In my last post, I zoomed in on a single case at this year’s Cannes Lions awards, which took us into the mating habits of coquí frogs.

Having been active in the Cannes Fact-check campaign last year (‘campaign’ is overstating it – a loose effort of a few academics, journalists and ad people) and having noted the introduction of tougher entry standards as a result, I felt I should pay attention to this year’s awards and see what difference it made. As I noted in the previous post, one outcome is that entries fell by 25% this year. It’s hard to tell the cause and effect, but it seems likely this was driven at least in part by the stricter entry requirements and the risk of being called out.

But there has also been another outcome, at least in PR terms. Cannes is now able to turn its failings into a more positive tale: yes, we may have been embarrassed into it, but we can now claim to be the most credible awards in existence, setting the integrity standards for others to follow. Similarly, Cannes winners can claim more credibility than the winners of previous years, because they’ve passed the tougher entry requirements and are now presumably the real deal.

In this post, I want to zoom out and convey the sheer extent to which this isn’t the case. And I want to show how it’s driven by forces larger than fact-checking can realistically address.

I’ll do it by sketching out a few cases and comparing the fairytale to the reality. Importantly, I’m not arguing that these cases are entirely fake, or deliberately lying, or even badly motivated. I’m just describing the gap between the case study and the reality. Afterwards, I’ll argue that these cases tell different versions of the same story – one which Cannes systematically reproduces every year.

Outside of awards schemes and advertising press coverage, I doubt any readers will have heard of these projects, so you may need to watch the video in each case. If I make any mistakes or misrepresentations in what follows, I’ll publish corrections.

1. Suncorp / Grand Prix Dan Wieden Titanium

Let’s start with Suncorp, one of the most heralded cases this year.

The fairytale:
Multi-billion-dollar Australian insurance firm revolutionises the home insurance sector by focusing on resilience rather than recovery: first with one house, then a whole street (renamed Resilience Road), then with a digital platform to get advice on your own home. The result: “The Resilience Platform has driven significant growth, moving Suncorp to number one in market share. But more importantly it’s affected national building codes, influenced industry and government resilience spending, and kept insurance affordable and accessible.”

The reality:
The campaign PR variously describes the street has having been ‘renamed’ or ‘co-named’ Resilience Road. In answer to my query, the Office of the Mayor of Rockhampton Regional Council confirms no such renaming or co-naming took place: “The sign displayed during filming was a temporary sign and was not an official road co-name adopted by Council. Bowen Street remains the official street name.”

Suncorp remains no.2 in overall market share – part of a long-standing duopoly with IAG. The claim probably relates to home insurance specifically – it is hard to verify and presumably based on internal figures.

As for keeping insurance “affordable and accessible”, the wider story is one of soaring premium prices, with Suncorp at the centre of the criticisms. In October 2024, the company was ordered by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority to overturn a 60% increase in a home insurance premium following a customer dispute. Former Australian Competition & Consumer Commission chair Allan Fels suggested “It looks like price gouging an individual customer.” As of February 2026, reports are that premiums have climbed 51% in five years, while Suncorp posts record profits. “Keeping insurance affordable and accessible” isn’t specific enough to fail a fact-check, but it can hardly be said to reflect the reality.

Meanwhile, resilience efforts are nothing new. In 2021, Insurance Council Australia introduced a Building Resilience Rating Tool, which had been in development for 10 years – it continues to lead industry-wide efforts on resilience and mitigation.

2. Heineken / Grand Prix Creative Strategy

The fairytale:
This is a genuinely lovely story about a grassroots community effort to save a local pub in Kilteely, Ireland. In the fairytale version, the €44 billion multinational brewer is the enabler of the project, providing training for bar staff and making a documentary film that went on to be shown at the Dublin International Film Festival.

The reality:
I’m sure the community was only too happy to get support from Heineken when it arrived. Importantly, this support did not come at the beginning – the real story involves 26 locals putting in their own money in a desperate and financially risky attempt to save the pub. Hence the national press coverage at the time of the pub’s opening not mentioning Heineken at all.

At some point further down the line, Heineken got involved through their local rep. This is reflected in the fact that the ‘documentary’ appears to be filmed almost entirely as a reconstruction. There are many brilliant documentaries about community projects – for example, the award-winning series about the rebirth of my local club Macclesfield FC, which documented the process over months and years, resulting in three hour-long films.

The Heineken documentary is 10 minutes, three of which are taken up by the credits. The credits find room for 34 named staff from Publicis – more than it took to save the pub. The scenes of the opening night are a re-enactment (this is the call to locals to take part). Presumably the same is true of all the scenes showing the building work.

None of this means the entry broke any Cannes rules. Nor does it imply the locals weren’t genuinely delighted to get a film made about them. But it’s clearly a story of a multinational brewing giant casting itself as the people’s champion, at a time when prices were once again rising, and not long after Irish publicans were threatening a boycott specifically against Heineken.

3. AXA Three Words / Grand Prix Dan Wieden Titanium

The fairytale:
Domestic violence is a serious issue that French policy makers and charities have been wrestling for years. With a disarming twist, an ad agency adds three words (“and domestic violence”) to its client’s insurance policy. That single creative leap revolutionises the sector and saves lives. The case enters ad industry folklore: “When AXA moved beyond covering the damage to helping people escape domestic violence, it earned a level of loyalty that no jingle can buy.”

The reality:
This is a real project and not insignificant. But as with all social issues, it’s complicated.

Journalist Frederic Welmant writes about this from the perspective of social policy rather than brand building. She notes how other insurers have announced the preparation of similar offers and how this is leading to a ‘market’ in human distress that disadvantages the most vulnerable. “The most precarious victims, already vulnerable by economic isolation or disability, find themselves excluded from these devices.” And she goes on: “By conditioning protection on insurance contracts, the State delegates a sovereign mission to entities motivated by profit.”

On a practical level, Welmant notes how AXA’s support for emergency relocation is limited to seven days, which “does not meet the reality of the victim’s journeys” – where it is common “for the current period of filing a complaint in the gendarmerie or police station and the judgment in the Tribunal to be more than 6 months”. She also notes how the policy requires filing a police complaint within 24 hours, which places added stress on the women involved and can aggravate fraught situations. In the end, she concludes this “looks more like a marketing argument disconnected from the reality these women live”.

My point is not to argue that everything Frederic Welmant writes should be taken as gospel, or that the AXA policy may not deliver some benefits. The deeper point is that ad awards juries have no ability to weigh these issues, or even know which questions to ask. On the basis of emotive videos presenting one side of a story, they award creative campaigns not for creativity, but for claimed social good – despite having no expertise in social policy or ability to question professionals from that world.

4. Too True Crime

The fairytale:
Ad agency’s lateral idea for a podcast ends up changing Canada’s Criminal Code to include ‘femicide’ as a recognised offence.

The reality:
I mention this case in passing only because a Cannes juror reported in his ‘Cannes Diary’ that one entry came under scrutiny during the judging. He writes: “After the first round of judging, a disclaimer was added to the case film, raising questions about the accuracy of some of the claims being made… By the following day, the work had been withdrawn from the festival entirely.”

Despite commitments to ‘transparency’, this seems to have happened quietly and without naming the project involved – hardly a deterrent to future entrants. I received an anonymous email suggesting Too True Crime was the campaign in question, which seems possible given it was trailed as a top Cannes contender but now appears nowhere in the results. I’ll issue a correction if this turns out not to be the case.

I’ve not looked deeply into the work, but I suspect there would be questions about its claim that subscribing to a podcast counted as a valid petition signature, and its causal claim that policy changed because of the campaign, rather than simply after it, as is so often the case in Cannes stories.

5. 600K Network / Grand Prix for Good

The fairytale:
This one relates to a genuinely impactful, courageous effort by political activists to expose corruption in the 2024 Venezuelan election, at great risk to the participants. Over 600,000 trained volunteers turned their mobile phones into a ‘clandestine network’ to scan QR codes and collect official vote tallies from polling tables across the country. There is no misrepresentation in the entry once you read it closely, and it’s all done with honesty and integrity.

The reality:
The fairytale nevertheless needs examining, because most casual observers would think the award was going to the idea of harnessing the QR codes in that way, and that agency Rainbow Lobster was somehow involved in developing and activating that idea. Many press articles are written as though this were the case: “Created with Rainbow Lobster, Mexico City, 600K Network trained 600,000 volunteers in secret to scan QR codes printed on official ballots…” or “600K Network, created by Comando con Venezuela and Rainbow Lobster Mexico City, won both the Grand Prix for Good and the Titanium Lion at Cannes Lions 2026—a feat that transcends advertising itself.”

To be fair to Rainbow Lobster, they are clear that this isn’t the case. The agency had no involvement in the electoral operation. In a weird feedback loop, their contribution was to make a Cannes case study film about the campaign – so the award is for the creative act of making the entry film, rather than for the thing the film is about.

The rationale was to bring more recognition to the thousands of people who were engaged in the campaign. However, it’s arguable that an ad industry awards show in Cannes isn’t the ideal platform for this. The Venezuelan opposition leader had already been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 and the whole operation was widely reported and praised at the time.

While there’s nothing wrong with bringing recognition to a grassroots effort, the effect is that many observers will get the impression that ad agencies are helping to change the world, when the real effort entirely precedes the agency’s involvement. This in turn brings a halo effect to Cannes and everyone associated with it – look at us, this is the kind of thing we award… this is the kind of thing advertising is.

6. Others

There are many others and I’ll mention a few only briefly.

Nigrum Corpus / Glass: The Lion for Change – a project that ascribes unequal racial outcomes in Brazilian medicine to the racism of the medical profession, and addresses it through a high-production-values satirical hardback book that has been sent to various medical colleges. It’s hard to check whether this has become a widely used educational tool as claimed, or whether it has simply been mailed out to medical colleges and assumed to have been read.

Fertiliser 2.5 / Bronze Creative B2B – a project in Thailand that claims to have reduced crop burning and resulting air pollution through an innovative microbial fertiliser. In reality, it appears to be a straightforward packaging project, where the agency is taking credit for the product itself – and it’s not even clear if this was a commercial packaging project or, more likely, a limited-edition promo.

Magnif-eye / Silver Health & Wellness – an optician’s campaign that claims to scan your phone’s photo reel and spot early signs of eye conditions in photos of your children. In reality, this appears to be the promo hook for a data capture campaign that relies on people then filling in an old-school medical questionnaire, because most eye conditions don’t show up in photo reels.

The Paid Relief / Silver Health & Wellness – a campaign by pain relief brand Dorflex, offering workers a paid day off, because time off is better than taking painkillers in order to continue working. (But Dorflex sells painkillers?…. I know, bear with it.) In reality, the day off involves another form of labour. You have to film an influencer-style video promoting the brand, and liaise with the brand until they’re happy with it. About 45 people appear to have done it, and it’s unclear if they were directly approached.

Infinite Saree / Silver Health & Wellness– a ‘living petition to end marital rape in India’ that claims 19.5 million earned media impressions and 13 million social reach but appears to have 6,611 signatures on the related petition, along with 181 Instagram followers, 2 followers on X, and about 40 uses of the hashtag on Instagram. To put it mildly, these publicly visible engagement figures are hard to reconcile with the claimed reach.

Donate to Play / Gold Health & Wellness – a campaign aimed at gamers, reminding them of a labour law that entitles workers to a day of paid leave if they give blood. The idea is that gamers can free up more time to play Ubisoft games by claiming this under-publicised right. In reality, this law only applies to about a third of the workforce, who are covered by Consolidation of Labour terms in their contracts. Public sector workers operate under different employment statutes, while Brazil’s large self-employed and informal labour force isn’t covered at all. The campaign treads a questionable ethical line in that it introduces a commercial interest (Ubisoft) with the explicit instruction to Donate to Play. There are rules around offering commercial incentives for blood donation, for understandable reasons. The case study claims “22% more shareability” as one of its headline outcomes. Over what period? Compared to what benchmark? A control group? A previous campaign? Actual shares? Survey answers? All these questions are too dull to ask, let alone answer.

I’ll stop with those eleven cases. With all of them, I’ve barely gone into the numerous stats and impact claims they make, but there are plenty more cases of “X% rise in sales” without giving any baseline or time period, or “X million impressions” without showing how that is calculated, or “brand awareness up X%” based on unspecified internal metrics, or claims to have “changed the law” without showing causation, only chronology…

…so the ad agency changes the law in the same way that this guy stops the train.

But asking for sources, baselines and evidence for these claims feels inadequate in the face of stories this big, especially when they’re just 11 examples from 20,000 entries. Fact-checking serves a useful role in screening out the more egregious cases. But it risks favouring those who are just slightly better at playing the game.

The bigger issue is that these are all versions of the same story. An insurance company battles to keep insurance affordable. Another insurance company addresses domestic violence. A beer company saves pubs. An ad agency fights air pollution.

Any visitor from Mars, unfortunate enough to land in Cannes in late June, would go away with an incredibly positive impression of the role of corporations and advertising agencies in human affairs. These humans have somehow worked out a way to align corporate interests and social progress! Every year these corporations solve more problems, and it’s all down to the good will and clever thinking of ad agencies!

Many self-styled adland progressives are happy to endorse this version of events. “Values-led, inclusive marketing walked up and collected the Titanium. Again.” enthuses an article in Campaign. “Cannes Lions’ top winners prove purpose succeeds when it drives products, policy and business innovation—not just marketing campaigns,” concludes the head of a purpose strategy company. None of these commentators have any incentive to question the headlines or dig deeper into the work – the Cannes machine has clicked into gear and delivered the narrative people need to hear.

As always, actual creativity is ushered out of the spotlight. This isn’t an aberration, it’s the purpose of the system. On its home page, Cannes advertises itself as “Where creativity drives progress”. In its Integrity Handbook, it proudly says it does not celebrate “creativity for creativity’s sake”.

They say that like it’s a good thing. In practice, it means entering creative work in creative categories won’t get you far. You have to play the game of making a £20,000 case study video claiming spurious increases in shareability and impressions. You need to create the montage of press headlines and social media posts enthusing about the work. To join the big league, you need to show how it made a social difference – ideally by changing a law or saving a species. ‘Raising awareness’ is too 2016, let alone ‘changing the conversation’.

Just as one example of a purely creative entry, imagine entering the Rail Clock for Network Rail by Design Bridge & Partners. For those who like it, it’s because it’s an elegant, appropriate, British, timeless piece of infrastructure design. But it’s also… just a clock. Design Bridge valiantly plays the game of turning it into a case study video, but it’s so clearly swimming against the tide. How do you compete against the next project that gamifies horology to challenge racism and rewrite farming policy, while boosting shareability and driving up sales? As it is, you get a Bronze and a shortlist if you’re lucky, while the headlines talk about domestic violence and heroic activism.

If only this were the only downside. I’m sure we could all live with a few agencies not getting the top awards they’d ideally like, however good the work.

But the deeper problem is the one that purpose people claim to care about most: the relationship of advertising to wider society.

Every year, Cannes sustains a narrative about corporations driving social change, aided by brilliant ad agencies. According to the Cannes Theory of Social Change, we just need the right brand campaign to come along. Somewhere out there lies a solution that aligns solving the problem with increasing sales of something. All it needs is a clever creative step.

In reality, social change usually takes place slowly and doggedly, often frustrated by those same corporations. Individuals in an Irish village battle market forces to revive their local. Homeowners in Australia fight Suncorp in court. Social workers continue the delicate work of responding to domestic violence long after the brands and marketing budgets have moved on.

This year, the talk at Cannes has been about artificial intelligence. But the perennial issue is artificial progress: a level of PR spin that would sicken the public if it was ever widely publicised, but would probably come as no surprise in any case.

A reality check is needed. It would involve everyone, from agency leaders to marketers to journalists to LinkedIn dwellers, getting at least one degree more serious and sceptical about all this stuff.

If you’re one of the purpose champions who believes in the importance of these social causes, at least take the extra step of fact-checking some cases – it shows you take the issues seriously. If you’re an agency staffer, send anonymous tips to journalists to call out bad practice. If you’re an awards judge, insist on awarding creativity and don’t be dazzled by big numbers and background music. If you’re an ambitious reporter, dig into the work more deeply than I can manage. You are guaranteed to find big stories about multinational brands, topical social issues and reputation laundering.

And we’ll all live happily ever after.

Or maybe not.

I’m at nick@asburyandasbury.com if you want to get in touch – I will add prominent corrections and updates if needed. Thanks for reading and please feel free to boost my shareability.

1. Background
This post is a follow-up to a LinkedIn post I shared yesterday, about a Cannes-winning campaign called ‘Coqui Alarmed’. Having become curious about the campaign, I found myself in an email correspondence with one of Puerto Rico’s leading experts on coqui frogs.

To my surprise, he told me he’d been approached by the ad agency and advised them their idea would bring no conservation benefits – yet the campaign ultimately included claims he had advised against.

I brought the story to the attention of Campaign, the main advertising title in the UK. As reported yesterday, Campaign followed it up with Cannes, who subsequently cleared the entry and took no further action.

If you’re still reading, I’ll assume you’re interested either in the inner workings of Cannes fact-checking, or in the reproduction habits of coqui frogs. If not, please go about your day.

2. More background
Regular readers may already be aware of the broader context. Last year, I was part of a ‘Cannes fact-check’ effort, looking into various winning case studies at the Cannes Lions advertising awards.

The fact-checking led to Cannes introducing a new Integrity Handbook, promising more rigorous checks on the many effectiveness claims that are made in case study entry videos. It seems likely these tougher requirements are at least partly responsible for a reported 25% drop in entry numbers this year, with the steepest decline coming in the creative effectiveness category.

This year, the new commitments to transparency and accuracy were always likely to come under pressure at some point. I share the following story as an account of events so that readers can make up their own minds. I’ve no desire to launch a crusade on this, and you may well decide the case is valid and nothing misleading has occurred.

3. And now the story

The case is Hyundai Puerto Rico’s Grand Prix-winning campaign ‘Coquí Alarmed’. Created by BBDO Puerto Rico, the campaign was a response to a social media outcry after a tourist posted on Reddit, asking about a spray to silence Puerto Rico’s native frogs, whose loud cry is as distinctive as cricket calls in other parts of the world. The campaign involved Hyundai replacing the standard lock and unlock sound on rental cars with an authentic-sounding coquí call.

So far, this struck me as charming enough – a creative idea that might be an effective awareness-raiser for visiting tourists. However, ‘raising awareness’ is rarely enough to get to you to the top level of Cannes, where even the creativity/craft judges feel the need to award measurable social impact.

Hence the inclusion of the ‘science bit’ in the case study video, in which biologist Samuel Lacén states “The coquí’s song is a mating call. Males sing to attract females. Efforts like this help ensure that coquí frogs can reproduce.”

On first watching the video, this claim immediately struck me as odd. Why would it help them reproduce? If anything, I wondered if a negative effect might be more likely, with frogs becoming confused about nearby mating calls that turned out not to signal the presence of any mate.

As well as odd, it struck me as crucial to the video’s argument. While judges might bring some expertise when it comes to assessing the craft, and maybe weighing the credibility of marketing effectiveness claims, the same judges are unlikely to be experts in coquí mating habits. If a scientist can be brought in to lend their authority, it carries a lot of weight, appearing to elevate the case from a mere awareness-raiser to a credible scientific intervention. In the video shown to the judges, it is the main substantiation for a story that culminates in the claim: “What started as an instant cultural response turned into a conservation effort”.

It took me a minute of curious Googling to discover there is one guy who knows everything about these questions. Professor Rafael Joglar is founder of conservation project Proyecto Coquí, recently retired biology professor at the University of Puerto Rico, and has spent decades researching and conserving the species. I emailed him, and this is where things took a surprising turn.

“I was invited to a meeting with the people that created that campaign,” Professor Joglar told me. “I diplomatically explained [to] them that their campaign had no sense and that it will not help the coquis at all.”

In our email exchange, Professor Joglar said he had explained to the agency that, while the coquí call does attract females, it also serves a territorial function by warning rival males away – a point he says was omitted from the campaign’s explanation. He said he offered alternative ideas for how Hyundai and the agency could help, but met with no interest.

When I asked specifically whether replacing a car locking sound with a recorded coquí call had any plausible conservation benefit, Professor Joglar’s response was unequivocal: “No! No benefits at all.” And when I put the reproduction claim to him – “Efforts like this help ensure that coquí frogs can reproduce” – the response was equally direct: “This is not true and I made this very clear on our meeting.”

4. Follow-up reporting

I shared my correspondence with Professor Joglar with Campaign, whose reporter Charlotte Rawlings diligently sought out responses from Cannes and the various parties involved.

In the meantime, the story came to the attention of El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest daily newspaper. Reporter Melanie Ortiz Álvarez talked to both Professor Joglar and Samuel Lacen, the biologist featured in the video.

Importantly, when interviewed by El Nuevo Día, Samuel Lacén described the campaign quite differently, no longer repeating the claim that the campaign would help reproduction. A translated extract reads:

Samuel Lacén, the environmental conservation scientist cited in the campaign, said that the sound used by the vehicles would hardly alter the behaviour of the animals.

“Sound is played only once, usually outside of their most active hours, while coquis depend on repetitive songs, with specific frequencies, volumes and temporal patterns to communicate with each other,” he said, considering it unlikely that it will interfere with mating or other natural behaviours.

The article also quotes Professor Joglar, explaining further:

“The singing of the coquí is a highly specialized communication system. The well-known call ‘co-qui’ actually contains two different messages: the ‘co’ works as a territorial warning aimed at other males, while the ‘qui’ is oriented to attract females,” he explained.

According to Joglar, experimental research with recordings of the singing has shown that there is an evolutionary refinement in the way males and females respond to each part of the sound. Therefore, an isolated tone reproduced by a car “does not trigger reproductive responses or favour more mating.” In other words, from the point of view of behavioural biology, the sound used by the campaign does not represent a conservation tool.

When it comes to Samuel Lacén’s contribution, there may be several explanations for the apparent shift – perhaps the video edited his contribution, someone else wrote the narration, or the case study oversimplified his views.

