.

Because YouTube isn’t becoming television; television is becoming YouTube. The line between entertainment and advertising has dissolved into pixels and pre-rolls, and every brand is now a programming network whether they meant to be or not.

It’s a strange evolution. What was once the wild frontier of vloggers and cats playing pianos has turned into a structured marketplace where brands commission “creator content” the way studios commission shows. Yet beneath the professional polish, the same messy energy that made YouTube compelling in the first place still hums underneath—unfiltered, unpredictable, and mostly beyond anyone’s control.

For media buyers, YouTube has morphed into a Frankenstein’s monster of media formats, stitched together by algorithms and ambition. Long-form storytelling lives beside chaotic short clips. Tutorials compete with unboxings. Reaction videos sit between pre-roll ads for luxury cars.

Buyers have to juggle three incompatible truths at once:

Budgets once reserved for 30-second prime-time spots are now quietly funneled into creators who can deliver five minutes of genuine attention. Meanwhile, the CFO still demands the same KPIs they got from broadcast, as if a teenager’s skincare haul and Sunday Night Football should somehow report under the same column.

It’s all measurable—until you try to explain it.

Here’s where the fun stops and the caffeine kicks in. Every CMO now lives in a constant state of dashboard-induced panic.

YouTube’s biggest selling point—its measurability—is also its biggest curse. Every data source tells a different story. Google says “brand lift.” Nielsen says “reach.” Third-party vendors say “trust us.” And the agency just nods politely, pretending they have a unified model while secretly praying the quarterly review gets postponed.

Some buyers treat YouTube like the Holy Grail of attribution: real-time reporting, engagement metrics, cross-screen reach. Others see it as a data swamp—too many formats, too many signals, too many ways to pretend an impression equals impact.

The truth sits somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. The more measurable YouTube becomes, the less meaningful those measurements feel. Every metric promises certainty, but in reality, measurement is theater—performed for the anxious, financed by the confused.

Marketers keep asking for a “universal video currency,” as if they can just Venmo trust into existence. But it’s never going to happen. Not when each platform guards its metrics like state secrets and brands keep chasing ROI like it’s a ghost they almost caught once in Q3.

Now let’s talk about the most overused word in the marketing dictionary: authenticity.

Every creative brief demands it. Every influencer promises it. Every brand pretends to embody it. But what does it actually mean when a billion-dollar company hires a twenty-year-old creator to make a “relatable” unboxing video in a $5 million campaign?

This is the paradox: creators are brands now, and brands are trying to become creators.
Creators have production schedules, brand managers, and quarterly KPIs. Brands are making “behind-the-scenes” TikToks pretending they woke up like this. The whole thing is a hall of mirrors—authenticity reflecting authenticity until the word loses all meaning.

Still, media buyers chase it. They build spreadsheets quantifying “fit,” dissecting tone, parsing engagement comments like theologians searching for proof of divine resonance. They’ll tell you that 10,000 engaged views beat 100,000 passive ones, and they’re right—but it’s also like saying you’d rather have one loyal fan than ten polite strangers. True, but not scalable.

That’s why the smartest buyers now test chemistry before contracts. They send products to creators, watch how they actually use them, and only then decide if it’s a match. It’s not about authenticity as a brand goal—it’s about believability as a business strategy.

YouTube isn’t the one having an identity crisis. We are.
The platform’s doing fine—printing money, absorbing culture, and redefining video faster than the rest of the industry can update their org charts. It’s the marketers, the agencies, the self-proclaimed “creator economy experts” who can’t decide what they’re looking at.

Is YouTube TV? Yes.
Is it social? Also yes.
Is it commerce, culture, and chaos all rolled into one? Absolutely.

But pretending it fits neatly into any of those boxes is exactly why brands keep falling behind. The buyers who win on YouTube don’t treat it like a channel—they treat it like an ecosystem. A living, breathing world where stories, creators, and brands collide in real time.

Everyone else will keep arguing over what counts as a view while YouTube quietly becomes the future of everything they’re trying to measure.

Let’s just call it what it is: “authenticity” has become the emotional kombucha of marketing. Everyone swears it’s good for you, no one can define what’s in it, and somehow it costs three times more than what you were doing before.

The word is now so thoroughly abused that it’s lost structural integrity. It shows up in every deck, every RFP, every influencer brief like a sacred mantra—“authentic voice,” “authentic connection,” “authentic brand love.” It’s the industry’s security blanket. Whenever a campaign feels shallow or overproduced, someone inevitably says, “We just need to make it more authentic,” as if sprinkling fairy dust on a KPI will suddenly make it human.

But here’s the reality: authenticity has become a performance, a simulation of sincerity. Brands hire “authentic creators” the way Hollywood used to hire method actors—hoping the audience can’t tell it’s sponsored. The influencer eats the granola bar with reverence, smiles at the camera, and whispers about “balance.” Meanwhile, the brand’s media buyer watches engagement tick up by 0.3 percent and calls it a win.

