Why the best content feels unfinished

Let’s talk about the kind of content people actually watch all the way through. The stuff that holds attention without really trying to.

You’ve seen it, I guarantee it.

It’s that video that feels kind of off. The pacing’s slow, the camera’s still moving when someone starts talking and the captions cut out halfway through the sentence. There’s background noise. Someone stumbles on a word and they don’t cut it out. A couple years ago you'd be watching and thinking, “Was this even supposed to be posted?”

But that’s the point. That’s why it works today.

At first I saw this as just a trend. Like a lo-fi aesthetic thing, editing stuff to feel casual and messy on purpose.

But now it’s bigger than that. We’re watching a shift in how content earns trust online.

This is because the content that feels familiar is the content that gets believed. Right now, what feels familiar isn’t polish—it’s presence.

Think about how most of us communicate. We send voice notes, disappearing DMs, we talk over each other on Zoom. We record something once and send it straight away. No re-takes or editing. Just the moment as it happened.

That tone is bleeding into the best-performing content. The stuff that doesn’t feel like a campaign or have the need announce itself.

Important point - whilst this kind of content might feel off-the-cuff, it’s almost always intentional.

There’s a structure to it. You start noticing the patterns.

The cuts come a second later than you expect, so the moment feels discovered instead of produced. The sound design includes all the messy stuff—breathing, background noise, someone fidgeting. The captions don’t transcribe every word. Instead they highlight a thought. The framing’s not perfect but the vibe is right.

This is not random. It’s designed to feel real.

Emma Chamberlain basically built her whole YouTube career on this. Self-interrupting and pausing mid-sentence. She's allowing the edit feel like a thought, rather than a performance.

But you’re seeing it in brand content now too.

Glossier’s bts GRWM stories get more engagement than their big-budget ads.
Gymshark’s raw edits of athletes warming up or messing around before a shoot often outperform the campaign videos.
JW Anderson just posted a fashion week recap that left in the mic crackles and the false starts. It didn’t feel messy. It felt smart.

Making things feel like real life is probably the easiest way to think about authenticity in content. It sounds simple but most people miss it by chasing trends or copying what worked for someone else. It worked because it felt authentic to their audience, not yours. Think about creating something that actually feels natural to the people it’s meant for.

So if you’re working on content and wondering why something’s not landing, it might be worth asking:

Are we over-producing this?
Are we cutting it so clean that it feels lifeless?
Are we chasing polish when we should be chasing presence?

Try pulling the edit back five seconds.
Try keeping in the part where someone resets and laughs.
Try letting the mic crackle. Let the camera drift a little.

Just see how it feels. Not everything needs to be raw but if something feels too composed, it might be too far from how people actually communicate now.

And if you want help figuring this out, structuring it properly or building formats around it, that’s literally what we do at FORWARD WORKS.

Drop me a line: samuel@forward-works.com
Or check back here. We’re always breaking this stuff down.