5. Cannes response

All of the above information was put to Cannes by Charlotte Rawlings at Campaign, who received the response:

“Following a thorough review of Coqui Alarmed, including additional supporting information provided by relevant parties, we can confirm that it meets our eligibility criteria and integrity standards. No further action is required.”

Despite the new Cannes commitment to ‘transparency and accuracy’, Cannes has not explained the nature of this ‘additional supporting information’, making it difficult for outsiders to understand how it reached its conclusion.

Nor is it clear how the work meets the ‘integrity standards’ which place a special emphasis on sustainability-related claims, with a requirement to:

“Make sure that any sustainability claims are credible and accurately represent the environmental impact.”

and the specific instruction:

“Don’t exaggerate the impact of your efforts.”

Instead, the response from Cannes is similar to the same brief statements that came out when campaigns faced similar questioning last year.

6. Possible defences

I present all the above so anyone interested can make up their own minds.

One defence might be that the conservation claim wasn’t especially critical to the judging. I find this a weak argument for two reasons. First, the presence of a scientist appearing to endorse the campaign is a key element in a short case study video, giving judges reason to set aside any possible scientific doubts and take the word of an authority figure. Second, the Cannes rules require all claims to be supported – especially sustainability claims – regardless of the extent to which they affect the judges’ decisions, which is hard to discern in retrospect in any case.

Another defence might be that the campaign is still broadly a ‘conservation effort’ and does still broadly ‘help ensure that coquí frogs can reproduce’ – because, if it raises awareness with tourists, that might in turn lead to a more general cultural shift, which would be good for coquí reproduction in the long term. Again, I find this a weak argument as the case study explicitly draws a distinction between this kind of softer cultural response and a more substantive conservation effort. (“What started as an instant cultural response turned into a conservation effort”. ) In the context of Cannes, where countless entries claim to ‘raise awareness’, any claim to go beyond that carries persuasive power.

7. Continuing statistical vagueness

I consider the conservation angle to be the heart of this story. But it’s worth noting that the campaign’s effectiveness claims continue in the same Cannes tradition of big numbers vaguely sourced. Public case materials report:

9m impressions in the first two weeks
(using what methodology? measured by a third party? earned vs paid? duplicate impressions removed? are judges aware that ‘impressions’ usually means an optimistic ‘opportunity to see’ so that one sponsored article on a syndicated platform with a combined audience of 2m can be counted as 2m impressions even if only a tiny fraction have ever seen that particular article?)

+7,000 tourists reached in six weeks
(reached in what sense? drove a Hyundai car? heard the alarm? an estimate or based on actual records?)

3m reach in social media
(using what reporting tools, over what period? Reach for this campaign, for Hyundai in general, for coqui frogs? Organic or paid?)

+98% positive sentiment
(among whom? towards what – Hyundai or coqui frogs? what sentiment analysis tool was used? over what period?)

None of these are key issues in this case, and it may be that some of the answers were provided. But once again, this plays into a familiar pattern of superficially impressive numbers for a campaign that seems to have received minimal coverage beyond advertising awards press.

8. Finally

I’m aware this may come across as unfairly singling out one campaign among many at Cannes. I have nothing against the agency or client and would welcome any information that answers some of the questions above. Once again, some people may read all this and conclude there is nothing misleading about the case and that it should be celebrated.

But there is a wider context. Earlier this year, climate change journalism platform DeSmog wrote about Cannes having a ‘cheating problem’ when it comes to environmental claims in particular – making the argument that this helps sustain a broader narrative about corporations having a win-win relationship with climate issues. In that context, all the above can be seen as one small case in a bigger picture.

For my part, I still think Coquí Alarmed can be defended as a lovely creative idea, worthy of awards for craft and lateral thinking. But the more Cannes judges such campaigns on environmental and social impact rather than creativity alone, the more it enters a world where claims about important issues need to withstand scientific and factual scrutiny. That’s why I share the case here.

Note: I submitted this article to Campaign last week. As it hasn’t yet appeared there, I’m sharing it here instead. For context, Campaign is the main advertising trade magazine in the UK. Every year, it releases ‘School Reports’, giving an agency a mark out of ten for its performance across the year. Historically, this has reflected factors such as business wins, client retention and awards won. Since 2016, Campaign has incorporated DEI metrics as an additional factor. Since 2024, this information has been mandatory – agencies not cooperating receive only a ‘provisional’ score.

A minor skirmish broke out on LinkedIn recently over this year’s Campaign School Reports and, specifically, the continued inclusion of DEI metrics as a factor in an agency’s score.

I was part of that skirmish, so I listened with interest when Campaign responded with a podcast featuring four members of its own team. Some fair points were made. But what struck me was that, in a discussion about criticism, very little time was spent engaging with the strongest version of the opposing argument.

I want to make that case here.

First, some things we can hopefully agree on.

Racism and sexism are morally wrong. Ethnic and gender discrimination in pay and hiring is wrong. Collecting diversity data is useful. Industry-wide demographic patterns may raise legitimate debates about underlying causes. Campaign is entitled to report on those patterns.

None of this should be controversial. In the podcast, contributors repeatedly defend the idea of collecting this data – “I just genuinely believe that if you don’t track where you are, you can’t know where the problems are” – but data collection isn’t the point at issue. It’s the next step: making the data part of a scoring system.

This is partly a question of Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. It’s worth examining why this is the case. In many instances, a measure is created because there’s a desirable but hard-to-quantify outcome: in this case, a fairer and more inclusive industry. That’s a complex social outcome. So we reach for proxies, like gender and ethnic headcounts. But the proxies aren’t the same thing as the goal itself – they’re rough indicators of it.

The problem is that, once the proxy becomes the target, organisations start optimising for the number rather than what it was meant to represent. The result can be an industry that gets better at hitting the narrow metric while getting worse at achieving the broader goal.

But it’s not just the switch from measure to target. It’s the switch from population-level patterns to the expectation of sample-level consistency.

Suppose we agree it’s desirable for the ad industry as a whole to resemble the wider population in terms of gender and ethnicity. Even if we accept that premise, it doesn’t follow that every individual agency should be expected to mirror the population in the same way. Even in a perfect world of fair and unbiased hiring, you would expect wide variance around an average. Some agencies would sit above it, some below. If an agency sits below, it shouldn’t be seen as evidence of failure, still less cause to penalise them.

Yet right now, agencies are judged on how closely they meet the population-level target. In the podcast discussion, the Campaign contributors are keen to play this judgment aspect down: “It’s an important part of the conversation, but it’s only one part of the conversation.”

But either the data influences the score or it doesn’t. If it does, agencies are entitled to ask how. If it doesn’t, why is it mandatory? Fail to provide it and you receive a disapproving asterisk beside your “provisional” score.

Nevertheless, Campaign issues a challenge to the critics. In the course of the podcast, editor Maisie McCabe asks: “Name me an agency that’s doing really well and has been held back by its diversity from this year’s score reports”.

The obvious answer is: how would anyone know?

By its own account, Campaign has no objective process for arriving at its scores. Instead, an agency’s performance across multiple areas across a whole year is distilled into a single mark out of ten – the outcome of a “conversation” that is undocumented and takes place behind closed doors.

“I think the business maybe does come first in our discussions. But I do also think the culture feeds into that…” says one contributor. “If you’re on a kind of shaky seven, then maybe like a really good cultural makeup will solidify your place kind of thing,” says another.

In this context, how are critics supposed to identify an agency that might have earned an eight but ended up with a seven? The fact they can’t even try is part of the problem.

But all this raises a more fundamental question: are the targets themselves valid? And what exactly constitutes a “good” score?

As the podcast explains, the IPA set a series of ten-year diversity targets in 2016. Since then, those targets have been met or exceeded:

• Women in senior roles: target 40%, latest figure 50%

• Ethnic minorities in senior roles: target 15%, latest figure 15%

• Ethnic minority entry-level hires: target 25%, latest figure 41%

Remember, these measures are not ends in themselves. They’re proxies for a larger goal: a fairer and more inclusive industry.

With that in mind, what does it mean to exceed a target? Does overshooting indicate more fairness, or less? If the aim is balance or representation, does there come a point at which under-representation and over-representation are treated as equal causes for concern?

The podcast floats a couple of possible answers. The first is that ad agencies are disproportionately concentrated in London, where the ethnic composition differs from that of the UK as a whole. So representation targets should be higher than the national figure.

This is a plausible position. Yet elsewhere in the discussion, the justification for diversity is that agencies should better reflect the audiences they serve. Most agencies are marketing to the UK population, not to Londoners alone. If representativeness is the principle, it’s not obvious why London rather than Britain should be the relevant comparison. In any case, is it not part of a fairer society that agencies should cast the net beyond London?

The second argument is that exceeding the ethnic minority entry-level target is desirable because it helps correct historic imbalances and creates a pipeline for future leadership positions. Again, that’s a rational argument. But if this was always the rationale, why was the original target set where it was? And if the target is now considered insufficient, what is the new target? (Bear in mind, the IPA’s target for ‘ethnic minorities in senior roles’ has already been met.)

These questions matter because Campaign is not simply reporting the numbers and encouraging a debate – it’s incorporating them into agency scores that can affect an agency’s standing in an already precarious industry.

Campaign’s defence rests on a foundational claim: diversity improves business performance. By its lights, Campaign is doing agencies a service by monitoring diversity. As the School Reports metaphor suggests, teacher knows best.

But is it true?

The claim rests largely on two sources: McKinsey’s Diversity Wins report from 2020 and Unstereotype Alliance’s Inclusion = Income from 2024. In this context, the latter report should not be relevant. It contains claims about diversity in advertising casting but has nothing to say about diversity in agency hiring.

As for Diversity Wins, subsequent researchers were unable to replicate its headline findings using McKinsey’s own methodology. Yet, as so often happens, the original claim remains better known than the critique because it supports a conclusion many people already wish to believe.

To be clear, I find both the research and its debunking largely irrelevant to the main argument. The reason I support fair hiring practices is not because they lead to better business results. It’s a moral argument: racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination are wrong, full stop. There’s no need for a so-called business case.

In any case, if the justification is that diversity leads to better business outcomes, it raises an obvious question: why not simply measure the outcomes? Campaign could stick to business wins, turnover, creative output and growth, and let agencies decide how to achieve them. If McKinsey is right, the most diverse agencies will eventually rise to the top.

But finally, there’s a deeper philosophical question.

The theory underpinning all this is rarely stated explicitly, but it seems to run like this: demographic diversity produces diversity of thought, which in turn produces better advertising. The result is an industry that serves a wider range of people more effectively.

It all sounds defensible at the macro level. But when you apply it agency by agency, team by team, hire by hire, promotion by promotion, you keep running into something uncomfortable: individuals have become categories. Different-looking heads in the headcount.

Liberal societies start from the premise that people should be treated as individuals, judged on their talents, character and conduct. This is the goal. It’s the reason that sexism and racism are so profoundly wrong. Identity-based frameworks start from a different premise. They assume that meaningful differences in outlook flow primarily from group membership – that ethnicity and gender are not merely aspects of a person, but important predictors of how they think.

That assumption deserves more scrutiny than it gets. It’s the logic behind saying: “You’re a woman, here’s the Tampax brief” or “You’re over 40, here’s the Saga brief.” No one likes to be treated that way, but it is the logic on which all of this ultimately rests. Nothing about us without us.

Speaking of which, the Campaign podcast addresses the criticism that its diversity metrics overlook class and ignore what is reportedly the most disadvantaged group in Britain: white working-class boys and men. The discussion acknowledges the issue, without acknowledging that none of the people being discussed are in the room.

The response to the class question shouldn’t be another box to tick. It should be to recognise the limits of the entire exercise. Do we really want score-chasing agencies to quiz staff about their parents’ income when they were 14, whether they received free school meals, or whatever other proxies we decide to use for class? Or do we want to recognise that human beings are too complicated to be reduced to a handful of variables?

Campaign is explicit about this. “If you say previously had an all-white management team, and now it’s become more diverse, that would be something that we would see as positive… because we do think that more diverse teams are better for business.”

But what if that “all-white” management team included a working-class 28-year-old lesbian, a hearing-impaired Green-voting single mother who left school at 16, and a Reform-voting 55-year-old bipolar former public school boy? And you replace them with three mid-thirties middle-class graduates from London with non-white faces?

Real people don’t fit neatly into demographic categories. Yet if you’re micro-managing hiring at agency level – always with a nagging thought about the year-end tally – these are the kinds of people whose hiring and promotion become more or less likely, in pursuit of a metric that’s supposed to be a proxy for a fairer society. Ethically, you’re nudging people towards decisions that may be profoundly unfair.

Which brings us back to the key issue.

A trade publication is absolutely entitled to report diversity data. It’s entitled to analyse it, debate it and challenge the industry about it. Genuine debates may arise from the macro trends – about causation and competing interpretations of the same data.

Equally, when the data becomes a score, readers are entitled to challenge Campaign back. The podcast includes a strange complaint that all this criticism is about men “telling” the Campaign editor what she should do. For my part, I’ve actively defended Campaign’s right to publish Turkey of the Week, despite its male and female critics telling Campaign what to do. And for what it’s worth, when 14 people explicitly ‘told’ Campaign not to put Farage on its cover, six of them were women.

So take this as opinion and nothing more. Campaign’s role should be to inform the conversation, not to appoint itself as referee. Collect the data, analyse the data, debate the data. But don’t judge agencies on it.

This week saw an unfortunate and much-discussed episode at the BAFTA awards where two black actors on stage (Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo) were interrupted by a shout of the ‘n-word’, coming from John Davidson, a member of the audience who has Tourette syndrome and is the subject of a recent film about the condition.

The social media reaction was complicated by the fact that the BBC proceeded to broadcast the awards ceremony on a two-hour delay, while neglecting to edit out the shout. I don’t know how this happened, but it seems like a massive error in which the event in the hall wasn’t communicated properly to the editors, as it surely should have been. As a result, there was a failure to protect both John Davidson and the actors involved from the resulting media storm.

Putting the broadcast question to one side, the incident itself has sparked a predictably heated discussion about the nature of offensive language, the role of intention, and what exactly Tourette syndrome is.

One widespread misconception is that Tourette’s always manifests itself in this way. In fact, only about 10-15% of cases involve what is called coprolalia – the urge to blurt out taboo language. Other cases might involve involuntary throat-clearing, clicking sounds, eye blinking, head jerking, repeating words back (echolalia), or numerous other manifestations.

The other widespread misconception is that coprolalia is the involuntary expression of what you really think. This isn’t at all the case. Many mistakenly believe that Tourette’s ‘removes your filter’ so that you unintentionally blurt out the things you’re thinking deep down. “Nah he meant that shit” was the initial response from actor Jamie Foxx, and it was one shared across many parts of social media.

As more people are now understanding, the truth is closer to the opposite. Rather than expressions of the speaker’s ‘true self’, the shouted slurs are what psychologists term ‘ego-dystonic’ – i.e. profoundly inconsistent with the person’s own self-image and values. This is part of what heightens the anxiety and guilt that afflicts those with the condition. The pressure builds precisely because it’s the last thing they want to say, the last thing they believe, and the one thing they know is least socially acceptable in the circumstances.

Reading about coprolalia, I couldn’t help seeing parallels with a wider phenomenon in culture. None of what follows is meant to imply an exact equivalence between the metaphorical cultural phenomenon I’m describing and the highly specific reality of Tourette’s and coprolalia. But I’m struck by descriptions of the paradoxical effects involved in coprophilia – particularly how, the more a person attempts to suppress the forbidden thought, the more salient it becomes.

For a long while, people have been aware of the ‘white bear’ effect in communications. If you were to plaster the line ‘Don’t think of a white bear’ across every billboard in the country, the overwhelming likelihood is that people would think about white bears far more often.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was first to frame the problem this way. In 1863, he wrote: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

Social psychologist Daniel Wegner researched the ‘white bear problem’ in 1987. To test Dostoevsky’s observation, he asked a group of participants not to think about a white bear for a set period and ring a bell whenever the thought popped into their head. Despite their best efforts, thoughts of the white bear occurred frequently. When the same participants were subsequently asked to think about a white bear, they did so more often than a separate group of participants, who had been told from the beginning to think of white bears. For Wegner, this suggested a ‘rebound effect’ among those who initially tried to suppress the thought.

Admittedly, the methodology sounds flaky to me – asking people to report their thoughts is surely going to change those thoughts. But the conclusions are still persuasive. Wegner believed that mental suppression backfires because the mind runs two separate processes: a conscious effort to avoid the thought, and an unconscious ‘monitoring’ process that keeps checking whether the forbidden thought is appearing – which backfires by keeping the thought active. Wegner developed these findings into what he called ‘ironic process theory’ – the idea that suppressing a thought increases its salience – which has been influential in psychology and therapy ever since.

So far, it hasn’t been nearly as influential in advertising – at least when it comes to corporate communications campaigns aimed at behavioural change.

Ask most people in adland what the correct response to a social problem is, and the chances are it will involve a brand, a hashtag and an ad campaign. The goal is to ‘raise awareness’ of the problem and drive home a message until every mind is changed. Coincidentally, this involves producing lots of work for ad agencies, in perpetuity.

To pick a topical example: when the challenge is racial abuse in football, the standard answer is high-profile campaigns such as Kick It Out, No Room For Racism, Show Racism The Red Card and UEFA’s ‘Respect’ campaign. With all of them, the theory of the case is that a zero-tolerance approach to racism, conveyed in campaigns that repeat the same message loudly and often, will eventually lead to the last racist being expelled from the ground, and the last bigot being banned from social media. Until that day comes, the campaigns must be loud and uncompromising.

It’s easy to agree with the goal and yearn for the day when it comes. Nevertheless, incidents of racism continue. Only this week, there was a high-profile case involving Real Madrid player Vinicius Jr, who received racist abuse from an opposing player, causing the match to be suspended and disciplinary action to be taken – the extent of which is still being adjudicated.

The understandable response is to unfurl more banners, run more ads, repeat the zero-tolerance message until the last fan and player hears it, and keep tackling racism one racist at a time, for as long as it takes.

It all makes rational sense. But it also makes me think of the white bear problem, and my imaginary billboard campaign telling people not to think about them. Rationally, a sustained public information campaign urging people not to think about white bears ought to be able to deliver on its perfectly achievable goal. But most people instinctively know it wouldn’t. More likely, it would increase the salience of white bears, induce a form of psychological reactance, and create a weird, transgressive appeal around shouting ‘white bear’ if you were sufficiently riled up. (Incidentally, in the course of researching this, I came across The Game – an ongoing game played around the world, where the goal is not to think about The Game. Sorry you just lost.)

Of course, in reality, there’s nothing wrong with shouting ‘white bear’ – and there’s a lot wrong with shouting racial abuse. But if the goal is truly to find a solution, rather than signal moral outrage at the problem, then the relevance of ‘ironic process theory’ has to be taken into account. In terms of mass behavioural change, ‘No Room For Racism’ could be the social policy equivalent of ‘Don’t think of a white bear’.

If that sounds flippant, it’s not meant to be – because I think there is a particular, intensely sad cycle going on, especially in football grounds. To a psychologist, it would be unsurprising that football grounds are the scene of many of these transgressions. If people are angry, inebriated, highly emotionally aroused, and especially when they’re ‘deindividuated’ in a crowd, then this high emotional state is likely to inhibit the ‘monitoring’ process that would otherwise prevail.

In such cases, people are likely to default to the most available verbal response, rather than the most reflective one (in the sense of being something you actually mean and want to say). And if a word or idea has been continually spotlighted, framed as the worst possible thing to say, and associated with strict punishment and taboo, then it becomes the linguistic grenade you reach for when the monitoring process fails.

Importantly, this doesn’t always mean people believe the slur – it means the slur is the most emotionally loaded object in the linguistic culture at any one time. By common cultural agreement, it’s the last thing you’re supposed to say, which ironically creates that coprolalian urge to reach for it in extremis.

Sadly, I suspect some people are more vulnerable to this collapse of the ‘monitoring’ function – including some autistic people for whom the anxiety baseline in social situations is already higher, some ADHD-diagnosed people with heightened impulsivity, and people with other anxiety disorders, who may be fighting ‘intrusive thoughts’ similar to those found in Tourette syndrome.

None of this is to diminish the real problem of racism. Racists exist and some people truly believe what they say. Nor is it to argue that intention matters much if you’re on the receiving end – although the question of intention surely has to weigh into any moral calculation. Either way, action should be firm and there should be a strong cultural norm around not saying this stuff, or tolerating it when people do.

But it’s possible to combine tough action with a more enlightened approach to communication. My prediction is admittedly a controversial one – that if all anti-racism campaigns in football were suspended (while incidents were nevertheless dealt with firmly), incidents would noticeably drop off over time.

Yet what I’m arguing isn’t so different to the idea that the best way to tackle school shootings is to decrease the coverage we give to the shooters. The No Notoriety advocacy movement in the US was formed with this insight in mind – that decreasing the coverage is more effective than increasing it. It reduces the ‘notoriety’ effect, stops the spread of copycat incidents, and helps break the cycle. Similarly with coverage of suicides and terrorism cases – extensive research suggests that limiting coverage helps reduce the salience.

Or a closer parallel might be the classic ‘Just say no’ anti-drugs campaign, which researchers suggest had little long-term effect and may have increased curiosity and first-time use by making drug use highly visible, highly discussed and highly culturally salient. Spotlighting drug use can have the counter-intuitive effect of making it seem more common than it is – a form of social proof that inadvertently legitimises drug use as something everyone is doing. The same effect has been noticed in anti-litter campaigns that send the signal that everyone else is littering, so why not join in? It’s possible anti-racism campaigns have a similar effect.

More enlightened campaigns have centred on normalising the non-use of drugs, avoiding making them a central identity issue, and quietly introducing prevention initiatives in broader health programmes. Similarly, the smarter litter campaigns have emphasised that most people don’t do it (Keep Britain Tidy).