The irony is, the audience is not fooled. Viewers know exactly when they’re being sold something—they just don’t care if they like the person doing the selling. That’s the brutal math now. Authenticity doesn’t mean honesty; it means chemistry. And like any chemistry experiment, it can explode in your face if you over-engineer it.

Marketers treat “authenticity” like it’s a universal truth, but no two people mean the same thing when they say it. To some, it’s being human. To others, it’s emotional honesty. To a few, it’s vulnerability—whatever that means in a world where your “vulnerable moment” is filmed in 4K and uploaded with brand-safe hashtags. Even psychologists can’t agree. One called it “acting in accordance with one’s true self.” Fine. But which self? The one you are at 3 a.m. eating cereal? The one you are in a boardroom? The one replying “so honored” under your own LinkedIn post?

The problem is that authenticity has become a suitcase word—a convenient container for everything we want people to feel but can’t be bothered to describe precisely. When a word loses definition, it loses utility. “Authentic” used to mean something close to “genuine.” Now it means “I think this campaign will perform better if we make it sound like a diary entry.”

Even journalists have started banning it. Jordan Teicher once wrote that the word had become a crutch—an empty placeholder used to explain why something worked instead of how. He’s right. It’s a linguistic sugar substitute—sweet, comforting, and completely devoid of nutritional value.

Let’s talk about the economics of authenticity. The brutal truth is that authenticity doesn’t scale. It’s unpredictable, expensive, and worst of all, slow. Real connection takes time, and time doesn’t fit into quarterly planning cycles. The industry keeps trying to turn “trust” into a metric—tracking emotional resonance through sentiment analysis and keyword clouds, pretending “likeability” is just another input variable.

It’s not. Authenticity is inefficient by design. That’s why brands keep trying to industrialize it, to algorithmically manufacture it, to turn it into a data point that can justify their spend. But authenticity evaporates under measurement. The minute you quantify it, you kill it.

CMOs know this. They just can’t admit it. So they keep faking the funk. They write case studies about “authentic creator partnerships” that were planned six months in advance, negotiated by legal, and vetted by brand safety teams. And when the numbers come in flat, they blame “market saturation” instead of the obvious: the audience smelled the script.

Then there’s the AG1 model, which feels almost subversive in this sea of contrivance. The team doesn’t talk “authenticity”—they practice it. They send creators the product before they talk money. If the influencer doesn’t like it, that’s it. No deal. It’s shockingly simple: they only work with people who actually use what they’re selling.

That shouldn’t sound radical, but it does. It’s what happens when sincerity becomes a luxury good. AG1’s approach rejects the idea that authenticity can be forced through a contract clause or a brand brief. It’s not strategy—it’s hygiene. If the creator doesn’t believe in it, no amount of optimization will make the audience care.

That’s why long-term creator partnerships are replacing one-night-stand sponsorships. Brands have finally realized that durable relationships build trust in ways flashy, one-off integrations never can. People don’t believe your message because it’s polished; they believe it because it’s consistent.

Here’s the punchline no one likes: you probably don’t want authenticity at all. Not in its true, unfiltered form. If most creators were “authentic,” their feeds would be full of self-doubt, burnout rants, and videos about taxes. Audiences say they crave “real,” but they really crave “relatable aspiration”—just flawed enough to feel human, but polished enough to sell.

That’s why being “too authentic” can tank you. Studies even back this up: people who present as more “authentic” often get lower performance evaluations and fewer leadership opportunities. Authenticity, it turns out, is bad for business.

So maybe the goal isn’t authenticity at all. Maybe it’s integrity—the ability to sell something without betraying your intelligence or your audience’s. Maybe we stop trying to be “real” and start trying to be credible. Because no one’s asking for your unfiltered truth. They’re asking for a version of it that doesn’t make them want to close the tab.

Authenticity isn’t a strategy; it’s a side effect of doing things that don’t insult people’s intelligence. The smartest media buyers know that. They’re not buying followers—they’re buying trust. They know that 10,000 genuinely engaged viewers can move a brand further than 100,000 passive ones. They know that sending a sample before sending a contract matters more than any engagement rate. And they know that trying to measure “realness” is the fastest way to prove you don’t understand it.

So the next time someone in a meeting says, “We just need to make it more authentic,” here’s the only appropriate response: WTF does that even mean?

While everyone else is still talking about “the future of CTV,” ADOTAT is covering Roku’s Shoppable OS—where pressing OK on a remote is the new Add to Cart.

Peter Hamilton isn’t building an ad platform; he’s turning your living room into a transaction engine. We broke down how Roku’s Ads Manager now connects directly to Shopify Checkout, feeds real-time purchase data into its Conversions API, and rewires the entire funnel—from “watch” to “buy”—in one motion.

If you’re still measuring CPMs, you’re missing the real story: Roku isn’t serving ads—it’s serving commerce.

👉 Catch it now on ADOTAT: The Shoppable OS: How Roku’s “OK-to-Text” Became the Default Add-to-Cart.