I watched the Super Bowl at a friend's place in Sellwood with nine other people and a bowl of chips nobody touched after halftime. By the third commercial break we had stopped talking about the game. We were doing something worse. We were critiquing.
One brand had rewritten a sermon into a pickup truck ad. Another wanted us to know it stood for coming together. Two spots, ten minutes apart, both about healing a fractured country, both attached to something you drive.
My friend, who does not work in advertising and has never read a creative brief in her life, put down her beer and asked the room why everything has to mean something now.
That is the entire argument. She got there in ten words. I have been chewing on it for three weeks.
Purpose is not the problem. Purpose applied indiscriminately, by every brand, in every category, in every execution, is the problem, and the audience noticed it before we did.
Here is the part that gets lost. Purpose works when it is expensive. Patagonia blacking out its homepage in December to say the President stole your land was purpose, because Patagonia then went and sued the administration over it. That is a company spending money, goodwill, and a retail relationship or two. The cost is the proof.
Compare that to what most purpose work actually is. A thirty second film about human connection. A hashtag. A donation with a ceiling on it. And a product that is identical to the one it was the week before. Pepsi found the floor of this last April, and we all agreed to be horrified for roughly nine days.
So I have started asking three questions before a purpose platform leaves the room. One, would this claim survive a reporter with a phone and a free week? Two, does the company change if we say it out loud, or does only the advertising change? Three, has anyone else in the category already said it, and if so, why are we the fourth voice saying the same warm thing in the same serif type over the same piano?
Most work fails all three. Most work gets made anyway, because purpose has become the safest thing to present. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Nobody gets fired for a deck about belonging.
Purpose works when it is expensive.
Two Fridays ago I sang Rocket Man at the place in Southeast with the sticky floor, and the host, who calls everyone baby, told me I had really committed to it. That is the most generous available review of what happened. But commitment is the whole thing. It is also the part of purpose that most brands quietly leave out of the deck.