These are examples of public policy professionals getting wise about this stuff. But the same enlightened approach hasn’t made its way into the corporate world of UEFA, the Premier League and elsewhere – where it feels like the real aim is to protect institutional reputation and signal that, whatever the problem is, you can’t blame us or our advertisers.

On one level, it’s hard to argue with that self-interested logic. But I wish some smart people in adland would bring some alternative advice to the table – certainly if we’re interested in addressing the problem, rather than putting up another billboard. Public communication is meant to be adland’s specialism, but too often advertising people endorse naïve ideas about cause and effect, and activism-oriented ideas around the urgency of sending loud signals.

Frustratingly, my advice would probably involve ad agencies creating fewer ads, and corporations being accused of not caring enough. So I suspect we’ll keep running the white bear campaign, increase the media budget, and urge the public to read the headline properly this time: Don’t think of a white bear. We said don’t!

Thanks for reading. For anyone new here, I’m the author of this book about good intentions leading to bad outcomes. You can find more of my work at nickasbury.com.

Transport for London (TFL) is the latest advertiser to fall foul of the Advertising Standards Authority for inadvertently “reinforcing a negative stereotype about black men”.

There’s a painful irony, in that TFL has long seen itself occupying the moral high ground on these questions. Last year, it ostentatiously removed Accenture from its creative pitch process for not meeting its DEI criteria – a move that TFL was keen to publicise widely, at the expense of an agency whose staff (as far as I can tell) are more diverse than TFL’s board.

The campaign in question is Act Like a Friend, launched in October 2025 to urge TFL users to look out for anyone who might be getting harassed by fellow travellers. Here’s the full two-minute video:

So far, so…. laudable? Some might question why public transport companies are so keen to invest in ‘behavioural change’ campaigns that seek to educate the public as station staff numbers fall (from roughly 6,000 in 2016 to 4,500 today). Some might also question whether nudging people towards intervention could lead them into dangerous situations. But a charitable reading is that it’s well-intentioned advice that could make a positive difference, and no more patronising than the time-honoured call to ‘mind the gap’.

It’s clear that the two-minute film has an extremely careful eye on diversity. There’s a mixed-race (?) woman being bothered by a white middle-aged bloke on the tube; a black teenage boy and his white mate harassing a white girl (redhead) on a bus; and a white man and his black friend intimidating a white man (gay?) on a train platform. A black woman intervenes on the tube. Two young women (Asian and black?) intervene on the bus. A white man intervenes on the train platform.

It’s all self-consciously even-handed. Indeed, TFL has revealed that it used “a bespoke, casting-diversity tracker” in the making of the ad. This tracker reportedly “tracked age, ethnicity, gender and disability, and compared TFL’s casting to the London population as recorded by the March 2021 Census data for London.” The aim was “to ensure that, overall, [TFL’s] advertising campaigns were representative of London and to reduce the risk of perpetuating negative stereotypes.”

Alas, that work was in vain. Having made the ad, TFL made the mistake of releasing a set of 15-second edits that ran on Facebook and directed people to the full film. One of these edits showed only the black boy harassing the white girl, with no inclusion of his white mate. A single member of the public complained and the Advertising Standards Authority found that – encountered in isolation as it might be by some people – the shorter ad reinforced a negative stereotype about black men.

That particular edit has now been taken down. But the 15-second angry-white-man edit is still up on Facebook. You might question whether this edit perpetuates a similarly negative stereotype about working-class-coded Essex ‘gammons’. But for now, that question carries no weight.

The wording of the ASA ruling makes clear that the edit is the problem:

“Although we understood that TFL had intended to present a range of diversity and scenarios across their campaign, we considered the ad, when seen in isolation, had the effect of perpetuating a negative racial stereotype about black men as perpetrators of threatening behaviour. On that basis, we concluded that the ad featured a harmful stereotype, was irresponsible and likely to cause serious offence.”

Specifically, the ASA finds the ad breached two sections of the CAP Code (the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing):

CAP 1.3 Marketing communications must be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society.

CAP 4.1 Marketing communications must not contain anything that is likely to cause serious or widespread offence. Particular care must be taken to avoid causing offence on the grounds of: age; disability; gender; gender reassignment; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; and sexual orientation. Compliance will be judged on the context, medium, audience, product and prevailing standards…

Born of ad industry self-regulation, the CAP Code is itself rooted in wider UK law, including the Equality Act 2010, which enshrines the protected characteristics cited in its ruling.

I set this out in order to show the full legal machinery and institutional cascade that eventually leads to these rulings, with all the attendant press and social media reaction. You could argue it’s framed with the best of intentions – but is any of it doing any good?

Architect and critic Ike Ijeh is one of many who think it isn’t.

By the simplest application of game theory, the outcome of this regulatory framework is that anyone doing anything negative in an ad is best cast as a white person, probably a white male. Indeed, this episode has already been taken by many on the right as definitive proof that the game is rigged. It plays into a narrative that has become a festering source of grievance – and part of what keeps it going is that anyone who points it out is leapt upon as racist themselves.

I remember a comparable campaign for South Western Railway from a couple of years back – another attempt to educate customers and signal to staff that their employer cares about them. Conveyed visually, the idea is simple enough: if you hurl abuse, you’ll end up in court. Once again, the casting is studiously diverse: white woman, black man, white man.

I was surprised it never led to a backlash – because, as soon as you see this one ad in isolation, it has the same ‘perpetuating a negative stereotype’ vibe as the TFL ad, only more so. That one person who complained to the ASA must have missed this one, but I’d say it was a narrow escape.

Part of this is a familiar problem within adland: marketers tend to think in terms of ‘campaigns’ and assume everyone will see the full set. In reality, many people only see one execution, which can entirely alter the way an ad lands. The danger is heightened in an age when social media incentivises activists to remove work from its context in order to generate more outrage.

For self-described progressives, it’s possible to look at all of the above and see no problem. The regulations are well-intentioned and fine in most cases. Sure, there will be edge cases like TFL that get caught up in the machinery, but that’s a price worth paying for a generally good outcome.

It’s the ‘generally good outcome’ part that’s getting harder to defend. Representation in ads has become a hot cultural topic. Ike Ijeh words it more strongly than I would, but it’s obvious that the current approach is fuelling a backlash, and most likely increasing support for the parties that progressives fear most.

There’s a term in psychology that comes in useful here. ‘Hypervigilance’ is a state of extreme, constant alertness and heightened sensitivity, where the mind and body are continuously scanning for potential threats. It’s a survival mechanism gone into overdrive, tripping into irrational fear and chronic mental exhaustion.

Maybe that’s where the adland diversity conversation is stuck right now. And to be fair, you could say that’s where wider culture is stuck too. In most cases, advertisers are only trying to avoid the kind of backlash that people love to provide. It’s hard to blame advertisers when people are so quick to read the worst intentions into every possible execution.

For example, a couple of years back, Heinz got into trouble for this one – another case where they’d obviously studiously taken diversity into account. So we have a mixed-race marriage between a ginger beardy bloke and a black woman, and a depiction that ‘normalises’ both a conventional two-parent family and perhaps a single-parent family (or else the dad is out of shot). But it all led to an outraged ‘Black girls have fathers too’ reaction from a Guardian columnist, and a think piece linking the ad to the “compounding tragedies, confusions, narratives and stereotypes” unleashed by the Berlin Conference of 1884.

One problem with this cultural hypervigilance is that it fuels the backlash it initially only imagines – which in turn heightens the vigilance. Once you get Reform MP Sarah Pochin enthusiastically agreeing with a question about the amount of non-white people in ads and saying that it “drives [her] mad”, it’s taken as justification for doing more of it. Collectively, we yank the seatbelt harder and wonder why it remains stubbornly locked.

The answer might be to hold these principles a little more lightly, even if that draws accusations of complacency.

Broadly, you could see all this as part of an evolution in four phases:

1. We’re in the unenlightened era where only white people appear in ads

2. We’re in the early progressive era where it’s normal for non-white people to appear in ads, presented positively and maybe disproportionately to balance things out

3. We’re in the mid-progressive era where non-white people can be presented in all their humanity, negative and positive, just like white people are, and there’s no need to be too patronisingly over-representational about it all

4. We’re in a post-race utopia where people don’t see skin colour as that important, view race as an outmoded cultural construct, and celebrate that we’re past all this stuff

I think a lot of progressives see us being in Phase 2, but in perpetual danger of being dragged back into Phase 1 by reactionary forces. In reality, I think the ‘drag’ is often misinterpreted. A lot of what’s taken as pushback actually comes from people who believe we’re in Phase 3 and are impatient for adland and its institutions to catch up.

But moving from Phase 2 to Phase 3 involves a certain relaxing of previous vigilance – not just within ad agencies, but within their overseers. Maybe the ASA needs to be able to turn around and say “We hear the complaint, but feel it’s over the top – there’s no implication that all black teenagers are harassers.” That would, in turn, require the ASA to feel less constrained by an Equality Act that is being interpreted over-zealously. Otherwise, support may continue to increase for the one party currently pledging to scrap the Equality Act entirely.

All of which feels like a lot to extrapolate from a single ASA ruling. But to whatever extent advertising sets the cultural mood, it’s worth examining whether it sets it in the linear manner of good intentions leading reliably to good outcomes – or if it’s more complicated than that, and the good intentions end up leading somewhere else entirely.

Thanks for reading. For anyone unaware, that last sentence is a coded plug for my book, The Road to Hell – recently named “one of the best marketing books I’ve ever read” by one of the best marketing commentators on LinkedIn.

“It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist. Adland has a way of proving him right every day.

The latest example comes in the form of a campaign by D&AD, alongside a podcast featuring the creative director behind the campaign—Nils Leonard of Uncommon.

Let’s take each in turn.

First, the campaign. It’s the latest iteration of an annual campaign by D&AD to promote its awards show and provide an overarching theme for the year.

This year, the theme is the supposed death of creativity. And it’s timely because creativity has indeed been assailed on all sides of late. If we’re looking to identify a culprit at the Cluedo crime scene, we might question Reverend Purpose, Professor Programmatic, Mr Ad Testing, Miss Media Fragmentation, Mr Holding Company, Colonel Cannes, even Doctor D&AD himself. Maybe all of them have been in the billiard room, gleefully beating creativity over the head with a lead pipe.

Instead, the campaign belatedly turns up at the crime scene—and blames the witnesses who reported it. Rather than looking for institutional failures, leadership shortcomings and seismic shifts, it points the finger at you, the individual, writing your little thoughts in your little LinkedIn posts. If creativity is dead, it’s down to your attitude: do better!

On one level, I can sympathise. Faced with the daily barrage of LinkedIn posts and anodyne press commentary, who hasn’t occasionally thought ‘Jesus Christ, shut up and do some good ads’?

But a smarter response might be to point out the deeper dynamics behind arguments like this. A critic in a ‘thought piece’ might relate it to the modern tendency to individualise and psychologise problems that are systemic in nature. Depressed at work? It’s not because of the long hours and low pay—you need to find your inner fire, maybe take these supplements. Struggling to afford rent? Forget low wages and high prices—try a budgeting app and practise your ‘abundance mindset’. Crisis in creativity? Don’t look at us, look in the mirror.

It makes for an interesting email to receive while writing this post. But it also makes for a weak and pretty insulting analysis, especially coming from this organisation at this time.

While its history is dear to any creative’s heart, including my own, D&AD has been culpably wayward in the past decade—not only abandoning its post when creativity faced attack, but rushing to lead the charge.

Particularly in the 2016-2024 years, at a time when we needed an organisation to champion creative excellence in all its forms, we got yet another captured institution pushing a narrow purpose agenda.“Turning social purpose into creative excellence is harder, and should be valued more highly” was the directive of its President in 2021, validating the mindset of so many jurors who award work based on the cause more than the craft (at the expense of agencies like Uncommon as much as anyone else). “Great creative work creates better outcomes for all,” said the CEO of D&AD in 2023—and we all knew “better outcomes” meant promoting the purpose agenda, rather than simply doing brilliant work. “I am very keen to keep pushing this agenda forward,” insisted its Chairman in 2020, and D&AD continues to push it.

The results of this industry-wide shift have been well-documented, leading to the mess we’ve seen at Cannes this year—a sickening parade of purpose projects harnessing social issues to impress naïve creative juries, all based on wild exaggerations and outright falsehoods. The same projects get awarded at D&AD, who are shielded from the worst of the backlash because, to their credit, they are at least a non-profit channelling the entry fees into educational work.

At the same time, we’ve seen a marked divergence between work that gets awarded and work that the public likes, with the chronology tracking the period when creative awards became purpose awards. You might think purpose would take the hit for this. But instead it’s creativity bleeding in the billiard room: ‘Crisis of creative effectiveness’ says the research. ‘Creatively awarded ads, once effective, are now officially average’ say the headlines.

And now we get this campaign, which recognises that creativity is in bad shape—a sobering thought given D&AD’s mission—but projects the blame firmly outwards, away from the institutions and towards the individuals: those troublesome people voicing their opinions and frustrations through the low-rent medium of social media, rather than proper platforms like podcasts.

Which brings us to the podcast in question: an episode of Uncensored CMO, featuring host Jon Evans and guest Nils Leonard, the creative director behind the D&AD campaign.

As you’ll hear in this short clip, Leonard has a particular source of criticism in mind: the Turkey of the Week column in trade magazine Campaign. Readers of the beleaguered industry press will know this is a rare outpost of opinionated critique, usually offering a contrarian view about a campaign being praised elsewhere. Uncommon (Nils Leonard’s agency) has featured several times, so you can understand the frustration on a human level.

I have my own frustrations with Campaign. Even more than D&AD, it has been captured by a narrow, moralising agenda in recent years—perhaps brought on by the small but vociferous backlash that followed when it featured Nigel Farage on its front cover in 2019, daring to ask whether an industry involved in mass persuasion might have anything to learn from the victor of the Brexit referendum. Get back in line you evil bastards, came the reply.

Since then, there have been endless articles about purpose, DEI, sustainability and representation, often sourced uncritically from advocacy groups, alongside ‘school reports’ scoring agencies on their behaviour in these purposeful matters, and all punctuated by brief flashes of heterodoxy from contributors who are seldom heard from again.

Amid that suffocating orthodoxy, the Turkey of the Week column has been an outlier—a reminder of the vigorous critical culture that once accompanied advertising’s most creative times. This is what Nils Leonard’s argument misses. In its most celebrated creative periods, advertising has always embraced a rough-and-tumble critical culture.

Campaign itself was founded in 1968, directly influenced by the American ‘hustle’ spirit that Leonard celebrates elsewhere in the podcast. Its first front cover featured Marshall McLuhan in the bottom corner—if only intellectuals of that calibre gave a damn about advertising now.

Turkey of the Week has been part of Campaign since at least the early nineties, and somehow advertising managed to thrive throughout that decade. Perhaps the only reason the column is more jarring now is that there’s so little of this critical commentary around. We urgently need more of it, not less.

Oscar Wilde knew the importance of criticism as a creative act—“there has never been a creative age that has not been critical also”. Brian Eno has written about it too. He talks about how great work emerges from ‘scenius’—a concentration of people vigorously arguing about the work and craft, pushing each other to do better, sometimes via highbrow critique, other times via snark and potshots.

We should welcome it all—it’s a sign the industry has some life left in it. And it’s far healthier than a future of podcast bros saying “Love that, dude” to each other for all eternity.

Switching to wide-eyed positivity for a minute, there is much to enjoy in the podcast. Despite the misdiagnosis of the problem, the championing of creativity is exactly right. I want to cheer Nils Leonard to the rafters when he talks about how creative companies—including one of the biggest in WPP—have utterly failed to centre creativity in their offerings.

The idea of rebranding WPP to ‘We Proudly Present’ is more than just a nice backronym: it expresses an offering and attitude that could have been powerful. But somehow ad people lost the confidence to brush aside the McKinseys and Deloittes, sweep into the boardroom and say “We do the weird stuff that you can’t reduce or reproduce, but you know it means everything. It involves a mix of science, art, craft, taste, showmanship, salesmanship, lateral thinking, instinct, humour, playfulness and serendipity. And whatever you’ve heard about AI, it’s about to get more important, not less.”

I truly admire Uncommon for being one of the few companies to centre creativity in recent years, which is partly why D&AD is now looking to them for answers. But if adland wants to fight for creativity again, it can’t start by alienating its one and only ally: the critics and commentators who give enough of a shit to write about it.

Like 95% of advertising, 95% of commentary may be crap. But without the scrolling and the posting, I wouldn’t know about Bob Hoffman’s heroic battles against programmatic and ad fraud, which have seem him frozen out of the same institutions now berating us. I wouldn’t have discovered Steve Harrison’s 2021 column in Campaign that introduced me to his book. I wouldn’t know about Paul Feldwick and his elegant writings on advertising history, which extract so much that is relevant today. And I wouldn’t be able to read journalists like Maisie McCabe daring to make advertising discourse a less dull place—always by criticising the work, not the people.

And here’s the important, Oscar Wildean bit:

Critics and creatives are fighting the same battle because they’re the same people: literally, in the case of a Steve Harrison or Bob Hoffman; and figuratively, in the sense that critics are using writing as a way to embody thoughts where previously there was just a vague feeling and a blank page. Many of the critics are driven by that same desire to ‘do something’—in their case, to puncture the institutional narratives that hold back true creativity and penalise the Uncommons of this world, alongside many smaller agencies where the best creativity often resides.

Over the past decade, creatives have been forced to live through a period of timid orthodoxy in advertising, from which we might yet have a chance to emerge. Yes, we need more people logging off and creating, but we also need more people thinking critically and writing about it. Launch your Substacks, publish your drafts, write your thought pieces, post your comments.

Just don’t say anything shitty about me—there are limits.

Thanks for reading. For anyone new here, I am this guy, this is my book and this is the new German edition.

This year’s John Lewis ad is the silent scream of an emasculated ad industry adrift in an age of feminised identity politics, no longer able to articulate anything meaningful beyond weak, muscle-memory gestures and commoditised nostalgia.

I’ll explain why in a minute.

First, some background. In each of the past two years, I’ve written a 99% tongue-in-cheek semiotic analysis of the John Lewis Christmas ad. I’ll include links at the end of this post.

This year, I’ve decided to go all in. The way I see it, if we’re going to continue treating the release of the John Lewis Christmas ad as a significant cultural moment, then we should go at it with full force, all semiotics guns blazing. If nothing else, it’s a fun exercise in talking academic-coded bullshit—and it might even be 1% true.

(If you’ve received this by email, you may need to open it in your browser to see the full post.)

So here is the crucial frame in this year’s ad.

For now, ignore the dad, who is in the grip of a deep depression, and look at the record sleeves behind him. On the top shelf, elevated in the hierarchy, is the symbol of the feminine: a soft pink, circular form. Immediately beneath it is the symbol of the masculine: a teal blue, square form. These contrasting motifs will recur throughout the ad: blue vs pink, square vs round. In this particular shot, the square is tilted to become a warning graphic, containing the simplified figure, which is a nod towards toxic masculinity. (If these are real record covers, I’ve been unable to trace the originals and I suspect they were chosen primarily for the shapes and colours.)

So the ad opens on the mother, standing up, briskly assertive, issuing instructions to the family: “All right kids, let’s clear all these prezzies off the table.”

Cut to the boy, sitting down, dressed in blue, beneath the spherical festive lights and round floor lamp, which represent the overarching feminine authority in the household. A set of circular, noise-cancelling headphones is clamped to his ears: a symbol of the culture in which the boy is immersed. He looks like an older version of the boy in Adolescence and he knows his parents were weirdly influenced by that programme, which makes him anxious.

The boy looks down at his dad, who cuts a pathetic figure, kneeling on the floor, tidying up scraps of wrapping paper.

The boy remains anxious. Looking sideways and downwards at his father, he sees the emasculated figure he may one day become. And he knows his father is about to discover the one remaining gift, which comes from the boy himself. Aware of his father’s already fragile state, the boy senses this gift is liable to be over-interpreted in a painful and heavy-handed way.

But now the mother’s instructions must be followed. The boy scoops up his gifts and exits the scene.

Dressed in dusty pink, his sister watches on, her face relaxed and observant. Emotionally literate, she reads the situation calmly and her centrally-parted hair denotes the balance and poise of a future Earth mother.

Now for the gift: a square Post-It on a square package (remember squares and straight lines indicate the masculine in this story). The package is a flash of assertive red, decorated by emergency yellow: the boy’s one, jarring contribution to the muted colour scheme of the ad.

Inside the square package is the square record sleeve. Inside the square record sleeve is the round record, the part that matters. And now the needle drops.

At this point, we hear something we have never heard before in a John Lewis ad: a strong piano chord.

After years of limp-wristed cover versions and Elton John wistfully picking out a one-finger melody (2018), the bright, bouncing piano chords come with what we might call the ‘shock of the old’. They are an impossibly vivid call from a distant era.

Why don’t you take my hand, come away, come out of your blues?

The song is part of the colour scheme: a call to ‘come out of your blues’. Tinged with the melancholy sense of blues, this is a siren call to step out of the masculine world and into the place ‘where love lives’.

It’s here we arrive at the central motif of the story: the gendered hierarchy of the shelves, and the blue record partially obscured by what looks like a piece of faux-ethnic folk art.

The boy in blue looks on from halfway down the stairs, against a backdrop of tasteful prints, referencing feminine forms and the mass-production aesthetic of the Bauhaus movement. At this point, the boy knows his father is doomed.

Rather than coming out of the blues, the father descends deep down into them. In this queasy, blue-lit nightclub, posters denote the year: 1991 to 1992.

One poster denotes a specific date. Thursday 8 August 1991 was, of course, the day of the collapse of the Warsaw radio mast, the tallest man-made structure in the world, its collapse symbolic of the decline that would rapidly lead to the fall of the Soviet Union. ‘Junction Vision’ is a reference to the historical juncture at which an alternative future seemed briefly possible: the ‘unipolar moment’ when the world might have taken a different course. This was the last time the advertising industry felt confident, the last decade where it felt like it mattered. A time when the father was young and virile, and girls leant in and listened.

