Matt Wareham is the founder of Depictar, a video production company built on storytelling rather than production budgets. We connected through our networks and after a conversation about the role video plays in building trust, I asked him to bring his thinking here.
Something has shifted on LinkedIn over the last few years, and if you’ve spent any time on the platform recently you’ll have felt it even if you haven’t quite put your finger on what it is.
The content that used to work doesn’t work anymore.
Generic posts with recycled tips, polished carousels that could have been made by anyone in your industry, announcements that nobody really asked for. A few years ago that stuff got traction, but now it just gets scrolled past.
What’s happened is what I’d call a trust recession, caused by too many people spending too long selling things that didn’t deliver. I’m talking about online courses that promised the world, endless consultants who talked a big game about making $50,000 a month but without anything to back it up, and more $27 PDF frameworks than you could ever read let alone follow.
People have become sceptical as a result, and by and large everyone sounds the same. And when everyone sounds like an expert, nobody trusts any of them.
The bar for earning trust has shifted. And that has real consequences for how founders need to show up online.
Why video cuts through
Video works in a trust recession because it’s harder to fake.
When you’re talking to a camera, your personality comes through whether you want it to or not. That can be the way you pause or look when you’re thinking, the way you share an unusual or unpopular opinion, or a specific client situation you reference that tells the viewer you’ve actually done this work, not just read about it. That’s what makes someone watching think this person actually knows what they’re talking about.
No other medium gets close to it. A written post can show people how you think, a photo puts a face to a name, but only video lets a potential client see you, hear you, and get a sense of who you are before they’ve ever spoken to you.
When it’s working properly, a prospect should be 70-80% sold before you’ve had a single conversation, and the call becomes more of a confirmation than a pitch.
The mistake most founders make
A scripted, over-polished video where every trace of the real person has been carefully edited out is just generic advice with your face on it. And a video that sounds like it was written by an AI tool does nothing for your credibility either.
There’s a simple test worth applying to everything you post: if someone else could take what you said, read it out word for word, and it would still make sense, there’s not enough of you in it.
This is the mistake I see constantly with founders who’ve been told to add value and share useful content. They (or their VA) post the same tips and information that anyone in their sector could. It ticks a content box, but it does very little for their business because people don’t blindly trust information anymore.
What actually works
The good news is that the bar for doing this well is lower than most people think.
Casual video shot on a phone or laptop consistently outperforms professionally produced content on LinkedIn. Not because production quality doesn’t matter at all, but because authenticity matters more, and a video that feels real will always beat a scripted one that’s been through three rounds of approval and had every interesting opinion sanded off by a comms team.
If you stick to one idea per video, speak like a real human, and share your actual experience of something (not a sanitised version of it) you are on to a winner.
And then post consistently over time so that the right people keep seeing you. The trust will build gradually, and in six months time you’ll wish you’d started sooner.
The opportunity hiding in plain sight
Most founders know they should be doing this. Every January a growing number of business owners tell me that this is definitely the year they will finally ‘do video’, yet each year comparatively few actually do.
And that’s not because it’s technically difficult – it’s because talking to a camera can feel uncomfortable, and that discomfort is enough to make most people put it off indefinitely.
That discomfort is also exactly why the opportunity exists. The bar is low because most of your competitors will never push through it. The founders who do, and who keep going long enough for the trust to build, end up with an advantage that’s very hard to compete with.
The trust recession isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, as AI-generated content becomes more widespread, the premium on genuine content that’s unmistakably you is going to keep rising.
Two things in this piece stayed with me.
The first is the phrase “trust recession.” Trust is something I have been talking to clients about recently, and a topic that has come up on various podcasts I have been part of this year. As a branding and marketing consultant, trust is built slowly through every interaction a brand has with its audience and lost quickly when something feels off. What Matt describes is that same principle playing out in real time on social media. When everyone sounds like an expert, the only way to stand out is to sound like yourself.
The second is the founder visibility point. There is still a tendency, particularly among smaller businesses, to hide. To not put themselves out there, to keep things polished and professional and at a safe distance, to let a logo do the talking so they never have to. Video, done the way Matt describes, makes that impossible. And that is precisely why it works.
Thank you to Matt for writing this. If you want to explore what video could do for your business, you can find Matt at depictar.co.uk.
Until next time,
Vaishali