A mid-sized technology company announced this week the appointment of its first Chief Authenticity Officer, a newly created C-suite position responsible for ensuring that the company's authenticity strategy remains authentic to the company's authentic values.
"We've always been authentic," said the company's CEO in a press release that had clearly been through seven rounds of legal review. "But we realized we needed someone to be authentically in charge of that authenticity. Someone who could own the authenticity space."
The new CAO, hired from a boutique authenticity consultancy that also offers "genuine transparency workshops" and "real vulnerability retreats," will oversee a team of twelve Authenticity Specialists whose job is to audit company communications for inauthenticity and replace it with curated authentic-seeming alternatives.
"The key insight," the new CAO explained in an interview, "is that authenticity doesn't just happen. You have to be intentional about it. You have to have a strategy. You have to measure it." When asked how you measure authenticity, she said there were several proprietary frameworks for that, which she couldn't share because they were proprietary.
The content culture content culture angle on this is that the word "authentic" has been so thoroughly processed by marketing departments that it now means approximately the opposite of what it used to mean. Authentic used to mean unperformed. Now it means performed in a way that looks unperformed. The cultural commentary cultural commentary tradition has been tracking this for years.
The company's first authenticity initiative will be a campaign called "Real Talk," which will feature scripted videos of employees saying things that sound spontaneous. The campaign will run across all social platforms and will be supported by a paid media budget of $2.3 million, which the CAO described as "a genuine investment in genuine connection."
The creative culture creative culture response to this is, predictably, to do the opposite — to make things that are actually unperformed, actually unstrategized, actually just what they are. Which is harder than it sounds, because the moment you decide to be authentic, you've already started performing authenticity.
The spoof daily has been covering this beat for a while. The authenticity industrial complex is real and it is growing. The Chief Authenticity Officer is just the latest iteration. Next year it'll be the Chief Genuine Connection Officer. The year after that, the Chief Actually Real Officer. The titles will keep escalating. The authenticity will keep declining.
The company's stock rose 3% on the announcement.