But the father is haunted by the opening lines of the song that brought him here:

You’ve been hurt and you’ve been down
You’ve been set out of your course, boy
And pushed around
Flying high, but oh, you felt so low
When she walked out of that door and left you on your own

Somewhere along the way, the world went off course. The white, western male got pushed around by history. Yes, he was flying high and still is, living in an impeccable house with his impeccable family. But why does he feel so low? Where did she go, this future he wanted? Why did she leave him like this?

The black, female singer brings no comfort:

Don’t reach out for me with an apology
I’ll never suffer your desire

Caught between regret and desire, the man is told that both are useless. Your apology is unwelcome, your desire is unwanted. Just come down, deep down, and have a good time. Drink, drugs and the undignified dad dance towards death’s door. That’s all that’s coming for you, mate.

Deep in his fever dream, the father realises, with sickening clarity, where life has placed him: the stale white male in the diverse and impossibly young crowd. Almost certainly, the dad works in advertising. This is the ad talking about itself.

Now the father is alone and about to enter his own advertising trope: the time-lapse dream sequence.

He sees his boy in blue, regressing to a toddler taking his first steps, then a babe in arms, pointing and laughing at the wisps of grey in the beard of the man he is set to replace.

Now we are back in the living room, where a tasteful card saying ‘LOVE’ indicates for the hard-of-semioticising that this is where love lives. But the song itself has morphed into a contemporary cover version by Labrinth, the confident chords subsumed into the kind of fey cover version that they promised to disrupt.

Meanwhile, the son has descended to dad’s level. It is time for the man hug—or, more accurately, the sublimated fight sequence.

Liberated from the noise-cancelling headphones of a feminised cultural discourse, the boy locates the release valve of a sense of humour: a relaxedness that feels alien to him, and is only possible because the women aren’t here, and the butt of the joke is masculinity itself.

Dad continues to go through the gestures of the dance: a sparring motion where the hands are raised as though to fight, but instead waft ineffectually in the air. We glimpse a dim muscle memory of more masculine times, when confrontation was a rite of passage, and men bonded through rituals of dissent, humour and transgression—traits that have been problematised and ironised.

Language is no use. The male generations are adrift in a time of profound inarticulacy, unable to find words to say anything worth saying.

But they are able, at least, to join in the ritual of consumption. Buy the Rough Trade record, but do it from the tasteful concession in John Lewis. Put it on your turntable, but know that the record player long ago stopped being a symbol of rebellion and is now a retro interior design feature.

Now the women are clearing the table, and it remains the father’s job to fill it. One day it will be the son’s job too.

This is your gift. You found it.

Now on your knees and pick up the paper.

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this incredibly useful.

Here is the 2023 reading and the 2024 reading.

For anyone new here, I am this guy, this is my book and this is the new German edition.

Channel 4 has released its latest ‘Mirror on the Industry’ report, in which it purports to monitor the advertising industry’s performance when it comes to diversity and ‘representation’ in its output.

No one has ever asked Channel 4 to do this. Under its public service broadcasting remit, the channel has a requirement to promote diversity in its programming output and hiring practices, and has to report back to Ofcom every year. Psychologically, that’s probably a galling thing for its executives to have to do – most people like to think they’re doing the right thing because they’re good people, not because a superior is monitoring their every move.

So, like a toddler playing at being teacher, Channel 4 has chosen to cast itself as the superior to the people ‘below’ it in the food chain – in this case, the ad industry that largely funds the channel. On one level, it’s a useful way for Channel 4 to show Ofcom they’re going ‘above and beyond’ in their commitment to DEI. On another level, it’s a soothing displacement activity – a chance for the put-upon broadcaster to play the moral leader, instead of the obedient junior.

For this, the ad industry is supposed to be grateful. As the introduction to the report notes: “Ultimately, this insight initiative is Channel 4’s gift to the industry.” Yay, thanks!

Like all the best gifts, it comes with a snarky swipe at the recipient: “Mirror on the Industry launched in 2019 to see if the UK’s TV advertising was as inclusive as the industry said it was… spoiler alert, it wasn’t.” (Spoiler alert, this is because advertisers are horrid, whereas Channel 4 is great.)

We’ll come back to the corporate psychology behind all this. But this post is mainly about the report itself. For a mirror, it’s stunningly unreflective when it comes to its own blunderings and failings.

First, the buried lede. The headline finding reported in The Times and Daily Mail is one that the report quickly skips over. Despite continual talk of under-representation and a crisis of inclusion, it turns out that black people are now represented in 51% of ads, while making up 4% of the UK population.

A similar story plays out across other ethnic groups. According to members of the diversity commissariat, who have combed through 1,000 ads and pressed pause to assess the faces and skin tones, South Asians are represented in 17% of ads, while making up 8% of the population, East Asians in 11% of ads while making up 1% of the population, and ‘Mixed ethnicity’ in 9% of ads while making up 3% of the population.

Nowhere in the report does Channel 4 reflect on whether there might be a downside to this imbalance. Whatever the noble intentions behind it, the result is a world on screen that looks very different to the world off it – the kind of world that might make some feel alienated, or at the very least patronised. It can’t be framed as a necessary over-correction that will naturally settle to its ‘correct’ level – because, despite Channel 4’s earlier ‘spoiler alert’, the level of black representation was already 37% (compared to 3% of the population) in 2018, before Channel 4 took up the fight. Nor can there be grumblings that this is just token bit-part casting and doesn’t really count. According to the research, 23% of all ads feature black people in ‘lead roles’.

To be clear, I don’t lie awake worrying about the number of people of any ethnicity in ads. The trouble with critiquing this stuff is it reduces you to the level of those who treat humanity as a spreadsheet: tallying up which minority groups are represented, and how far those numbers deviate from census proportions, as this report does again and again. The underlying logic is that, once one group’s numbers are ‘solved’, attention moves to the next. And that’s exactly what happens in this report.

Pregnant people and over-70s, your time has come!

There’s no particular reason why Channel 4 has picked you out over the involuntarily childless, the over-80s, the widowed, the orphaned, the bald, the anosmic, the club-footed, the left-handed, maybe even the non-telegenic (we’ll come back to that). But for now, be grateful it’s your turn. Once we’ve got you over-represented, we’ll move on to the next group.

Assuming at least some of adland laps this stuff up, we can expect a wave of ads similar to the ‘essential example’ of Vodafone, who drew complaints from healthcare professionals over their depiction of a roadside birth facilitated by Vodafone’s excellent signal. And we can look forward to more ads in the ‘normalised’ mould of Durex briefly showing two older people getting frisky as part of its montage (no idea how we work out if they’re over 70).

I won’t dwell on the language of pregnant ‘people’ or the presumably pregnant trans man in the image above, though I’m sure others will take note. But it’s another sign of the intersectional aesthetic in which so many are invested. Wherever there’s a spreadsheet to be filled, someone who can tick many boxes in a split-second of screen time is invaluable.

Alongside the pregnant and the pensioners, disability also gets its turn in the spotlight. The report uses a baseline of 24% of UK adults having a disability (sourced from a government figure, though the claim there is that it’s 24% of all people, not just adults).

Either way, this is based on the broad definition of disability as self-reported impairments that have a substantial and long-term negative effect on someone’s ability to carry out normal daily activities. Only a fraction of those in that group will have a more obvious disability, such as being wheelchair-bound, severely sight-impaired or profoundly deaf. The majority will have less visible conditions, ranging from chronic depression to arthritis to dyslexia and ADHD.

The assumption of Channel 4 is that only 4% of ads feature such people, to which the obvious retort is – how the fuck do you know? It may sound glib, but in all seriousness – how do we know Gio Compario isn’t on the spectrum? How do we know Peter Kay’s ‘top bombing’ isn’t motivated by undiagnosed ADHD? How do we know Jack Dee isn’t staring at those penguins out of debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome?

The only way to ‘code’ such characters as disabled is to include an explicit reference to it in the script, which in turn invites cries of tokenism or negative portrayal. Channel 4 is the self-appointed authority when it comes to this stuff – deciding which ads are properly inclusive and which are “coded with tokenistic inclusion”.

Who are these mysterious diviners of what is inclusive and what isn’t? According to the report, it’s a consulting firm called Tapestry, within whose Clerkenwell walls “trained auditors review ads second by second, interpreting them as the average audience would, assessing both explicit and implicit cues to understand who is on screen and how they are portrayed.”

For my part, I have zero faith in the ability of a team of London EC1 diversity auditors to think remotely like the “average audience” would. And presumably they would find the concept of an “average audience” deeply troubling in any case.

But for these diversity experts, it’s not solely about setting aside the ethnic minorities in favour of the old, pregnant and disabled. Adland must also #DoBetter when it comes to the particular casting of ethnic minorities. This is where the report springs a masterful Kafka trap. On the one hand, you have to meet these absurd inclusion metrics in the space of a single ad, which is naturally going to lead to montage-style approaches that cram as many people as possible into your 30-second slot. (The report notes with zero self-awareness that these montage ads are now more widespread than ever.)

On the other hand, using montages is now deemed Problematic, because such an approach might be seen a shortcut or somehow tokenistic. (No shit – people have been rolling their eyes at this tokenism for years, and Channel 4 has encouraged it all the way.)

At the same time, the report insists that montage ads can still be the model to follow – you just have to do them the ‘right’ way.

Like this Virgin Atlantic ad, which the report elevates as the model for us all to follow.

Note that this advice comes from people who have never made an ad in their lives. I’ve laboriously taken the time to show exactly what their vision of ‘best practice’ advertising is – see my screenshots and commentary below.

Doing my best to respond as “the average audience would”, I think this ad stinks. It’s tiresome diversity drivel in which everyone looks like a catwalk model, white men are cast as high-flying executives, black men are happy bus drivers, Asian men serve up spicy food, and a ginger woman appears for a split-second looking genuinely bemused to be there – all in service of a commercially appropriated Maya Angelou script, which (with stunning creative originality) flogs holiday flights by showing happy people in exotic locations. Watch and learn, Bill Bernbach.

This is the future Channel 4 wants for advertising. There is zero curiosity about whether the ads are funny, entertaining, original, surprising, or commercially effective. Just make sure you get the right boxes ticked, but also do it the right way, and we’ll tell you afterwards which is which, because we have a team of diversity experts who think like average people do.

Bizarrely, the ad industry press is happy to go along with all this. While mainstream titles like The Times and the Daily Mail note the eye-opening over-representation of ethnic groups, the trade press contains zero mention of this and instead goes straight to the ‘more must be done’ narrative: Only 4% of ads include disabled people, says Campaign. Channel 4 report finds stagnation in DEI representation says Marketing Week. Channel 4’s Mirror on the Industry… highlights that progress is slow says Creative Brief. Channel 4 Report Exposes Representation Gap in UK Advertising says Little Black Book. None are allowed to mention any progress, let alone raise the uncomfortable issue of over-representation. The mono-narrative must be sustained.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks on in bemusement. I’ve written before about Jon Stewart’s brilliant evisceration of ad industry bullshit, which – in the name of busting stereotypes – has created a host of new ones: the omnipresent mixed-race couple, the perfectly balanced group of friends in the pub, the ethnically correct extras milling around diversely in every scene, the endless montage ads.

But we already know how Channel 4 responds to criticism of this stuff. “Complaints welcome!” it cheerfully advises the racists and bigots who are the only people who could ever possibly have an issue with it. “Ride me to Narnia, bitches!” is the cry from the newsreader who isn’t specific about which people he’s referring to as female dogs, but presumably it includes the Jon Stewarts of this world, who think most advertising these days is full of patronising dross that treats people as though they continually need to be educated out of their bigotry.

The report notes that it is landing at a time when the world is not showing the required progress. While taking care to lend an honorific capital to Disabled and Black people, the writers curiously stick to lower-case for the ‘reform supporters’ who are now ‘gaining visibility’. Presumably we’re just a few montage ads away from convincing Reform voters that they’re wrong about all this stuff and our diverse future will arrive as scheduled.

For its part, Channel 4 doesn’t stop at simply monitoring what is taking place in adland. It also actively intervenes to ‘encourage’ the right work with its Diversity in Advertising award. The name suggests it might be an award given to the best naturally-occurring DEI-friendly ad from the previous year. In fact, it’s a specific brief set in advance, to a theme decided by Channel 4’s diversity commissariat. The winner receives £1m in match-funded airtime, because horrible ad agencies would never do something vaguely good without a cash incentive.

So far, this scheme has brought us a nicely made film about an autistic schoolgirl’s family life, but one which crassly makes Vanish fabric conditioner the hero of the story, because it extends the life of the girl’s favourite hoodie. This is Channel 4 and adland’s version of social purpose – conceptually no different to Left-Handed Mango Chutney (a brilliant parody from 2022), and all executed with an obvious eye to awards schemes. Other winners include E45’s transgender ad, which does the same thing as Vaseline’s Transition Body Lotion and demonstrates capitalism’s admittedly brilliant ability to monetise any given social phenomenon.

I’m nearly done now, but first I’d better include the obligatory ‘to be sure’ paragraph, much as I resent having to write it.

To be sure, nothing in this post is arguing that diversity and representation should never be considered in the process of making an ad. And to be even surer, ads shouldn’t be exclusively full of straight white people. And to be absolutely even fucking surer, people who make ads should be mindful of the ‘tropes’ and shortcuts they will inevitably use when telling a story to a mass audience in 30 seconds. That is part of the skill of storytelling and mass communication.

But to be even surer, none of this is the goal or primary purpose of an ad, and it’s ridiculous to read every ad through this lens. The main goal is always to build fame and sell stuff in an entertaining and respectful way: that is the biggest service ads can perform for people of all races and backgrounds. Many of the greatest ads achieve this with zero diversity, because they feature zero people. Smash Martians, Cadbury’s Gorilla, Churchill the Dog, Sony balls, Honda cog, Compare the Meerkat. I genuinely wonder if some agencies now avoid such ads, because they offer no opportunity to demonstrate their diversity bona fides in the year-end report, or to please their comrades at Channel 4.

Which brings us back to Channel 4 itself – this self-appointed authority whose board is currently 12 white to 1 black, and 8 male to 5 female. (To be fair, I have no idea what hidden disabilities any of them have, or their sexuality, or their class background, or their physical health, or their religion, or their life experiences and traumas, because that important stuff doesn’t show up in photos.)

This is the Channel 4 whose recent content includes Embarrassing Bodies (in which taboos are busted by gawping at naked people), Virgin Island (in which taboos are busted by sending young virgins to a Croatian island), Open House: The Great Sex Experiment (in which couples are pressured into open relationships, one of them reportedly vomiting in humiliation at the experience), Naked Education (in which adults strip naked in front of school children), and 1000 Men and Me (in which Bonnie Blue does what it says in the title – advertisers actually withdrew their ads from that one).

Despite this noble record, Channel 4 has been haemorrhaging younger viewers to Twitch and YouTube, and one of its former commissioners recently wrote an article in which he identifies the source of the problem: it’s the viewers.

According to the article, “It’s viewers who are scared of trying new talent, not commissioners. It’s viewers who nine times out of ten will choose a mediocre true crime or celebrity doc over a brilliantly made doc about almost anything else. It’s viewers who – overwhelmed with choice – are terrified to take risks on unfamiliar-looking new propositions.”

At least Channel 4 is consistent in this. If you complain, it’s ‘Ride me to Narnia, bitches’. If you stop watching, it’s because you’re a villain who’s scared of brave content.

And if you stop advertising? Well, we may eventually find out. Channel 4’s traditional ad revenue is in long-term decline and talk of privatisation flares up periodically. At some point, its uncomfortable straddling of public-service remit and commercial pressures may become impossible to sustain, especially if it’s obsessed with relentlessly diversity-monitoring the hand that feeds it.

Returning to the corporate psychology with which this post started, it’s the power dynamics that are most fascinating in all this. At the top, you have the Government and Ofcom, which has ratcheted up the DEI requirements on Channel 4 to the point where they go far beyond the relatively broad terms with which it started in 1982.

Then you have Channel 4, meekly answerable to its Ofcom overlords, but compensating by coming home and kicking the cat – i.e. its advertisers.

By Channel 4’s framing, they are the ones who genuinely care about diversity and inclusion. It’s nothing to do with it being a statutory requirement – they just live and breathe this stuff.

But advertisers are the grubby little bastards who only care about commercial results. So Channel 4 helpfully wheels out the inevitable ‘business case’ for doing the progressive thing. All of it is familiar over-claiming based on sketchy research by the Unstereotype Alliance, another interest group that goes in search of evidence for the arguments it already believes.

Then you have the advertisers who duly turn around and preach to the people below them in the food chain – the poor bastards who have to watch this stuff. In the end, it’s the viewers who bear the brunt of this box-ticking, and they’ve all noticed ads are crapper than they’ve ever been.

‘But the viewers want this!’ insists the report, having asked the usual leading questions to its survey respondents. (Effectively, ‘Do you think it’s important for ads to be inclusive or are you a bastard?’)

What irks me most about all this is that it’s the critics (like me) who risk being labelled bastards and bigots. Channel 4 and its acolytes have no conception that the criticism might be rooted in something else entirely: an actual respect for other people’s basic human decency, which I believe is widespread, even among the dreaded working classes.

Like many people, I don’t see the public as racist, sexist bigots who need to be coaxed out of their prejudices by sufficiently progressive casting decisions from the corporate brands flogging them holidays and phone contracts during the ad breaks. I think the vast majority are on board with the broad ideas of diversity and inclusion, which have deeply liberal, humanistic roots. But they’re turned off by the co-option of those values by a DEI professional class that relentlessly raises the salience of identity categories in a way that increases division, while creating the kind of cultural background noise that favours whatever elements of the far right exist and want to take advantage of it.

I think Channel 4 is profoundly clueless when it comes to diversity in advertising, and all of its efforts are self-centring and counter-productive. Even if you insist on judging an advertiser’s output by a crude headcount, you can at least do it over the course of five years of content across all media, rather than expecting a single TV ad to cover it.

But the report ignores all this grown-up stuff and stands there like a toddler with a clipboard, shouting at the assembled class. If advertisers have any respect for themselves and the public, they should ignore this bullshit and work from the assumption that most people don’t need re-educating by consumer brands and their carefully audited tropes. Make great ads, place them wherever works best, and let Channel 4 be grateful for whatever it gets.

For anyone new here, I am this guy and this is my book.

Anyone who enjoyed this post might also like: My inherently problematic Christmas ad diversity audit

Anyone who peers long enough into the abyss will eventually find Piers Morgan staring back at them. (This is my attempt at a modern aphorism.)

So it was that I found myself watching the latest episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored yesterday, in which the American Eagle campaign is argued over in a way that appears to drive all four guests to distraction, while the host periodically barks his characteristic ’Ang on! before cutting to a commercial break that (in my algorithm at least) didn’t involve jeans.

How did we get to this point?

I’m writing this to lay out the timeline of a media storm, because I think it’s an instructive exercise that reflects how a lot of these episodes play out.

But I also want to challenge four theories of the case. First, that this was a storm whipped up by right-wingers based on a few posts by anonymous nobodies. Second, that this was a woke hallucination based on a reading of the ad that had zero validity. Third, that this was a widespread Gen Z backlash that media commentators have subsequently commented on. Fourth, that this was a Pepsi Kendall Jenner rerun, where a misjudged ad led to a predictable public backlash.

Let’s start with the timeline, then come back to how none of those interpretations work, but another one might.

Timeline of a media storm

Note: I’ve done my best with the digital archaeology, but if I’ve left important gaps in the narrative, please let me know.

July 23: Campaign launches

If you’ve not seen the campaign or the controversy, for Christ’s sake, stop reading this post and continue with your life.

The rest of you know it’s American Eagle jeans, Sydney Sweeney in said jeans, and a brand hoping this will sell some jeans.

On launch day, the American Eagle website featured quotes from Jennifer Foyle, President and Creative Director, who is notably not a reactionary old white male. She was given a Brand Genius award by AdWeek in 2018 for her exceptional talent, bravery and commitment to body confidence and empowerment. The mention in the article of “a little mischief” is the only hint of what is to come.

Marketing Dive also mentions Chief Marketing Officer Craig Brommers. Elsewhere, he describes himself as “passionate for purpose-driven brands” and someone who believes that “purpose-driven brands… can make a difference when they connect with young audiences in an authentic and meaningful way.” To use the TikTok parlance, he is not giving fashy vibes. (Fashy = fascist since about 2017.)

In other coverage, AdWeek cheerfully repeats the genes/jeans pun, and Hollywood Reporter mentions how the campaign’s proceeds will be donated to mental health and crisis intervention charity Crisis Text Line. Again, not very fashy in tone, though there is an ominous mention of Sydney Sweeney owning a German Shepherd puppy.

July 24: Stock surges, good vibes

We’re 24 hours into the campaign, and most of the headlines are about a stock surge.

Any self-respecting ad person will tell you this surge does NOT reflect any kind of consumer response. Ad campaigns are generally judged over weeks at the soonest, and years or decades if you’re talking long-term brand effects. Nevertheless, the vibes are good and the surge reflects investor optimism about American Eagle doing something big with someone famous, which often works well in advertising.

Meanwhile, CMO Craig Brommers has posted about the campaign on LinkedIn, and for the first 24-48 hours the comments are glowing (see image above), reflecting well on him and Ashley Schapiro, Marketing VP.

July 25-26: Early, non-eugenic rumblings

Two days post-launch, the first signs of discontent. But they have nothing to do with eugenics. Instead, there’s talk of the link to the charitable cause being ‘tasteless’ and ‘tone deaf’, along with criticism of objectification and the male gaze. On the other hand, Brand Vision is reporting that the campaign has already won Gen Z hearts, claiming that the Sydney Jean stock sold out in 48 hours.

