Authenticity is one of those words brands love to say. And that's a problem because saying and doing are two different things. True Authentic Expert campaigns solve the audience distrust problem by handing the message to someone with a better reason to say it. A crash survivor. A firefighter. A child. A ski instructor. A prisoner. A drag queen. A dinosaur. Someone who knows, feels, proves or embodies the message in a way the brand never could. Here are eight ways from the Perspective Engine to find the expert who makes the idea more trusted, more interesting and more famous.
The eight sub-tactics
- Lived Consequence Experts
- Occupational Truth Experts
- Insider Knowledge Experts
- Embodied Symptom Experts
- Credibility by Inversion
- Behavioural Authority Figures
- Unfiltered User Experts
- Cultural Permission Experts
1. Lived Consequence Experts
Use people who have personally experienced the thing the audience is trying to ignore.
Volvo, Survivor Sales Agents
Volvo could have made another safety ad. Instead, it put real crash survivors on the sales floor. These were people whose Volvo had saved their life, explaining safety features not as product benefits, but as the reason they were still alive.
A salesperson can be doubted. A survivor is much harder to dismiss. The campaign worked because the expert did not have to perform credibility. They were the credibility.
NZTA’s Belted Survivors used the same logic with young rural men who saw seatbelts as weak. Seatbelt-wearing crash survivors became the proof, with their injuries recreated as visible marks of survival. Aleve’s The Painful Truth let people recovering from opioid addiction talk to pain sufferers about the risks of pain treatment choices. Follow2Unfollow gave prison inmates Twitter accounts so they could warn young people what a life of crime actually costs.
2. Occupational Truth Experts
Use professionals who see the reality every day.
Firefighters Don’t Like Fire Movies - Fire and Emergency New Zealand
Hollywood taught people that fires are dramatic, visible and survivable. Firefighters know the truth: smoke moves fast, incapacitates quickly and gives you almost no time to escape. Fire and Emergency New Zealand turned firefighters into film critics. They critiqued the false version of fire people had absorbed from movies and used that gap to make smoke alarms feel urgent. It was not a safety lecture. It was a correction of the source code.
Waka Kotahi’s Mixed Driving used medical experts and emergency responders to unpack the danger of mixing substances before driving. Renault’s Time Fighters used firefighters to show why post-crash rescue innovations matter when minutes decide outcomes. parkrun’s Just What The Doctor Ordered borrowed the authority of doctors to make a free Saturday 5K feel like a credible wellbeing prescription.
3. Insider Knowledge Experts
Use people who know the world better than the brand ever could.
Ask Guðmundur - Inspired by Iceland
Inspired by Iceland turned locals into a human search engine. Travellers could ask Guðmundur questions and receive answers from real Icelanders across the country. The charm is in the replacement. Not another official travel guide. Not another glossy landscape promise. A real person, with a real name, answering real questions about the place they know best.
Austria’s Chat SkiPT updated the same instinct for the AI age. Instead of letting travellers ask ChatGPT for generic winter tips, the Austrian National Tourist Office invited them to ask real ski instructors. BARMER used people in their nineties and beyond to turn long lives into health wisdom. Piper Verlag’s Criminal Reviews asked an ex-convict to review a crime novel for realism, giving the book a review no literary critic could write.
4. Embodied Symptom Experts
Use someone who naturally owns the awkward truth.
Mermaid - Gyno-Canesbalance, LOLA Mullen Lowe, 2023
A mermaid is the one woman who is meant to smell fishy. That makes her a strangely perfect spokesperson for bacterial vaginosis. The campaign used her to explain an intimate symptom with humour and clarity. The idea is silly, but the logic is sharp. A mermaid gives the brand permission to say the thing people avoid saying.
Aspercreme’s Asperqueens used drag queens as experts in high-heel pain because they perform through it. Vizio’s Hear Like They Do used dogs as sound experts because dogs hear more than humans. Aviation Gin used Nick Cannon as the comic expert in fatherhood overload for its Vasectomy cocktail because the casting made the joke do half the work before the script had even started.
