Post-awards, post-purpose: Will purpose focused work win out if there aren’t awards on the line?
As the issue of awards cheating rears its head yet again, Oglivy’s Alex Watts considers exactly where creative would land in a post-awards world.
If anyone won Cannes this year, it was McCann New York’s Fearless Girl. The street statue, which was commissioned by investment firm State Street Global Advisors as a statement about gender diversity in the workplace, won 18 lions in total, including four grand prix. It set a standard that’s hard to beat.
More than that, it cements a long established (and long awarded) industry trend: advertising with a purpose at the core.
It’s not hard to find other examples – Like A Girl from Always, or Worlds Apart from Heineken. All of this work lives and breathes in convincing the audience that the brand believes in the cause, and is doing what they can to change the world.
McCanns’ Fearless Girl was created by artist Kristen Visbal
Using Like a Girl as a case for why purpose driven advertising is effective is a bit like using Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark tweet to demonstrate why social media is effective. They’re outliers and should be used for creative inspiration, not as part of a serious discussion around the effectiveness of specific channels or strategies.
There’s only a point in using a purpose driven strategy if it makes you stand out in any way, from your competitors and in the media landscape in general. Purpose today is extremely narrowly defined, purely revolving around certain strict definitions of equality and diversity. In other words, brands are limited to demonstrating the degree to which they’re not a racist, sexist or homophobe.
I wonder in whose interest that is…
If brands want their purpose to lead to profit they need to promote an un-PC point of view. Or at least something with the tiniest degree of controversy surrounding it.
How about targeting the millions of Liberal voters for a change, instead of just your local barista?
Of course, people who work in marketing and advertising are too cowardly to do that. You see, people in advertising today don’t create work for the benefit of their brands – God forbid, it’s not like they’re capitalists or anything – they create work so that they can convey and promote their own ideology and worldview (and a rather predictable one at that).
In other words, corporations spend millions so that their PC employees and agencies can virtue signal to their friends. Now, that’s ironic.
I actually don’t know what the author’s point of view is after reading this article. Nothing has been put at stake here. A Whitman’s Sampler of thought starters that lead nowhere.
Also confusing: Pro purpose, yet anti brand. Pro award winning work, yet anti awards.
Better try next time, mate.
I find it ironic that the writer is calling crap on awards only to then peddle their own crap. Way to grab every hot trend and philosophy currently sitting at the epicentre of the advertising zeitgeist and misinterpret, misuse and bastardise it in order to try and appear in the know.
“work that focuses on driving loyalty misses the mark – and some of the best purpose-driven work focuses on this by establishing a link between the consumer and the brand.”
Actually, connecting with consumers is what you try to do with every type of campaign. Most of the purpose driven campaigns you’ve mentioned are populist and wide reaching, meaning that they do just what the likes of Sharp and Peter Field say. They reach the whole market and use emotion to connect with the whole category, encompassing both light and heavy buyers.
Might pay to do some research so you know what you’re talking about before writing the next one.
Bit of heat in the comments on this one. Justified!
If the author had provided a map at the top of the article, I might have kept up with him throughout.
But he very early on lost me, and I was flat out trying to rejoin the party.