Meanwhile, on the right, there are the first signs of triumphalism about the campaign signalling the ‘end of woke’. Again, none of this coverage mentions eugenics, but is a rerun of the April 2024 viral tweet by Richard Hanania that heralded Sydney Sweeney’s appearance on SNL with the words ‘Wokeness is dead’. Since then, Sweeney has been associated with a memetic strain of ‘America is back’-ness despite not having expressed notable political views herself.

July 26 (evening): First Nazi sightings

TikTok doesn’t give time stamps, so it’s hard to know the exact chronology. But it seems like the evening of July 26th was when Nazis first entered the chat. On Twitter/X, Ella Yurman had the distinctively modern experience of posting something, going to bed, and waking up in the centre of a global shitstorm. Around the same time on TikTok, the first viral post appears to have come from @midwesterngothic, where he leads with the Nazi propaganda angle, then goes on to talk about over-sexualisation and the visual echo of an old Calvin Klein ad featuring an under-age Brooke Shields.

It’s worth noting that neither poster can be described as a nobody. The former is a trans woman Jewish comedian and antifascist campaigner focusing on labour rights and trans liberation (description taken from her agency representation page on Avalon—not many nobodies have one). The latter is a trans influencer with 74k followers.

July 27: Influencer wave / first media coverage

Day 4 and the tweets and TikToks take off. It’s hard to trace all of them, but I’ve picked out some of the most shared.

Note how this isn’t members of the public taking to the streets, students attacking shopfronts, Gen Z kids returning their jeans in protest, or mums getting restless on Mumsnet. Typical examples include a millennial PhD scholar with 30k followers (Mia Brett), a millennial gay influencer with 1.3m followers and agency representation (Brandon Edelman), a professional creator with 700k followers (Mariah Rose), a self-described communist and prison abolitionist with 127k followers (evan_loves_worf), and a self-described human rights activist with 17k followers (Hana Katana).

None of this is to criticise any of these individuals, just to illustrate the phenomenon we’re analysing. Most are openly left-wing in their activism, some are involved in professional content creation, some are high-level academics, many are millennial rather than Gen Z, many are white, some are Black.

Meanwhile, the first media coverage of the eugenics-related uproar comes from progressive-leaning Salon (see image above).

July 28: Amplification in marketing circles…

I’m not sure if it was the 27th or 28th, but Dr Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel made one of the earliest and most influential interventions on LinkedIn (leading eventually to her appearance on the Piers Morgan panel). At the same time, the LinkedIn post by Craig Brommers (CMO of American Eagle) began to attract negative comments, primarily from the highly educated and professionally successful millennial-and-older people you would expect to find on LinkedIn.

… amplification in left-leaning media & marketing press

Still on July 28th, NBC and Washington Post, typically rated centre-left or left-leaning, amplified the story, with NBC contributor Cheryl Overton calling the ads a ‘dog whistle’, and Washington Post contributors talking about how ‘regressive’ they seemed. Meanwhile, the creative advertising press began to report on the story, including a Creative Bloq column that opens “It’s 2025. Do better.”

In all cases, the sources for the stories aren’t on-the-street voxpops or angry phone-in callers, but quotes from the same influencers, academics, and social media posters mentioned above.

… and amplification in the right-wing press

At the same time as Washington Post, NBC and others were lining up to cover a story involving Sydney Sweeney pictures and Adolf Hitler references, the right-wing press eagerly got involved too – some examples here from New York Post, Breitbart and Fox, all reporting on the same social media posts, all gleefully framed as a ‘woke gone mad’ story.

July 29: Gen Z myth-making, meme warfare, and Ted Cruz

Six days into the campaign and about three days into the backlash, left-leaning media outlets like MSNBC continue to amplify the story with talk of “an unbridled shift towards whiteness”, while Psychology Today talks earnestly of a backlash from young people, though no evidence is given for this. The author seems unaware she’s writing mainly about an online backlash from fellow PhDs and other marketing-adjacent influencers. She also references the “smart online satire” of a meme post by Doja Cat (US rapper of Black South African and Ashkenazi Jewish descent)—which takes the form of Doja Cat delivering Sydney Sweeney’s ad script in an exaggerated southern drawl, which I guess we can leave to the semioticians to decode.

By the evening of 29 July, Ted Cruz gets involved, retweeting the coverage in the New York Post, with a message about the ‘crazy Left’. By this point, rather than plucking an obscure social media post from nowhere to generate some outrage, he’s commenting on a mainstream press article about a story already being covered everywhere.

July 30: Piers appears

While I’ve left out too many articles, takes and sidebars to mention, that pretty much brings us up to the Piers Morgan Uncensored episode I mentioned at the start—in which Dr Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel is one of the panellists and carries herself (I think) pretty well as she faces a barrage of ‘yoo wot mate?’ eye-rolling from Morgan and others. Nevertheless, her talk is of “the impact that [the campaign] has on audiences and particularly on younger audiences” and how “it is no surprise to me that it was picked up by audiences who reacted in the way that they did”.

It should be clear by now that I don’t think this is what happened. What nearly all of the commentators, columnists and influencers miss is this: Rather than commentating on the phenomenon, they ARE the phenomenon.

Four theories of the case

Having laid out the timeline, let’s see how those four theories stack up.

1. This was a storm whipped up by right-wingers based on a few posts by anonymous nobodies

This argument has been made widely, but the timeline should show it’s unfounded. Far from anonymous nobodies with little connection to the left, most of the early posts came from people who overtly present themselves as political activists and command big followings. They range from professional influencers and content creators, to PhD authors and academics, to highly-paid marketers, mostly from at least a generation older than Gen Z.

While the right-wing press has, of course, leapt on this with glee and will no doubt milk it for all it’s worth, they’re not the only ones. The progressive and left-leaning press were among the first to amplify the story, and there is an entire ecosystem of people making hay out of it. Ted Cruz was a relative latecomer to the drama, reposting a story that was already in the mainstream media.

2. This was a woke hallucination based on a reading of the ad that had zero validity

I haven’t directly touched on this in the timeline above, but it’s a point worth emphasising. I’ve seen people arguing that concerns of ‘ fascist coding’ and ‘eugenics’ are nothing more than crazy, bad-faith takes with zero validity and fit only for mockery.

I don’t believe that. I think it’s valid for a semiotician, or anyone, to read the ad that way. Ads are cultural documents that emerge from a time and place, and it’s anti-intellectual to say you can never read them in a deeper way. Lord knows, I’ve spent years arguing that corporate purpose ads reveal a lot about the times we’ve just lived through, and none of it is good.

You can certainly argue that some people infer this reading in a cynical way to get clicks—and there’s a flavour of that in some of the earlier posts, where people try out various tacks (masculine gaze, sexualisation, exploitation of cause) before landing on one that gains more purchase (Nazis). But it doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth considering in those readings.

It’s also valid to see those ‘codes’ and ‘tropes’ without claiming intent by the creators. Effect often diverges from intent—again, an argument I’ve made many times in the purpose years.

3. This was a Gen Z backlash that media commentators have subsequently weighed in on.

But what is a hallucination (unless proven otherwise) is the claim that this reading is shared by millions of people, especially those of a specific ethnicity, gender or age group.

It’s one thing for an academic to say: “I fully expect this ad to work—for most people of all backgrounds, it’s just a hot celeb in jeans. But for me, this also says something disturbing about our times etc. etc.” All fine.

It’s another thing for an academic to say: “Here’s why this ad is offensive to people from group X or Y”, or “Here’s why this ad has failed with Gen Z”. If you’re going to say that, you need evidence beyond your own opinion. Every commenter quoted above was opining at least 3-4 days after the launch, at a time when no public outcry was taking place, and all reports were highly positive (including the one about the Sydney Jean product line selling out).

As is sometimes the case in these strange cultural spirals, it’s not out of the question that the reality can eventually catch up to match the narrative. At some point, the sheer heat of the discourse can end up warping reality—I’ll come back to this in the last section.

4. This was a Pepsi Kendall Jenner rerun, where a misjudged ad led to a predictable public backlash and immediate retreat.

But first, let’s quickly dispatch this one. The Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad was launched on 4 April 2017 and withdrawn on 5 April 2017 after being mocked by everyone from the New York Post to Bernice King. The American Eagle campaign lived for 3 days before any mention of Nazis, and continues to live now. I’m sure there have been wobbles in the marketing department, but there’s no sign of an about-turn, and very little reason for one, at least once you realise you’re battling a chimera more than a reality. Even progressive champion Stephen Colbert, speaking on July 31, is more inclined to find humour in the whole thing. And even at the height of the storm, the New York Times has room for sober, contextualising takes from the likes of (Black American) linguist John McWhorter. The spell-like power of the early 2020s woke backlash has weakened.

So what just happened?

Just over a century ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about the ‘manufacture of consent’ in his book Public Opinion, a phrase later adopted in the book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. The phrase is used to describe the way powerful institutions can shape and control public opinion by selectively presenting information, framing narratives, and limiting the range of acceptable debate, to the point where it seems like the public’s agreement is freely given.

I’m not the first to coin the phrase ‘manufactured dissent’, but I’m surprised it hasn’t become more widespread in recent years. You can see it as the other side of the consent coin: the illusion of dissent that appears spontaneous or grassroots, but exists primarily in a high-level discourse involving brands, academics, influencers, commentators and media reporting on other media. All this creates the impression of raging public debate and intractable generational divides, but its real purpose is to reinforce the legitimacy and cultural status of those giving the opinions.

As I say above, this isn’t to claim the left-wing reading of the ad is entirely baseless, or that you can’t legitimately read tropes and codes at play. But there’s a difference between a handful of media-literate commentators dissecting those tropes and a genuine, bottom-up youth revolt against a campaign.

To recap, this campaign ran for the best part of three days with no eugenics controversy and plenty of media attention. The first negative reaction came not from the masses, but from a handful of professional activists, semioticians, marketers, and academics—mostly older millennials or Gen X, many with agency representation or large media platforms of their own. None were responding to a groundswell, but were creating the appearance of one. Within hours, their posts were being quoted by progressive outlets as evidence of a ‘backlash’ , which in turn fed right-wing counter-commentary, which in turn fed left-wing outrage, until the whole affair became pure spectacle—a story about itself, whirling like a dust devil across a single week in late July.

Of course, I’m now caught up in it too, adding to the discourse about the discourse about the discourse. But hopefully this post offers an off-ramp from the whole thing. The reason it matters is that these illusions have a way of becoming real. Without pushback, even the most online of online outrages ends up affecting things in the real world—adding to a sense of stress, division and anger that is out of all proportion. We all end up like a version of the Piers Morgan panellist, gazing despairingly out of the split screen and praying for the sweet relief of the ad break.

This post took me too long. For anyone new here, I am this guy and this is my book.

I should go on holiday more often, or maybe less. As soon as I stepped out of the UK last week, there was a flurry of purposeful activity on LinkedIn—first with Antoine Renault sharing my most recent post (and discovering how heated some of the responses can get), then with Callum Towler writing a defence of purpose that got some traction and to which I promised to respond.

I made that promise because I appreciated getting a response that addressed the issues in a reasonable way, without any personal attacks, and showed evidence of having read / listened to the background and wrestled with the issues in good faith. Thanks Callum!

I’ll go through and respond to the post in more detail, but first I want to lay out something called the Motte and Bailey Fallacy, which is perpetually on my mind when I talk about purpose, but which I don’t think I’ve mentioned on this Substack before. (I know I said my last purpose post would be my last purpose post, but such is life.)

Social bailey, commercial motte

Philosopher Nicholas Shackel was first to use the medieval motte-and-bailey analogy to describe a common rhetorical gambit. The bailey is the bigger, more expansive claim—for example, saying Defund The Police with the radical implication of withdrawing all funding and abolishing police departments. The claim is big, controversial and attention-grabbing, but it’s also vulnerable to argument. So, when challenged, arguers might abandon the bailey and retreat to the smaller, more defensible motte—for example, we just mean we should reallocate a portion of police funding to community support services in certain cases. Having seen off the attack, the arguers can then go back to repeating the more expansive claim, until challenged again.

I’ve sensed a version of this in purpose debates. Look at every press article about purpose, every purpose awards scheme, every purpose agency website, every pronouncement from Larry Fink, Richard Edelman, Paul Polman, Klaus Schwab and Yvon Chouinard (to name a few) and purpose is continually meant in the values-laden, moral, social, stakeholder-capitalism, do-well-by-doing-good sense. This is what made it feel like a different idea in the first place, and it’s what drives the many heated debates people have had over the years.

But, when challenged, there is often a retreat to the motte of ‘We just mean commercial purpose. It doesn’t have to be social or morally loaded in any way—it’s just a business having a clear idea of who it is and how it benefits people. It might be as simple as making really tasty biscuits that people like!’

This is a smaller claim and much easier to defend, but it’s also wholly unremarkable. Jump in a time machine to 1980, 1960, 1940 or 1920 and any marketer or business leader would shrug and say, ‘Yeah… we know. We sometimes call it our proposition, mission, strategy, business plan, or just take it as read that we’re selling widgets that solve a widget-shaped problem and are marginally useful to people’s lives because they wouldn’t buy them otherwise. If that’s what you time-travelled back to tell us, it’s nothing new and I’m not sure why you think it is? But sure, if it makes you happy—every business can have a purpose in that sense.’

And it’s true. In the anodyne, motte-based sense, every business can be purpose-driven, with no moral implication either way. To use a British reference, Del Boy could say that Trotters Independent Trading is highly purposeful, in the sense that he has a clear vision of selling knock-off goods and get-rich-quick schemes with a view to becoming a millionaire by this time next year. Similarly, Halliburton could scoop all the purpose awards by fulfilling its purpose of selling oil and gas to a world that demands it. And Primark could be applauded onto the stage at Cannes for fulfilling its purpose of selling clothes cheap because people seem to like them. If purpose has no moral or social valence, no connection to values and responsibility, and is just about having a clear sense of what you do as a business, then all these things are equal examples of purpose, and are all equally eligible for purpose awards, and are all as likely as Patagonia to come up in the next press article about purpose.

But, of course, we know the word is never truly used in that way. Having seen off the challenge, purpose people head back out to the bailey and start talking about social responsibility, values and morality, all while citing Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s as examples of what they mean, and mixing in a bit of ESG and DEI because that’s obviously part of being purposeful. And when the next challenge comes, it’s back to the motte with Del and Rodney.

The response to the response

With all that in mind, I want to offer some responses to Callum Towler’s response. I’ll do it by commenting on screenshots—you can read the original here.

First, I agree with this observation, but it’s worth adding that it’s not just the absence of a defence to the critique. It’s also the absence of a clearly built case in the first place. If purpose is a new idea, then the burden of proof lies with its proponents. But the argument has always been made harder by the elusive nature of the initial claim. Jim Stengel’s Grow is just one example of the hazily defined original case, and it’s worth noting that Towler’s post doesn’t address of any of the specific Stengel critiques from Byron Sharp, Richard Shotton and others.

Yes, good to start with definitions, and my book does too.

This is close to Larry Fink’s ‘reason for being’ definition that I discuss in the book, but the word ‘beyond’ is doing a lot of work here. Does it simply mean a more detailed explanation of how the money will be made (‘We’re here to sell razors that people can trust to do a great job at a decent price’). Or is it ‘beyond’ with a hint of ‘above and beyond’—some higher claim like ‘We’re here to enhance self-esteem for everyone, everywhere and we just happen to do it by selling razors’. If it’s the latter, is it truly honest to call it the ‘reason for being’ or (at best) a potential positive externality—a fancy way of emphasising the emotional benefit over the functional feature, to use the old-school language?

And if you call it a ‘reason for being’, is that the kind of subtle inflation that leads you to think you’re truly driven by this purpose and profit is just a happy by-product—a way of thinking that will continually catch you out? After all, when a supplier says ‘Hey, you can boost our self-esteem by giving us a bigger margin!’ do you remember your reason for being and offer them a better deal, or do you remember your for-profit status and find a new supplier? That might sound flippant, but if words mean anything, you have to follow through the implications, because you’re already on a road that leads to confused ethics and inflated marketing.

Here we get the retreat to the motte that I talked about above—purpose is mostly commercial and only a small subset / exception is about creating a better world.

But even within the same section, the return to the bailey begins. Having being offered a ‘reason for being’ definition, we’re then immediately told not to take it literally, which surely isn’t a helpful starting point. Is there a definition we can take literally? Can we start there instead? And already, the word ‘values’ has drifted back in—a morally-laden term that takes us back into social purpose territory.

I won’t dwell on this, apart from pointing to my previous thoughts on ‘bothism’, a term I don’t believe adds much to the argument. It’s worth noting again how we’re back to purpose entailing “a brand’s commitment to a cause” and “moral conviction” when we’ve just been told that this is the exception not the rule when it comes to purpose.

The same section goes on to talk about the Peter Field/IPA research, once again adhering to the industry-wide agreement never to call it the Danone research, after the highly invested company that funded it. I wrote about it here.

Even braver than arguing with Jesus Christ, this section is arguing with Mark Ritson. The altruism research isn’t specified, but either way I think the point fails to land, because it’s ignoring the crucial difference between charity and business.

There are, of course, organisations who have to sound their trumpets loudly about the good they do, in order to inspire more of it. We call them not-for-profits and we give them that status partly because it removes the ick-factor about businesses trumpeting their virtue in order to turn a profit and boost pay-outs to shareholders.

Towler goes on to give the entertaining example of Larry David and “I’m anonymous!” along with the straighter example from Sam Harris. But these are examples of charitable giving and interpersonal etiquette. Even with individual people, there’s rightly a taboo around boosting your personal status by saying how much you give to charity, and Sam Harris has to tread extremely sensitively round the idea that he’s the guy giving a homeless person a dollar and then shouting to everyone in the street about how generous he is. Of course, it can be done with tact, and might inspire more people to do the same, but at least there’s no question of financial profit entering the equation, and the end beneficiary is a charity. It’s all a very different ethical world if you’re talking about for-profits selling widgets by leveraging social issues. We’re right to be uncomfortable about it.

Three things to note about this section: 

First, I’ve said all along that my primary concern isn’t whether purpose works commercially—I’d almost be more worried if it did, because it’s the social effects that matter most. In any case, we’re all meant to agree that the purpose of purpose is purpose and commercial effectiveness isn’t the point.

Second, we’re back to the Danone research. I’ve written a lot about the weirdness of the sampling-on-the-dependent-variable stuff. But there’s more weirdness in the core study, in the sense that we can’t see the full list of case studies to assess how and if they’ve been fairly categorised as purpose-led. And there’s no attempt to demonstrate causation over correlation—there might be all sorts of reasons why the best performers were the best performers, entirely unrelated to purpose. Maybe they all had animals in them.

Third, we’re back to plastics and beach preservation, rather than the commercial purpose that is meant to be so much more common. Social purpose is supposedly the exception rather than the rule, but it seems to loom large as soon as that point has been made and the conversation has moved on.

The difficulty with the ‘absolutely incredible work’ claim is that it’s still not clear how purpose-led work is even being defined. If it’s just about a brand having a clear idea of who it is and conveying it in a powerful, single-minded way, then sure—any successful ad can be defined as a purpose ad. Well done WeBuyAnyCar, congratulations Domino’s, thanks for your service GoCompare.

But in reality, we’re back to talking about refugees, domestic violence and supporting small businesses—all social, morally-charged stuff. And if we’re interested in more than the commercial results (for which no evidence is brought forward), then once again we have to ask uncomfortable questions about Airbnb’s wider social impact, or Amex being criticised by the small businesses they’re meant to be helping. And we once again have to make the distinction that YSL is engaged in charitable partnerships—a fine thing to do, but it’s the charity that’s purposeful, not the luxury fashion house sponsor.

This section sounds suspiciously like a business pitch, which I guess is fair enough. I’d just note that the claim that purpose started 20 years ago is only true if we’re back in the bailey, talking about the social purpose, do-well-by-doing-good movement that sprang up in that time. But if we’re in the motte of businesses simply having a clear sense of what they do and the emotional benefit they offer customers, it’s hard to know how anything substantive changed 20 years ago, or why any of this has caused such a fuss.

Finally, I agree that purpose campaigns can be easier, and this was part of the original appeal for ad agencies—there’s more scope to get attention and win awards if you do a domestic abuse ad rather than a luxury fashion ad. And it’s easier to pull the heartstrings if you do an autism ad instead of a fabric conditioner ad, assuming you can pull off the dismount at the end. (Once again, note how we’re back to talking about ‘tackling real-world issues’ when that’s meant to be the exception in purpose marketing.)

But I was particularly struck by the last sentence of the post. ‘Old-school, fame-first thinking’ is a strange way to think about the decades of brilliant commercial creativity that built most of the big brands to the point where they can afford to indulge in some purpose navel-gazing or pay for this year’s profoundly un-famous Cannes entry. It can’t be stressed enough that domestic abuse charities partner with YSL because what YSL brings to the table is fame and reach. That came from decades of strong branding and advertising. Purpose marketing didn’t do that.

One of the most painful ironies of the lost purpose years is that they overlapped with the How Brands Grow years that offered some genuinely useful, evidenced insights into mental availability (fame), distinctiveness versus differentiation, and the enduring power of creativity—all of which should be a gift to an ad industry beset by AI, influencers and programmatic. Instead, we’ve had years of defending the purpose bailey, retreating to the purpose motte, and gradually realising it’s the wrong hill to die on in any case.

Anyway, I’d better stop there. All this is pretty in-the-weeds, but hopefully useful—and I didn’t want to come across like I was ignoring constructive feedback having lamented its absence previously.

Zooming out, the tectonic plates are continuing to creak all over the place. There’s Fast Company with a long read that tells a similar history to mine, with welcome platforming for Tariq Fancy, who has been a brilliantly clear thinker about all this, plus some refreshing acknowledgement that purpose critics from the left have long existed, mostly before the right-wing versions came along. There’s also Bloomberg airing the idea that we can’t rely on businesses to self-regulate their way to a better world. And even The Guardian is finding its voice on the excesses of ‘wokeness’, of which purpose has been the corporate version.

