Perfect Ain’t Quite Right
ISSUE 22 [551g Per Serving]
Unspoken Trials
I’ve had some time on my hands lately — more to come on that — and so, inevitably, certain tasks have reared their heads. You know the ones: usually content to haunt you quietly from the wings, but sensing the moment, they clamber for the spotlight — clearing out the garage, sorting through two decades of old clothes and selling them on whatever pre-loved platform is currently in vogue, or — the big one — finally organising Spotify.
There is another version of me somewhere who has mastered these tasks. Rather than treating them as luxury to-dos, they were prioritised and tackled head-on. The garage is spotless, the retro outfits shifted. And Spotify no longer comprises a handful of playlists so limited in depth and breadth that the algo will always — without fail — deviate to We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off by Jermaine Stewart. But for now, he remains out of reach.
Reddit Or Not
Dove’s Real Beauty platform carved out another headline-grabbing piece of work last week. R/eal Reviews takes Reddit users’ comments about its Intensive Repair Serum Mask and plasters them across billboards.
This is smart. The unfiltered nature of the comments — not all of them flattering — chimes neatly with Dove’s real-world approach to beauty. It’s also a savvy (read: cheap) use of existing content.
Of course, leaning into bad reviews isn’t new. Liquid Death famously made a whole album from people’s misgivings about their product. Or there’s the fictitious bad review — this one’s still an all-time favourite of mine.
Still, Dove’s willingness to embrace warts-and-all marketing marks a broader shift: brands are entering their imperfect era.
Flaws To The Fore
As the AI juggernaut rolls on, implied fallibility is increasingly becoming a tool to differentiate the real from the synthetic.
In Matt Klein’s manual analysis of over 70 trend decks — drawing together signals like Perfectly Imperfect (M.Cast), Unmistakably Human (D&AD), and Ambient Realism (Stocksy) — the first meta-trend, Goosebumps, identifies the overriding sentiment:
Unflattened, imperfect human characteristics warm us amidst frigid glass screens, AI, and division.
Against this backdrop, the message for those trying to cut through the noise is straightforward enough:
Elevate vulnerability as a value. Admit uncertainty and acknowledge limits. Build for trust over perfection.
In this brave new world, we can expect to see more brands actively flaunting their flaws. More campaigns playing on the idea of human error. More activations vandalising themselves. And a wider shift towards self-effacing communications that position the brand as closer to the people who buy it — not like the machines trying to pass for them.
Welsh Wisdom
In an attempt to become that other version of me — and very much against my better judgement — I’ve decided to embark on the long and arduous journey of cataloguing my music. It’s not without its benefits. Rediscovering long-forgotten tracks — and the lyrical wisdom therein — is keeping my spirits up.
Always a sucker for Kelly Jones’ unmistakable gravelly tones, I found myself lingering on a couple of lines from the Stereophonics classic Just Looking:
Do I want the perfect wife?
But perfect ain’t quite right.
Perfectly put.