For me, there’s a sense of hearing the last rumbles of thunder as the storm fades over the horizon (though who knows what else is on the way). Clearly, arguments about the ethics and societal role of business are much older than the recent 20 years of purpose, and they can and should continue. But hopefully that can happen within a mental model that doesn’t immediately obscure all the issues and blur vital distinctions.

My last appeal is to anyone concerned that letting go of purpose will somehow ‘embolden the far right’—a claim I’ve heard a lot recently. I think the lessons of recent years and elections are that we should consider the opposite, as some on the left are now doing. To whatever extent those extreme elements exist, they would love nothing more than for the left to cling to unpopular ideas that they don’t even fully believe in themselves. So yes, there may be some hardcore ‘real purpose has never been tried!’ believers, but I think it’s better to leave them in the bailey and tiptoe away. As for me, I’ve talked for years about how we should be discussing ideas, craft and creativity instead—and that’s what I’m hoping to focus on now, eventually in a new book. I’ll share more about it when time and LinkedIn allow.

Thanks for reading. For anyone new here, I’m a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, books about design, and occasional songs. My book The Road to Hell is available on Kindle and in print.

I’ve taken a few months away from Substack to immerse myself in research for a new book about writing, creativity and AI—more on that when it happens.

At the same time, I’ve found myself cooling on the purpose wars, given the sense that the vibe has conclusively shifted. There’s still some bizarre revisionism around, like people heralding Philip Kotler’s ‘announcement’ of purpose being the new ‘Fifth P’ in marketing as a major breakthrough, despite the fact he’s been reheating that article since 2013. But for anyone more closely attuned to the debate in the corporate world, it feels like purpose is finally fading, like a strange fever dream.

Still, I couldn’t help being pulled back in by a new CMO Podcast episode from Jim Stengel. It features Kory Marchisotto, CMO of e.l.f. Beauty, Lisa Materazzo, CMO at Ford, Mark Ritson, marketing professor and commentator, and Sarah Carter, Global Planning Partner at adam&eveDDB. Broadly, Marchisotto and Materazzo make the case for purpose, while Ritson and Carter push back.

But it’s the host who first catches the eye. As any reader of The Road to Hell knows, Stengel was the author of Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s 50 Greatest Companies. Published in 2011, the book became one of the most influential texts in the early purpose years, endorsed by Sheryl Sandberg and Martin Sorrell, and widely cited as proof that purposeful brands out-perform the market.

In his post announcing the podcast episode, Stengel confirms his part in the purpose narrative: “I have long championed the belief that brands grow by serving a higher purpose beyond the functional benefit of their products or services. I believe organizations that create products, services, and experiences that improve people’s lives differentiate themselves and win versus the competition.”

But, in Stengel’s telling of the story, the pushback has only just begun: “As people grow more skeptical and some brands struggle to connect their lofty language to real value, a quiet question is starting to echo through company boardrooms and agencies: Has brand purpose run its course?” According to Stengel’s version of events, purpose “has entered a more mature and more scrutinized phase”.

In reality, the scrutiny began long ago. Way back in 2011, Professor Byron Sharp, known for his rigour on these questions, subjected Stengel’s methodology to clear-eyed scrutiny and found it fundamentally flawed. As far as I’m aware, Stengel has never responded to this ‘quiet question’, posed 14 years ago.

The question echoed louder in 2015, when author and behavioural scientist Richard Shotton wrote a widely shared critique of Stengel’s work, versions of which appeared on Medium, WARC, Huffington Post and The Drum.

Again, this was a high-profile critique, raising substantive questions. To my knowledge, Stengel has never addressed them. Despite offering spirited pushback throughout the podcast, both Sarah Carter and Mark Ritson were too polite to take Stengel directly to task on this. But it’s hard to take the purpose ‘conversation’ seriously when one side appears so wilfully unaware that the conversation even has another side.

The true history of this ‘conversation’ is one of increasingly impatient pushback from the saner corners of the business world. Marketing Week was running purpose-sceptical articles as early as 2013, when Marketoonist was also lampooning it (above). The Guardian was running Dove-sceptical articles in 2015. Mark Ritson started attacking brand purpose in 2015. I was writing about the mission escalation trend in 2015, before properly entering the purpose fray in 2017. Anand Giridharadas dissected the ‘do well by doing good’ cult in Winners Take All in 2018. Steve Harrison wrote his scathing critique in 2020.

Jim Stengel now welcomes what he calls a ‘timely conversation’. But it’s one that could have been had at least 14 years ago, if he and many others had engaged with the criticism in good faith, rather than ignoring it, or problematising it as somehow reactionary or ethically suspect. (As far as I know, Stengel has never done the latter—he seems a pleasant guy and more oblivious to the purpose debate than anything else.)

All this means his latest podcast lands strangely and unsatisfyingly. But it’s still immensely heartening to hear the unequivocal pushback from Mark Ritson, who talks witheringly of the “undergraduate desire to link purpose to making money”, eyerolls at the “orgy of purpose” at Cannes, and rightly repeats his line that “the purpose of purpose is purpose”. Ritson has long been clear about this: Many businesses have done good things over the years, without making it the centre of their brand image. When they do, the ‘good’ starts to look a lot like self-interest. Early purpose critic Jesus Christ had it right when he said “Thus when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do… that they may be praised by others.” (Matthew 6:2) The din of for-profits blowing their purpose trumpets is what first provoked me into joining this debate way back when. It’s moral grandstanding of the most counter-productive, self-deluding kind, and there’s still plenty of it around (more on that in a minute).

Sarah Carter, who entertainingly floated the idea of a Purpose Inquiry a few months back, was also admirably sane, bringing in the crucial Bill Bernbach quote—“A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something”—and talking with disbelief about a group of Gen Z marketing trainees who were surprised by the news that price and placement are more important factors than politics when it comes to most purchasing decisions.

As is inevitable in the social dynamics of these situations, both Carter and Ritson were also keen to extend olive branches. The position that purpose is nonsense except for a handful of heroic exceptions like Patagonia, e.l.f., and Ben & Jerry’s is a tactful one to adopt, because it allows every purpose advocate to think they’re one of the exceptions. For the sake of a quiet life, I’d be tempted to go along with it, certainly in a podcast setting. Sure, attaching yourself to some social issue in a way that’s sufficiently authentic might help drive salience and carve out some distinct piece of mental territory in a few cases—go for it, all hail Patagonia etc.

But for anyone inclined to linger on the moral, societal and political questions, even that position gets uncomfortable fast. Mark Ritson is forced to be uncharacteristically credulous when he praises how being purposeful “cost Patagonia everything”—as though Chouinard and his family have been cast into poverty, rather than locking in political influence for generations, while avoiding millions in inheritance tax and being hailed as saints in the process.

Similarly, it’s tempting not to look too closely at Ben & Jerry’s and think: good for them, nice causes, sold plenty of ice cream, everyone’s a winner. But the problems are clear for anyone who wants to see. Ben Cohen’s recent friendly chat with Tucker Carlson must cause some cognitive dissonance for purpose people. In the podcast, he talks about his contrarian position on the west inviting the Ukraine war through reckless UN expansion—a take that most purpose people probably don’t share, but which you’ll be endorsing next time you buy your Cherry Garcia, along with their position on ceasing all business in the Palestinian territories. All this is assuming founders Cohen and Greenfield are successful in buying their company back from Unilever, with whom they had a strained agreement to retain control of their ‘social purpose’, while enjoying all the advantages of a multinational parent company. Some might also ask whether increasing the sales of HFSS foods can ever be a socially positive thing, given rising levels of obesity. This might seem like an unfair burden to place on a company, but when you advertise yourself as a proof case of ‘doing well by doing good’, you have to weigh up the ‘doing good’ side of the ledger.

As with ice cream, so with peanut butter. Early in the podcast, Jim Stengel relates his first glimmers of purpose awakening during his time with P&G and the Jif peanut butter account. As he describes it, it was a ‘stalemate’ brand until he decided to look into the values of parents and children and ‘make a difference through our brand with what they care about’—which in turn led to Jif building links with parent-teacher associations, schools and daycare centres. All this is presented as self-evidently a good thing, with great commercial results. But is that how society sees it? From the early days of the campaign, parents and policy makers were concerned. A 1990 article headlined ‘Corporations invade the schools’ noted how Procter & Gamble was offering schools money for Jif labels collected by their students, while running ads saying: ‘The more you buy, the more we’ll give to America’s schools.’ Is that doing well by doing good, or just doing well by marketing to children, while federal regulators do the slow work of curbing corporate involvement and improving health outcomes?

So often, a version of this logic seems to play out in purpose case studies. With sufficient rigour (which is rare), it’s possible to measure some of the commercial outcomes. But there’s a profound lack of curiosity about the true social impact, at least once you step outside the perspective of the company and think in terms of the society it’s claiming to help. Given that marketers are working inside the company and feel sincerely that their intentions are good, there’s a natural tendency to think this must equate to good outcomes—and commercial success is taken as positive proof.

I’ve experienced this myself with some brands I’ve worked on. You can find yourself developing a kind of Stockholm syndrome—a psychological phenomenon first noticed in hostage situations—where you develop positive feelings about the brand currently holding you captive (i.e paying your rent), coming to identify yourself closely and even passionately with the brand and its goals.

I can’t help noticing this in the contributions of the two other guests on the podcast, who come across as smart people and clearly successful marketers. But both speak almost evangelically about the social values of their employers (Ford and e.l.f), to the point where you’d think they were working for the Salvation Army or Cancer Research.

I’ve no doubt Ford has contributed significant social good over the years—selling affordable cars, employing generations of autoworkers, donating to charities, paying taxes, and driving it all with strong, mass-market advertising. You can go back through the history and pick out achievements to weave into a purpose story, like being early on the introduction of a living wage. But if you’re going to do that, it’s only honest to note all the stuff on the other side of the ledger—the unfortunately strong historic links with anti-semitism, the union-busting, the emissions scandal, the greenwashing. None of it means Ford isn’t a great American company. But the idea that its values of “trust, community, capability and passion” reside deep in some unchanging corporate soul and will define “what we have been and what we will continue to be for the next 120+ years”? It’s all marketing speak. It’s not real.

As for e.l.f. Beauty, I recommend this video, which is presented far better than I could manage (I suppose I could have a shave). It’s far from a hit piece and positive on the whole, but it also tells a story of questionable commercial practices combined with shameless moral grandstanding. It’s good on how e.l.f has built its brand on ‘dupes’ that mimic popular high-end products, then ruthlessly undercut them in price. This is framed as ‘democratising’ beauty—as a copywriter, I know this is the cool way of saying ‘making it cheaper’. As the video points out, one of the reasons e.l.f is able to afford this is that it doesn’t have to invest in the product development and hit-and-miss experimentation that leads to the breakthrough products that e.l.f then copies. From the start, the company was also what you might call patriarchal in nature—two young male founders backed by one of their fathers, an entrepreneur with inside knowledge at Target. In 2014, they sold a majority stake to private equity firm TPG, whose founding partner Bill McGlashan later had to leave the e.l.f board after getting caught paying bribes to get his son into college.

e.l.f not only glides away from such criticisms (and class action lawsuits), but has the chutzpah to spin them round into moral superiority, launching a campaign that challenges its rivals to ‘dupe’ their loudly trumpeted ethical practices. It urges other companies to democratise their products by dropping the price, which must grate with the brands whose products have been copied, or the non-VC-backed indies who don’t have the distribution in Target. It further urges them to embrace a ‘double’ cruelty-free certification, which (as the video notes) isn’t as rare as e.l.f makes it sound. And it challenges them to increase boardroom diversity, boasting that their own board is now 66% female and ‘44% diverse’ (this seems to be how we talk now—some people are ‘diverse’ and others aren’t).

I’m not setting out to paint e.l.f. or anyone else as some terrible company—they’re not. There are many great lessons to learn from them. They’re proof of a timeless principle in marketing: if you can find a way to sell a high-quality product at a low price, then you’ll go far, no matter who’s on your board. It’s a classic exploitation of a market gap backed by smart branding, nurturing of distinctive assets, and ventures into music, film, media and beyond. Those are stories worth exploring, but instead they get lost in this haze of ‘It’s all down to the purpose—#DoBetter everyone!’

It was wrong in 2013, and it’s wrong now. And the cumulative effect is serious. When so many brands and agencies drink the same Kool-Aid, it leads to worse marketing (because the entire mental model is warped), and a worse world (because real social good gets obscured and obfuscated by corporations who inevitably protect their self-interest and highlight the issues least threatening to them).

All the while, the purpose movement blurs distinctions on which the future of humanity may depend. Right now, there’s a debate raging about OpenAI trying to escape its non-profit status—a tangled story involving concepts like non-profit, for-profit, capped-profit and public benefit corporation. For now, suffice to say the debate only exists because everyone knows the distinctions matter, fundamentally changing the incentive structure by which organisations operate, and consequently how this powerful technology evolves. Purpose obscures all of it—just go for-profit, write a purpose statement, but make sure it’s authentic and you really, really mean it.

Bullshit.

Anyway, speaking of high-quality products at a low price.

Thanks for reading. By the way, I’m appearing on a Zoom with some semioticians on Friday 30 May, talking about ‘The rise of the right’. Free sign-up here.

So diversity and representation in advertising has been a hot topic of late.

On one side you have the professional advocates, ranging from Unstereotype Alliance to numerous industry commentators, all of whom see urgent problems to be fixed and overdue progress to be made.

On the other side, you have the pantomime-ish ‘anti-woke’ stories churned out by the Daily Mail and elsewhere, which pounce on examples like this year’s Boots ad and try to whip up Bud Light-esque boycotts.

In the middle of all that, it’s hard to talk about the nuances of these issues in a way that doesn’t get misconstrued. Generally, it’s easier to stay out of it, especially if you know some readers are liable to judge any argument by the profile pic of the person making it: Straight white man says what about diversity? etc.

But, having written a book called The Road to Hell, I think it’s worth me exploring a case where plenty of good intentions are involved, yet no one seems especially happy with where the road is headed.

So in this post I’m going to dive into a sample group of 22 mainstream Christmas ads, and see what we can learn.

1. The #dobetter narrative

First, let’s take the temperature of adland by quoting three Campaign articles from the past month.

In ‘Looking at Christmas characters through a gendered lens’, Lori Meakin laments how “too often in creative industries, we still see people regularly… behaving as if male is the default gender, with women being either a slightly niche alternative, or overlooked entirely.” She goes on to cite the maleness of anthropomorphic characters like Monty the Penguin, Edgar the Dragon and Kevin the Carrot, though she welcomes the inclusion of Katie the Carrot. To be fair, Meakin is wryly aware of how absurd some of this sounds, but the general tone is one of ‘progress made, but more to do’, ending with a rallying cry: “Let’s magically manifest the world as it could be, not just replicate how it’s always been.”

In the same pages, Bee Pahnke makes the case for adland doubling down on the diversity agenda, despite backlash from elsewhere (‘Brands – in this era of culture wars, don’t give up on DEI&R’).

And in another article, Danny Josephs criticises the lack of disability representation—“Despite 24% of the UK population living with a disability, this year’s Christmas ads offer little to no representation for disabled communities.” He sees this as part of a general cooling of the DEI agenda: “Apart from the myriad fantasy figures, famous sorts of both genders, a handful of brown and black faces and some LGBT+ representation, this year’s crop is curiously lacking in diversity; you’d think people are starting to get bored with DEI when you watch them.”

This last part in particular brought me up short, because it’s strange to think the internal adland sentiment is that Christmas ads are lacking in diversity, when the perception from outside (and not just in the Daily Mail) so often feels different.

Thinking this might be a reflection of my own bias, I forced myself to go through all the Christmas ads to see how they rate on gender, ethnic and (to whatever extent it’s visible) class diversity.

Despite the underlying issues being serious, there’s something comical and reductive about this whole exercise, so bear with me and I’ll come back to being serious afterwards.

2. The Diversometer—Xmas ad special!

John Lewis

Features two white sisters, coded middle class. Bad start, but at least they aren’t male. Also features the mother but no father, which is more like it. Probable Asian husband (bottom left image). Non-white boyfriend (top right). Verdict: Diverse

Tesco

White male lead, coded working class = potentially problematic. But his mates at the building site are black and a mix of male/female. And he laughs at the black guy’s joke at the party, and a black/Asian couple come round for dinner. And male stereotypes are challenged by a moment of tenderness with his grandpa. Verdict: Diverse

JD Sports

Easy win—majority non-white cast, and the main white guy is ginger, which scores points. Verdict: Diverse AF

Sports Direct

Mixed-race parents, diverse football team, white male celeb, ginger girl. Verdict: Diverse

M&S Food

Older white woman of larger body type. Limited cast, but she dances with black people, plus ginger beard guy. Verdict: Diverse

M&S Clothing

Black girl lead character. Non-white cast apart from old white woman. Verdict: Diverse

Sainsbury’s

Old white male BFG is a bad start. But the hero is Sophie, the non-white woman at the shop. They go and buy salmon from a black woman on a Scottish island, and visit Grant the black cheesemaker. Verdict: Diverse

Greggs

Only has Nigella, so has to rate as undiverse. But features some nice code-play between middle-class Nigella and sort-of-working-class brand. Verdict: Sorry, still undiverse

Kevin the Carrot

Problematically male carrot, though he may score ginger points. But now there’s Katie, who is smarter than him: “Kevin, that’s the oven!” Verdict: Diverse / empowered

Morrisons

Opens on a non-white woman with a white, grey-bearded husband. Black chef, white ginger woman chef. Christmas dinner scene: old white couple, black possible couple, Asian-ish hostess, white husband. Verdict: Diverse

Asda

Garden gnomes concept is potentially white / male. But it’s salvaged by some gnomes being black, one being very camp, the boss-gnomes being female, and the two human characters including a younger female. Older white male brings it down. Verdict: Diverse-ish.

Coca-Cola

Technically no diverse casting as no humans are involved. But AI has skilfully avoided generating any white males apart from Santa himself. Verdict: Diverse

Lidl

Worryingly white. But does feature the little girl helping out the little boy, so that’s empowering. Verdict: Educate yourself, Lidl

Debenhams

A bit… lookist? But definitely trying—decent redhead and beard representation. Verdict: Diverse

Argos

Problems here. Little white blonde girl, green dinosaur and not much else. Verdict: Wrong side of history

Amazon

Possible Hispanic worker, helped out by diverse friends. Brave of Amazon to tell a tale of a downtrodden worker. For fans of Christmas synchronicity, the theatre is called Sonnet, like the song in the John Lewis ad. Verdict: Diverse Prime

TKMaxx

Very white, but there is at least a campness about the llamas. Verdict: Try harder

Boots

Black woman lead, fat white sleepy male Santa, use of they/them pronouns, largely non-white and queer-coded cast. Verdict: Knocked it out the park

Waitrose

White, middle-class murder mystery premise. But the host is a non-white woman and part of a mixed-race couple. And the guilty person is a white man. Verdict: Diverse

Barbour

Basically just sheep. Verdict: Wrong side of history

Etsy

Waldo is a white male, but he’s Irish so he’s non-colonial. He walks through an admirably multicultural city and meets Wenda, his non-white girlfriend. Verdict: Diverse but heteronormative

Fatface

Middle-class mixed-race family with own swimming pool. All black cast, plus white beardy guy. Verdict: Diverse

3. The disconnect

OK, I’ll pull back from the light-heartedness now, although I do think it helps to bring some levity to this stuff.

The reason for going through that exercise is to highlight the disconnect with suggestions that “male is the default gender, with women being either a slightly niche alternative, or overlooked entirely”. Or that the ad industry is in danger of “giving up” on DEI. Or that the ads feature only “a handful of brown and black faces”. Or that “this year’s crop is curiously lacking in diversity; you’d think people are starting to get bored with DEI when you watch them.”

Seriously, I don’t think you have to be a Daily Mail reader to think that’s a weird take. The good intentions of adland long ago created a new kind of stereotype where (to the extent that any of us pay attention) we positively expect couples in ads to be mixed-race and any women or girls to be empowered.

So much so that perfectly non-Daily-Mail people like Jon Stewart have been poking fun at this for a while, expressing mock-incredulity at the likeliness of the couple featured here—the point of the joke OBVIOUSLY NOT BEING that mixed-race couples don’t exist or, still less, that there’s something inherently funny about them. Stewart is just pointing out something that’s become a heavy-handed adland stereotype, ironically brought about by an over-earnestness about busting stereotypes at every opportunity. We know mixed-race couples exist and we’re absolutely cool with it, but it just feels like we see A LOT of them on TV—roughly 8 in the 22 ads featured above.

Like the vast majority of people, I believe advertisers should be mindful of diverse casting and it can be a subtly powerful and moving thing if you’re a gay person seeing gay people in ads for the first time. Ads can play a role in ‘normalising’ societal change, but it tends to work best when done subtly—woven into the everyday activity of the brand, rather than a ‘look at us being progressive’ diversion. That way, it ends up actually feeling normalised. But instead, a lot of ads are so self-consciously engaged in trying to create a world everyone can recognise that they end up creating a world that no one really recognises.

To look at it through a clinical mathematical lens, the England / Wales population breaks down as: White: 81.7%, Asian: 9.3%, Black: 4.0%, Mixed: 2.9%, Other: 2.1%. That obviously varies in London, but it’s not crazy for a lot of resolutely unracist people of all ethnicities in provincial England / Wales to feel like the world on TV isn’t ‘representative’ of the world outside their door.

According to Unstereotype Alliance, this diverse casting is nevertheless a direct route to profits for brands. In a ‘do well by doing good’ story similar to the one pushed by purpose for the past 15 years, the idea is that diverse casting is the smart choice as socially conscious Gen Z rises to power—and the claim is that it already accounts for 3.46% higher shorter-term sales, 16.26% higher longer-term sales, 33% higher strong consideration, 62% higher likelihood of being a consumer’s first choice, and 54% higher pricing power (all based on answers to survey questions, so the usual scepticism applies to what consumers say versus what they do).

These are big commercial claims, described as “irrefutable” in the introduction to the report. But the research makes no attempt to separate correlation from causation, or to establish which way the causation runs—i.e. do diverse brands become successful, or do successful brands routinely engage in diverse casting? And it has no control group of ‘undiverse’ brands to compare against.

In any case, based on the above, it’s hard to find any UK or US brands these days who aren’t doing diverse casting—so how do you isolate it as a causal factor separating the successful from unsuccessful brands? Are we really to believe every one of the brands above is experiencing market-beating growth, even when they’re competing against each other?

Going back to the Campaign article mentioned earlier, Danny Josephs has a point when he says there’s not much representation of disability—although when he says “the nine million deaf or hard of hearing or the two million people who are blind are completely invisible when it comes to festive ads”, he must have been writing before the Apple ad was released, which has been widely praised for its depiction of deafness (hooray) albeit in a conventional white family (boo).

The disability issue is complex. Danny Josephs cites a figure saying 24% of the UK population is disabled, using the broad definition of people who report having a physical or mental condition that has lasted or is expected to last more than 12 months, and reduces their capacity to carry out day-to-day activities. But of that high number (1 in 4 people), it’s estimated that 70-80% have a non-visible disability—i.e. the kind that won’t show up if you put them round the dinner table in a Christmas ad. Given that reality, the shorthand for depicting disability is usually to show someone in a wheelchair, which Danny Josephs understandably describes as “the default ‘will this do?’ setting for so many brands… who use a chair as some kind of visual tick box shorthand”.

All of which puts advertisers in a bind, at least as long as we demand that ads are perfectly representative of diversity in all its forms, both re-presenting the world as it is, and ‘manifesting the world as it could be’, all without being tokenistic and all while mass-marketing stuff effectively and entertainingly, which is the main purpose of the exercise.

4. The challenges

Right now, I see four challenges that don’t get talked about much.

First, there’s the fine line between respectful representation and tokenistic box ticking, and it can be a hard one for a 30-second ad to tread. If some of the ads above had managed to feature a wheelchair around the Christmas table or a gnome with a hearing aid, then maybe it’s processed as heartening representation by some, but it could equally be processed as tick-box tokenism that patronises the communities involved.

Second, many of the vectors of diversity that matter aren’t visible. We have no idea if JR Hartley was gay, or had the hidden disability of early-stage dementia. We don’t know if Gio Compario was private schooled, or orphaned at an early age, or has bipolar disorder. We can only tell someone’s class if obvious indicators are used, like the white-van-driving building site guy in the Tesco ad. But ‘obvious indicators’ is a synonym for ‘stereotypes’. Ads use them all the time, because they’re a shortcut when telling a story.

And they’re hard to avoid. Recent years have seen woman-with-a-sledgehammer become the key signifier of empowerment for Jaguar, Dove, B&Q and others. (Beyoncé has a baseball bat, but it still counts.) The very symbol of busting stereotypes has become its own stereotype.

Thirdly, many ads only feature a small cast—maybe 4 people in a group of friends or a family scene. If every perfectly well-intentioned ad agency casts those four people with an eye to diversity, the unavoidable maths of the situation is that you end up with an adland that doesn’t look very like the real world and disproportionately emphasises easily identifiable diversity over other forms.

And lastly, many ads can’t show diversity because there just aren’t any humans. Cadbury’s gorilla, Smash Martians, Dumb ways to die, Honda cog. I don’t know how those ads would rate on the Unstereotype Alliance index, and you semi-seriously wonder if brands might avoid them these days because it’s a missed opportunity to boost your end-of-year DEI metrics. But they remain among the most popular ads of recent decades, and it remains an eternal truth that most good ads basically involve anthropomorphic animals.

5. White guy’s conclusion

All of the above is not intended to say diversity doesn’t matter, but I sense a widening gap between adland’s ‘must try harder’ narrative, and the public’s ‘honestly, we get it!’ response. If nothing else, I hope this audit means the conversation can be grounded in some kind of shared reality—because it’s almost like people are looking at the same ads and seeing different things.

Other than that, I’ll tiptoe away and pour myself a brandy. Thanks for reading this year, and it’s not too late to order an amazing Christmas present if you feel inclined.

Oh, and to end on a wholesome note, I love this ad for an actually purposeful (non-profit) organisation. It’s a poetic way to depict hidden loss, and without the torturous dismount of a Maltesers logo at the end. I wrote about it here.

It’s been a strange 15 years.

Consider the picture on the left—a poster advertising the Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011. ‘What is our one demand?’ the poster asked, coming in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the anti-corporate feeling it generated. ‘Representation not corporation!’ came the reply from supporters. Framed as the 99% against the 1%, Occupy Wall Street aimed to separate big money from politics, push back an encroaching oligarchy, and revive grassroots democracy.

Next, consider the middle picture. By 2017, the protestors had disappeared from Wall Street, and in their place came Fearless Girl—a symbol of youthful, feminist protest, but not one that came from an upstart guerrilla movement. Instead, the statue was the brainchild of ad agency McCann, working on behalf of asset management firm State Street—one of the targets of the 2011 protests, now warmly applauded for its progressive stance. Even as it collected 18 Cannes Grand Prix awards and two D&AD Black Pencils, State Street was quietly reaching a $5m out-of-court settlement with its black and female employees over claims of historic underpayment, and subsequently became embroiled in a years-long battle with the female sculptor over her intellectual property rights. But the statue hit the zeitgeist. It was the embodiment of a purpose movement that had risen since 2009, reframing business as the progressive left’s most powerful ally. ‘Representation not corporation!’ had been the demand. ‘Representation by corporation!’ was the response.

Then consider the third picture, inexpertly mocked up by me. When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, it sent the corporate purpose movement into overdrive, as CEOs vowed to step in where political leaders had failed. Larry Fink, a former Wall Street trader who pioneered the mortgage-backed securities that eventually led to the crash, was now head of BlackRock and vowed to use his firm’s $10 trillion market power to push a social purpose agenda. The US Business Roundtable followed suit, releasing a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation in 2019. Purpose was in the ascendant, Biden saw off Trump, countless businesses set about making the world a better place…

… and then Trump got elected again, this time winning the popular vote and all seven swing states.

The question is—will corporate leaders ‘step up’ again, breathing new life into a purpose movement that has been flagging? Or is there already a different mood emerging, in certain sections of the left?

I’m hoping it’s the latter, and I’m going to offer five reasons why it should be.

1. The narratives aren’t working

First, it’s worth noting that this wasn’t a massive Trump landslide, and it could have gone the other way if it wasn’t for an ‘incumbent penalty’ that has hit many governing parties in post-Covid times. But the deeper question for Democrats is why it’s so close in the first place—and none of the dismissive, feel-good answers work.

For the detailed analysis, I defer to and his Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives. He lists many confounding facts for anyone reaching for the easy identity explanations. Read the post for the full analysis and sources, but briefly:

It wasn’t racism
- Trump has done worse with white voters in each successive election
- The whites who shifted most towards Democrats were white men
- Every ethnic group except for whites moved towards Trump

It wasn’t sexism
- Harris performed worse with women than any Dem candidate since Kerry in 2004
- Harris did better than Hillary with white women, and worse with black, Hispanic and Asian women
- While rejecting Harris, voters elected a record number of female governors, and the first transgender woman in US Congress

It wasn’t old people
- Voters under 44 have shifted 9 percentage points towards Trump since 2016
- Voters over 65 have shifted 7 percentage points towards the Democrats since 2016

It wasn’t billionaires
- Yes, Trump has Musk at his side
- But Harris had 60% more billionaire backers than Trump
- Dems raised twice as much as Republicans, largely through billionaires, multinational corporations, and ‘dark money’ PACs
- Harris was the clear choice for voters with six-figure salaries or higher, while Trump won with people earning less than $50k per year

It wasn’t turnout
- Yes, Harris’s turnout was about 10 million voters lower than 2020
- But in all the swing states that mattered, turnout was higher than ever

2. Voter priorities don’t match corporate priorities

So what was it?

As always, election results are over-determined and there’s no single narrative to explain it all. But look at the research from Blueprint, the Democrat-supporting research group who surveyed thousands of voters immediately post-election, and the answer emerges across ethnic groups: It was a combination of inflation, immigration and alienation from cultural liberalism, or what is sometimes called ‘wokism’.

Despite how some define it (see a recent debate I attended in the House of Commons), anti-wokism in this context needn’t mean being racist, sexist or bigoted. Instead, it might mean being against any or all of defund the police, biological males in girls’ sports, open borders, the cultural norm of pronouns in bios (quietly dropped earlier this year by AOC), affirmative action, and a hardline identity essentialism that insists on shared identity meaning shared politics. This election might mark the end of the ‘demography is destiny’ mindset where all the left had to do was wait for the old white people to die, and sweep up the black, Hispanic and Asian votes that they believed were theirs by right. (For a recent example of the latter mindset in action, see the Guardian columnist calling Kemi Badenoch “white supremacy in Blackface” and part of “the Black collaborator class” for daring to be a black woman with different politics.)

If inflation, immigration and cultural liberalism are weighing on voters’ minds, how many corporations are stepping up to push that agenda? Which company’s purpose is to bring down prices? Which multinational’s purpose is to have greater controls on immigration and cheap labour? Which brand’s purpose is to focus less on the diversity of the C-suite and more on shrinking the pay ratio between its lowest paid workers and the CEO?

One problem with enlisting corporations to push a social purpose agenda is that they only push the issues that suit them, which are usually social and cultural. And as those issues grow in salience, it necessarily shifts attention from the issues voters care more about, which are usually economic.

In the wake of the election, these two graphics have been widely circulated, showing the marked shift leftwards on cultural issues since 2012, much of it coming from the ‘white progressives’ who are over-represented in marketing departments and ad agencies, and all of it tracking the post-2008 rise of corporate purpose. Marketing departments could do worse than right-click these images and select them as a screensaver for the next four years.

3. The Gen Z dream is over

‘Democrats’ Gen Z dream just died’ said Newsweek on the day after the election. The same could be said of the purpose dream pushed by Edelman, McKinsey, Deloitte, University of the Arts London (with their Chief Social Purpose Officer and Sinek-pilled Vice Chancellor), ad industry institutions, and any number of purpose-driven agencies. According to exit polls, only 42% of Gen Z voters turned out to vote at all—down from 2020. Of those, 56% of men between 18 and 29 went for Trump, along with 41% of women—up from 33% in 2020.

In the face of the most authoritative opinion poll of all—an election—it’s no longer possible for purpose advocates to claim that the purpose agenda is driven by upward pressure from an impatiently progressive generation. But it probably won’t stop them trying—look out for a wave of Gen Alpha articles in the near future. Like the millennials and Gen Z-ers before them, they’ll be billed as the new purpose generation, eerily attuned to the values of every brand they buy.

All this is a narrative to serve a business model: lull anxious, middle-aged managers into believing everything’s changing, then sell the solution from conference stages around the world, basking in the glow of goodness as you send in the invoice. Left-wing critic Anand Giridharadas described the dynamic in his 2019 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, lamenting the culture of hollow thought leaders: “positive, unthreatening, mute about larger systems and structures, congenial to the rich, big into private problem-solving, devoted to win-wins”.

4. Brands can justify being impartial

Pick a side, silence is violence, neutrality is not an option, politics is a competitive advantage—a crucial part of the purpose narrative has always been that brands can’t stay out of politics. That would be an existential threat to the legions of consultancies and thought leaders who are highly paid to advise them on it.

But brands are getting wise to it. As can happen with any mass-market brand, McDonald’s was drawn into the US election campaign in ways that were initially beyond its control—with the Democrat National Convention making Kamala Harris’s reported time at McDonald’s a major part of its PR narrative. In response, the Trump campaign approached one of McDonald’s thousands of independent franchise operators and set up what would become a high-profile photo op, leading to an outcry from some Democrat supporters and talk of a boycott.

In response, McDonald’s could have disowned the appearance with a stern reprimand for the franchisee—the kind of panicked reaction that might have happened in 2020. Alternatively, it could have embraced Trump closer and risked a Bud Light in reverse. In this case, McDonald’s wisely did neither, staking out its neutrality in an open letter: “We are not red or blue—we are golden” was the key phrase. Corny maybe, but a deft piece of PR that other brands will have noted. (I wrote about the case for brands as common ground in this piece for MediaCat.)

Next time purpose advocates urge brands to pick a side, the advice should ring even hollower than before. It never made sense in an era when elections were being decided by close to 50-50 splits, with both sets of voters equally crucial to marketers of detergent, deodorant, beer, biscuits and just about everything else we buy. It makes even less sense in an era when brands can reasonably ask—which side? The one that won?

5. The left might realise it doesn’t like oligarchy

“The best form of government is the benevolent dictatorship. And the same is true in organisations. The whole idea of consensus is lowest common denominator. How do you please as many people as possible? You end up with something incredibly diluted. Look at any congressional bill that passes… Rare are the bills that are truly profound and great because you have to please as many people and as many constituents as possible. So a leader is the single person, or no more than a pair of people, at the top, who explains their vision of the world and asks those in their organisation who believe what they believe to help build it. Consensus is not the way. There is only one vision and there can be only one vision.”

So said purpose prophet Simon Sinek in a 2010 interview. It was meant to be an argument for businesses stepping up where politicians had failed, under the guidance of benevolent CEOs who would pursue a singular vision, cutting through the slow business of consensus.

14 years later, we have a pair of billionaires at the top who might finally give the lie to that vision. Some alliance of Hillary Clinton and Paul Polman might be what Sinek had in mind, but the same road leads inexorably to Musk and Trump. If you’re advocating for business leaders using their market power to dictate societal outcomes, you have to take the whole package.

So what next?

An alternative package is available.

I hope we’re in the early stages of a preference cascade where disillusioned people on the left, who fear they are one of the few, start to realise they’re one of the many. There are already glimmers of the economic left reasserting itself over the identity left—an outcome that could deliver most of the goals of the latter more effectively in any case. I hope there will also be glimmers of brands taking corporate ethics more seriously and themselves less seriously. I hope there will be signs of businesses embracing their limited place in society and playing that role effectively. To rehearse the advice that it’s not entirely my place to give: Listen to your customers without judgment, respect the autonomy of your employees, grow brands with creativity and cognitive empathy, build out the common ground, and generate the economic growth that will benefit every demographic—younger generations more than anyone.

And I hope the ad industry will recognise its worthwhile place in that effort—re-centring the commercial creativity at which it can still excel, without losing sight of the role creativity can play in social change, but usually when channelled through the not-for-profits, social enterprises, community organisations, governments and protest movements who can actually deliver it.

All of which brings us back to the three images at the top of the post.

The first is a ballet dancer—a symbol of grace, creativity, art, humanity, the things that transcend markets and politics.

The second is a girl in an Amy Cuddy power pose, Cuddy being one of the TED talk influencers whom Anand Giridharadas deconstructs in his book—the body language expert who purveyed the corporate-friendly idea that sexism could be addressed by women adopting a certain stance on stage and in life, rather than through a deeper structural agenda that might not get you invited to TED talks.

The third is the bullshitter atop the bull, doing a victory dance despite everything that could have stood in his way—January 6th, John McCain, Serge Kovaleski, counter-endorsements from Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Springsteen, four criminal cases, two assassination attempts…

This is the candidate Democrats failed to beat, and it’s where we’ve arrived after 15 years of pushing a confected idea of how businesses can best serve the world, and how social change can best be delivered. It’s not a pretty place to have ended up. But at least the road was paved with good intentions.

For anyone interested, I’ve had some good conversations on a number of podcasts lately, including:

Masters of Credibility
Unmtchd
On Strategy
The Brief Bros
Marketing Book Podcast
Fuel
In Clear Focus
WARC podcast
Teamleader

The book (including a Kindle version) is available to buy, like, review, share… all support greatly appreciated.

There is a giant, dark rectangle in Euston station, where a digital billboard used to be. Installed in January 2024, the screen in one of London’s main rail terminals has been switched off by ministerial decree, following scenes of overcrowding, and complaints about an advertising screen projecting commercial messages in place of platform information.

There is a defence for the overcrowding claims—the new layout with the giant billboard and smaller departure screens is reportedly a nudge-theory move to reduce crowd density. But the deeper objection to the billboard is symbolic. Looming over the public concourse and occupying the space that was once dedicated to service information, it’s taken by many as an emblem of a privatised system where the customer is diminished and corporate interests dominate.

The controversial context means ads land differently than they might elsewhere. Sometimes the giant billboard projects ‘rush hour’ jokes that no doubt work better in the concept presentation than they do with weary commuters.

Other times, the billboard projects the familiar messages of the purpose age, as in this campaign by Ovo Energy, in which the company—whose earnings rose 11-fold in the wake of the energy crisis and which recently paid out £2.4m over customer complaint failures—aims to ‘educate’ the public on energy use throughout the UK. (The photo on the right was taken during a power cut that caused misery for commuters, rendering Ovo’s joke… less funny.)

All of this is preamble to a wider point I want to make about billboard advertising, which I think may come as a shock to many ad people today.

Did you know some of the biggest ad legends used to be vocally against billboards?

Howard Gossage was personally against the intrusion into the public realm, and managed to get his client Rolls-Royce (above, left image) to run a public consultation on the issue in 1963. All this came in the run-up to the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which called for greater control of billboard advertising, seen to be taking over the growing Interstate Highway System at the time.

Gossage found a supporter in David Ogilvy (above, right image), who had been railing against billboard ads since at least 1939. “Man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes... chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?” wrote Ogilvy in Confessions of an Advertising Man. Elsewhere, Howard Gossage expanded on his objections: “I like outdoor advertising… I just don’t think it ought to be outdoors. It’s not a question of aesthetics, it’s simply that it invades… I can’t close it up, I can’t throw it away. It’s just there, whether I like it or not.”

Both the above images come from The Howard Gossage Show, by Steve Harrison and Dave Dye—a brilliant tour of the adman’s career, and an insight into how much industry conversations around billboard advertising have changed.

In The Road to Hell (Kindle & print edition out now), I write about the origins of billboard advertising, and the implicit social contract that has always been involved. There’s no reason advertisers should have an automatic right to put posters up where no one can escape them. It’s a liberty extended to business by society, but it comes with conditions. If advertisers are going to invade the public realm, there’s a responsibility to make it tolerable—ideally by being brilliantly creative and interesting, but at the very least by not being offensive, hectoring, tasteless or fraudulent.

Increasingly, it seems society is unhappy with its side of the bargain. “These ads are in the public space without any consultation about what is shown on them. Plus they cause light pollution, and the ads are for things people can’t afford, or don’t need.” says Charlotte Gage of Adfree Cities, a movement set up to challenge corporate outdoor advertising and reclaim public space for art and community. Elsewhere, The Guardian reports that four in five billboard ads in England and Wales are in poorer areas, quoting research claiming that billboards “negatively affect people’s lives in intersecting ways, by pushing unhealthy products such as fast food and alcohol, encouraging environmentally harmful consumption and lowering mental wellbeing”.

Right now, the political focus is less on the billboards themselves, and more on the products being advertised. Transport for London, Sheffield City Council, Liverpool City Council and others have either banned or are considering banning junk food billboards, citing the negative impact on public health.

All this is distinct from, but related to, the larger issue of the billboard sites themselves. The defence is that they bring in valuable revenue for local councils. But that argument may become harder to sustain if the social costs are seen to be higher, or if the public mood continues to tilt against commercial intrusions of the kind seen in Euston station.

In this context, you might expect advertisers to be sensitive to the changing mood—but the opposite appears to be the case. Not only are advertisers pushing the limits of the social contract, but the self-serving logic of ‘purpose’ is making them feel good about doing so.

So the noble cause of GirlvsCancer is used to justify swearing and sexualised imagery on an untargeted public medium, where everyone is involuntarily exposed, from kids to grandparents.

The ad was banned by the ASA, who acknowledged that it had noble aims and didn’t explicitly spell out the word ‘fuck’. But the context and combination of words and imagery quite reasonably meant it wasn’t suitable for a public medium, whereas it would have been fine in the pages of an appropriate newspaper or magazine.

Rather than prompting self-reflection in the ad community, this led to a bout of teenage eye-rolling about the ASA, who “sound like they’d be a fun guest at a party” according to an article in It’s Nice That. For its part, BBH talked about the need to break the “taboo”, explaining “Our approach might make some people uncomfortable and that’s fine.” None of it evidenced any awareness that billboards are a special context where advertisers have a responsibility to the widest possible audience, some of whom might feel the ‘taboo’ around advertisers showing this stuff to six-year-olds might not need breaking, however noble the cause.

Coincidentally or not, BBH is also the agency behind the post-partum Burger King ads that have divided LinkedIn (and nowhere else). Based on a Burger-King-commissioned survey of women on Mumsnet, which revealed that 39% would choose either a generic burger OR generic fries for their first post-birth meal, the posters showed real-life moments of mums enjoying a Whopper supplied by the sponsor.

Despite the culture war guff about women loving this taboo-busting realism and only mansplaining blokes objecting, the ads evidently split opinion across genders, with some seeing it as welcome realism (albeit based on the surrounding reporting that explained the context in a way that anyone simply looking at the posters would miss)—while others saw it as a depressing commercialisation of a precious moment. Some defenders eagerly told men to be quiet because the ad ‘isn’t for you’—showing remarkable illiteracy about the nature of billboard advertising as a medium that is necessarily for everyone.

As I mansplained on LinkedIn, the key point with Burger King is that making something an ad changes what it is. I wrote about this phenomenon in my first ever post about purpose. Several years ago, a woman was buried in a Costa-branded coffin, because she loved meeting her friends there. It was an authentic and touching story that was widely reported in the press, but Costa OBVIOUSLY didn’t turn it into an ad, because turning something into an ad changes what it is. The real and true thing becomes a crass and insensitive thing, especially when it’s published without context on poster sites across the land.

But here we have to add a side-note—because, in a complex interplay of ad industry bullshit-mongering, it seems like most of this stuff ISN’T published across the land in any case. As far as I can see, the Burger King campaign hasn’t appeared in public at all, let alone across the nation. The only images I’ve seen are mock-ups, and the campaign was limited to a single day on 26 September, when the highest number of births apparently take place. So the lack of public reaction is probably because no one knows about it, beyond the marketers arguing about what the public thinks on LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, other advertisers cheerfully use giant billboards to exchange family in-jokes in which two brothers (founders of Surreal cereal and Days non-alcoholic beer) compete for the approval of their multi-millionaire father and funder. I covered that in an earlier post, but it’s worth revisiting in light of the Guardian’s reporting that four in five billboard ads in England and Wales are in poorer areas. That was certainly the case here, where the triple poster site was in the borough of Hackney, where 43.4% of children are estimated to live in poverty after housing costs. For good measure, the site is over the road from BSix Sixth Form college, where the students are among the poorest in the country. David Ogilvy’s plan to tear down billboards in the dead of night could do worse than start here.

There are too many other billboard provocations to mention, like HSBC beaming into cities to patronise them with their most familiar clichés.

Or this site in Elephant & Castle, where a once-ad-free office block (image 1) is taken over by giant hoardings (image 2), to vain protests from campaigners (image 3), before Corona takes the purposeful applause for running an ad that allows some light in (image 4), albeit by funding the site’s owners and continuing to block some windows with the ostentatious frame.

Am I arguing that all billboards should be torn down? No—I think there’s a place for public advertising, and it can add light and colour to public spaces, even defining the character of places like Piccadilly Circus and Times Square.

But forget my position. Assuming the position of the ad industry is that it would like to keep using these canvases, it urgently needs to recognise the responsibility that comes with the privilege. Make it good, make it for everyone, recognise it’s a medium distinct from websites, newspaper spreads and TV ad breaks. It’s not just a photo shoot for your LinkedIn post—it’s an intrusion into the public realm that we all share.

In a spirit of moral presentism, we often like to feel superior to the backwards old generations who preceded us. In some ways, I’d like to think we are. But on the issue of billboard advertising, it’s hard to think that the purposeful industry folk of today are more enlightened than those who came before them. Agencies need to remember the social contract that enabled these intrusions—or a lot more giant, dark rectangles will soon be appearing.

Thanks for reading. For anyone new here, I’m the author of The Road to Hell, which is out in print and on Kindle. I’m also a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, books about design, and occasional songs.

This is an extract from The Road to Hell: How purposeful business leads to bad marketing and a worse world. And how human creativity is the way out. It tackles the case of Dove, frequently cited as the stand-out example of purpose marketing.

If you live in that fabled land outside the marketing industry, you might loosely associate Dove with moisturising soap, roll-on deodorants and ads that use white space a lot. But within adland, Dove enjoys an elevated status as one of the trailblazers of the purpose movement. Having been a solid part of Unilever’s portfolio since 1957, the brand sought to broaden from soap to the wider beauty category by launching the Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004, consisting of both the Real Beauty Pledge and the parallel Self-Esteem Project. Since then, it has associated itself with a social mission to “make beauty a source of confidence, not anxiety”.

One of the instigators was chief creative officer Joah Santos, who applied a method he described as POV: Purpose, Objective, Vision. From the beginning, Dove was astute enough to add a gloss of science to its social mission, commissioning a white paper with named contributors including Dr. Nancy Etcoff of Harvard University, Dr. Susie Orbach of London School of Economics, and Dr. Jennifer Scott and Heidi D’Agostino, from StrategyOne, a subsidiary of Edelman Public Relations.

Although the white paper has the air of social science, it is primarily a market research exercise conducted by StrategyOne, designed to prove the existence of the societal problem that Dove would build its brand around solving. The report opens with a quote from Keats: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Cultural historians will note that the word ‘truth’ was going through an interesting evolution around this time. Over the next two years, both the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster would make ‘truthiness’ their word of the year: the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, based on emotions rather than evidence.

The white paper involved a survey of 3,200 women aged 18-64. The headline was that only 2% considered themselves ‘beautiful’ (revised to 4% in a follow-up 2011 study). This provided the shocking figure that justified Dove’s campaign to bolster women’s self-esteem. Less reported was the finding that 72% of women said they rated their beauty as average, and only 13% saw themselves as less beautiful or physically attractive than others. It’s also worth noting that an obvious response bias creeps into the framing of questions like these. Is any of it really a finding about the participants’ inherent insecurity, or more a wish not to appear vain when being asked about their appearance?

The research would later be dramatised in a #ChooseBeautiful campaign, in which adjacent entrances in public spaces were labelled ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Average’. The resulting brand film framed the exercise as a pop science experiment, in which under-confident women chose mainly to go through the ‘Average’ entrance, barring a few who chose ‘Beautiful’ because they were sufficiently empowered, or because their mother was with them and insisted they walk through it—all to a background of swelling piano music. Again, the fact that this is a forced choice taking place in a highly public space might make it evidence of socially acceptable modesty rather than inner self-loathing. Kat Gordon, founder of the 3% Conference, which advocates more female leadership in advertising, called the campaign “heavy-handed and manipulative”. Arwa Mahdawi wrote in the Guardian that Dove “has mastered the art of passing off somewhat passive-aggressive and patronising advertising as super-empowering, ultra PR-able social commentary”.

In this case, at least women were making their own self-assessment. Dove’s Real Beauty campaign had begun with billboard portraits of what were described as regular women rather than professional models. The campaign included an interactive Times Square billboard that invited passers-by to vote on whether a particular model was ‘Fat or Fab’ or ‘Wrinkled or Wonderful’, with the results dynamically updated and displayed on the billboard. It’s reported that ‘fat’ overtook the ‘fab’ number—an early example of the dangers of crowdsourced marketing.

This public rating of physical appearance didn’t seem likely to boost self-esteem, and soon Dove learned to be more subtle. ‘Tested on Real Curves’ was a poster campaign featuring a range of ‘real’ women unlike the usual models seen in ad campaigns. It was nevertheless a curated sample. Writing in The Atlantic in 2007, Virginia Postrel noted that, “The ‘real women’ pictured in the thigh-cream billboards may not have looked like supermodels, but they were all young, with symmetrical faces, feminine features, great skin, white teeth, and hourglass shapes. Even the most zaftig had relatively flat stomachs and clearly defined waists. These pretty women were not a random sample of the population. Dove diversified the portrait of beauty without abandoning the concept altogether.”

There was a lively row when photo retoucher Pascal Dangin told the New Yorker that he had made extensive edits to the campaign photos: “Do you know how much retouching was on that? But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.” After that inadvertent moment of candour, he later appeared to row back the claims.

The campaign received criticism for the way its stance conflicted with other brands in the Unilever stable. While Dove talked about women’s self-esteem, Axe (also known as Lynx) continued to run campaigns based on stereotypically sexualised women, while other products included SlimFast diet bars and Fair & Lovely, a controversial skin-lightening product marketed primarily in India—now rebranded as Glow & Lovely with previous references to ‘whitening’ removed from the language.

The high point in Dove’s campaign came with Real Beauty Sketches in 2013. Based on Joah Santos’s strategy and credited to Portuguese copywriter Hugo Veiga, the film would become one of the most viral of the decade, setting the template for similar ads to follow. The choreography is always similar, with nervous participants walking into a cavernous space to take part in a social experiment orchestrated by the wise and all-seeing brand. In this case, the room contained Gil Zamora, a male forensic artist from the San Jose Police Department. Placed behind a screen, the women were asked to describe their facial appearance to the artist. They reply in mainly self-effacing terms. “Tell me about your chin,’” says the man. “It kind of protrudes a little bit,” says the woman. “Your jaw?” says the man. “My mom told me I had a big jaw,” says the woman. We hear this over soft piano music—these ads would always land differently without it.

Afterwards, another stranger, who has met the participants only briefly, walks in and gives an alternative description of them to the sketch artist, this time in more flattering terms. “Her chin? It was a nice, thin chin,” says the stranger. “Cute nose,” says another stranger. “She had nice eyes, they lit up when she spoke,” says another stranger.

As the piano music swells, the original women are led back in and shown one sketch based on their own description (somewhat dour and plain-looking), then another based on the stranger’s description (comparatively brighter and more flattering). Learning their lesson, the women tear up and realise how much they’ve been talking themselves down. “Do you think you’re more beautiful than you say?” asks the male artist. “Yeah… Yes.” says the woman hesitantly, continuing: “I should be more grateful.” Another participant is shown hugging her boyfriend, having realised how unnecessarily insecure she was. “You are more beautiful than you think,” says the endline as the Dove logo appears.

The film was a social media hit, expertly framed to generate an emotional response. But some commentators were concerned. “These ads still uphold the notion that, when it comes to evaluating ourselves and other women, beauty is paramount,” wrote Ann Friedman in The Cut. “The goal shouldn’t be to get women to focus on how we are all gorgeous in our own way. It should be to get women to do for ourselves what we wish the broader culture would do: judge each other based on intelligence and wit and ethical sensibility, not just our faces and bodies.” The criticism chimes with another underreported finding in the original Dove research, which was that “beauty and physical appearance are not the primary drivers of women’s well-being”—coming behind factors such as family, friends, health, religious faith and professional success.

All this delivered undoubted commercial benefits for the brand. Ranked top in Ad Age’s list of Campaigns of the Century, the work has been credited with raising sales from $2.5 billion to $4 billion over ten years. Marketing commentator Mark Ritson has pointed out how the purposeful ads ran in parallel with many far more traditional product-centric ads—what the Dove team called their ‘dual communications model’—so it’s hard to separate out the impact of the two. Nevertheless, the purposeful ads have to be credited with raising the salience of the brand, despite (or perhaps because of) the attendant controversies.

The question for this chapter, and for anyone interested in social impact beyond commercial sales, is whether this has delivered anything good for society. As always, that’s harder to measure. One advantage of a societal mission is that it’s hard to attribute blame to a soap brand if trends go in the wrong direction (which can be framed as all the more reason to fight the good fight), but easier to claim a share of credit if things improve.

The evidence from the last two decades has not been encouraging. Figures presented in a District of Columbia filing against Meta and Instagram show an alarming rise in suicide rates among 12-14 year old girls, self-poisoning among 13-15 year old girls, major depressive episodes in 14-15 year old girls, and depressive symptoms among eighth-grade girls over the course of 2001 to 2018. There is a particular spike around 2004, then a dramatic rise from 2011 onwards, which the filing describes as attributable to the rise of mobile phones and social media.

None of this bodes well for the success of the Self-Esteem Project, but Dove’s more recent work has turned this into fertile ground. On TikTok, a #TurnYourBack campaign rails against beautifying filters on the platform. It’s a worthy target, but the campaign takes the familiar purpose approach of funding the platform it criticises. A ‘principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something’ approach might involve brands withdrawing from a platform that policy makers have discussed banning in the west. But commercial incentives mean the ‘do well by doing good’ approach is always more appealing: keep advertising to a key demographic, but frame it as resistance.

Social media spend has risen accordingly. At the start of 2023, marketing insight organisation WARC upgraded its ad spend forecast for TikTok by almost $2bn to $15.2bn, noting that 75% of marketers planned to increase their activity on the platform: a 52% increase in ad revenue over the previous year. If social media platforms are largely to blame for the mental health crisis, it may be due to the ad-funded model that incentivises clickbait, confrontation and controversy. Without the ads, there would be fewer problems for Dove to solve, or for other brands to ‘lead the conversation’ about.

Psychologists might ask other questions about the Dove approach. There’s a well-known joke about how to make someone feel insecure: just go up to them and say “Look, whatever anyone else is saying, I think you’re amazing.” While it’s framed as an empowering compliment, most people’s natural reaction will be: “Wait, what is everyone else saying?”

You could say this has been Dove’s brand strategy for 20 years. As I wrote in my first article about purpose in 2017, “Advertisers reinforce the insecurities they claim to fight, and introduce new insecurities that people didn’t know they were supposed to have.”

Writer and comedian Mindy Kaling has written about the wave of ‘empowerment’ advertising aimed at women, with Dove at the forefront.

“We just assume boys will be confident, like how your parents assume you will brush your teeth every morning without checking in on you in the bathroom. With girls, that assumption flies out the window. Suddenly, your parents are standing in the bathroom with you, watching you brush your teeth with encouraging, worried expressions on their faces. Sweetheart, you can do it! We know it’s hard to brush your teeth! We love you! Which must make girls think, Yikes. Is brushing your teeth a really hard and scary thing to do? I thought it was just putting toothpaste on a toothbrush. I get worried that telling girls how difficult it is to be confident implies a tacit expectation that girls won’t be able to do it.

“The good news is that, as a country, we are all about telling girls to be confident. It’s our new national pastime. Every day I see Twitter posts, Instagram campaigns, and hashtags that say things like ‘We Will!’ or ‘Girls Can!’ or ‘Me Must, I Too!’ on them. I think widespread, online displays of female self-confidence are good for people, especially men, to see. I just sometimes get the sneaking suspicion that corporations are co-opting ‘girl confidence’ language to rally girls into buying body wash. Be careful.”

‘Be careful’ continues to be good advice. In another Dove brand film, called Toxic Influence, mothers and daughters are led into the familiar cavernous space to talk to the all-powerful voice of Dove. Speaking from somewhere off-camera, the voice asks the mothers and daughters to discuss the effects of phone use and social media, to which the mothers give superficially complacent ‘It’s fine’ answers. Dove then shows the participants a film in which deepfake technology has been used (apparently without permission) to put toxic beauty advice into the mouths of the mothers, who eagerly advise their daughters to use Botox, try powdered diet foods (maybe SlimFast) and file their teeth with a nail file. “That is not me!” cries one shocked mother.

“You wouldn’t say that to your daughter,” admonishes the brand. “But she still hears it online, every day.” The mothers are tearful. “A girl’s greatest influence will always be her parents,” reads the message on the big screen. “Always be talking” is the lesson they learn.

One day it would be interesting to run another kind of pop science experiment. Nervous Dove marketers could be led into a cavernous space and placed in front of a giant screen. The screen could show the mothers from the Toxic Influence ad saying ‘Wait, so who funds these platforms?’. The piano could come in as a headline shows Unilever boosting its 2023 marketing spend by €500 million and opening 29 new digital marketing, media and ecommerce hubs. The strings could swell as a caption appears: “Today, women are three times more likely than men to experience common mental health problems. In 1993, they were twice as likely.” A marketer could shed a tear as the Dove logo fades from a Covid nurse’s face and an NHS logo appears in its place. A marketer’s boyfriend could give her a hug as Radhika Parameswaran, professor of gender and media studies at Indiana University Bloomington, relates how Fair & Lovely holds a 70% share of India’s skin-lightening market and “Just removing the word ‘fair’ is not enough.” Another marketer might murmur “I should be more grateful” as he reads about Unilever’s profit margins on the back of price rises during the cost of living crisis. The music could reach a crescendo as a group of Ukrainian amputees emerges from behind the screen and explains how Unilever doubled profits to 9.2 billion roubles and increased ad spend by 10% to 21.7 billion roubles after the Russian invasion. Then the endline could appear: “But $2.5 billion to $4 billion in sales, so it’s all good.”

Harsh, maybe. But these are the conversations that purpose invites. Dove deserves praise for running a successful commercial campaign and smartly riding the cultural waves of the past two decades. But the purpose of purpose is purpose, and the impact of a social intervention has to be measured by its social outcomes. In that context, it’s not enough to talk about starting conversations or generating social media impressions. When it comes to social impact, the warm feeling you get at the end of a Dove film is an unreliable guide. Truthiness isn’t the same as truth.

Thank you for reading. Please buy the book! And a quick rating and/or review on Amazon is a great help. Hoping to have a Kindle version out soon (but please buy a hard copy anyway).

In a period of national turmoil, there can be few scarier sentences than: “It’s time for the ad industry to step up.”

But, in the wake of the rioting that has followed the sickening Southport attack, this is the growing cry from across the advertising world.

This week, the chair of Saatchi & Saatchi floated a six-point plan that proposes “bans in one platform to be applied across all” and “bans for spreading misinformation to be preceded by a points system as in speeding”. Other ideas include requiring all accounts to be ID-verified and bans to apply to the person’s identity rather than individual accounts.

Taken together, these ideas are beyond draconian. They paint a picture of a Ministry of Truth-style surveillance state where having the wrong opinions will get you deleted from digital existence. By now, we should all know that what gets classed as ‘misinformation’ today can become accepted wisdom tomorrow. And if the misinformation-spreaders are to be first against the wall, plenty of brands and agencies will shift uncomfortably. Some of those purpose statements and greenwashing ads might elicit a knock on the door from plod.

Over in Campaign, one contributor says “It’s not OK to be funding X [formerly Twitter] at the moment and it’s certainly not OK to sit this one out.” Another talks of the renewed importance of diversity and inclusion, but has a strangely London-centric attitude: “It is important to recognise that these riots are not just a Northern issue; they are happening across the UK and are coming closer to London.” Closer to London—soon they might matter!

All contributors are agreed that Elon Musk’s X is the biggest danger. This is despite the reported role of Telegram when it comes to organising the unrest, and YouTube with its algorithmic tendency towards radicalising users (according to some research).

Mainly because of its owner, X remains the more compelling target. In a separate post, the Saatchi & Saatchi chairman firmly states “not a penny more to Musk”, explaining “Other platforms are irresponsible, twitter is a clear and present threat.”

In the current climate, that line will receive applause from many in advertising, and some of it is understandable. For my part, I find Musk tiresome and his “Civil war is inevitable” post reckless and irresponsible. But I’ve also seen how X has remained the place to turn during realtime events like the Biden debate, the Trump near-assassination and ongoing events in Gaza. And while it spreads ‘fake news’, not least via Musk himself, it’s often the place where fake news gets called out first. The introduction of Community Notes has been an effective intervention. And it’s been interesting to see the notes applied to advertisers including Samsung and Apple—I suspect that’s part of the reason for advertisers getting cold feet (and I imagine it will be reined in as a result). 

Now Musk is going legal with advertisers, targeting a lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM)—the industry body set up by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), launched in partnership with the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2019, and bringing together corporate and agency members who are collectively responsible for 90% of global advertising spend.

In response, the not-for-profit GARM has already discontinued its operations, while the WFA said it plans to contest the allegations in court, and is confident that it has complied with competition law throughout.

The simplified version circulated on X and LinkedIn is that Musk is trying to force businesses to advertise on X (as though that were possible), and people have been quick to defend the free speech rights of businesses, who should be at liberty to advertise where they like. “Let the market decide!” say the commentators.

But the antitrust case rests on the question of whether businesses can join forces in what is arguably a cartel, and then use their collective muscle to force media outlets into ideological compliance. I suspect Musk ultimately doesn’t have much of a case, as GARM will have been careful with its language—taking pains to emphasise it has no power to force any members into boycotting X or any other platform. Instead, there is softer language about generalised guidance around shared definitions. If Musk has a case, it will be that this nevertheless amounts to a de facto cartel, designed to increase the power of advertisers in a way that goes against the spirit of a free market, and decreases the power of media. I guess the lawyers will figure that out, but other industry bodies like B Corp will be watching apprehensively. They’ve been more explicit about encouraging members to work solely with B Corp suppliers, which is veering close to a pay-to-play cartel. (I talked about that on the Fuel podcast with Keith Smith.)

Meanwhile, some advertisers continue to stick with X. There’s plenty of dross, but a glance this morning shows names like the National Lottery, Sonos, Amazon and the National Institute for Health and Care Research. You have to wonder what a ‘not the penny more to Musk’ agency would do if their client wanted to advertise on X—maybe as a way to include a wider demographic in their health surveys, or because they’ve found their products sell especially well with younger men. (I’m not sure of the demographics of X these days, but believe it skews more male.) Is their agency going to refuse? Or is the same realism going to play out that would apply with any other media-buying choice, like advertising in the Sun, the Mail, YouTube or TikTok? I know ‘where is the line?’ arguments can sound like whataboutery, but when the commercial stakes are high, they can get legal pretty quickly. And if you’re an agency, it’s not ultimately your money or business you’re playing with.

All. Of. That. Said.

I can understand the instinct behind wanting to do something when the social media landscape does indeed contain a lot of toxicity and malign content, and advertisers know they have a structural part in funding it. Surely it’s good to use that power in some way, and hit them where it hurts?

What interests me is what happens next in that thought process. Even without any conscious scheming involved, there’s an inevitable tendency to favour the solutions that hurt someone else and benefit you—and so far the ad industry’s idea of ‘stepping up’ seems to involve all the things that would step up its own power.

Imagine a world where corporations and advertisers could indeed wield their collective power to support only the platforms that meet their guidelines. That would make agencies and their clients pretty influential political players. Imagine a system where platforms are kept “brand safe” by keeping the hoi polloi out, clearing the way for brands to “lead the conversation” about whatever issue is on their minds this week. Imagine a system where every account is tied to a real identity that remains constant across all platforms—a dream for the data-hoovering brands that already follow us around the internet.

All this represents a huge ratcheting up of the ‘surveillance advertising’ model that some non-advertising people blame for the state we’re now in. Social media researcher Jeanna Matthews has written about the “detailed profiles the social media companies build for each of their users [that] make advertising even more powerful by enabling advertisers to tailor their messages to individuals. These profiles often include the size and value of your home, what year you bought your car, whether you’re expecting a child, and whether you buy a lot of beer.” She continues: “The same mechanisms that can recommend a niche consumer product to just the right person or suggest an addictive substance just when someone is most vulnerable can also suggest an extreme conspiracy theory just when a person is ready to consider it.”

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist yourself to see how this data harvesting in the service of advertisers creates algorithmic echo chambers at best and radicalisation pipelines at worst. Notwithstanding the soothing words about protecting users’ privacy, a requirement for ID verification on all platforms would be a data-gathering bonanza for online advertisers. All of it accelerates the transformation of the internet from a window onto a shared world into a funhouse mirror that reflects back a warped version of yourself.

The answer, as Bob Hoffman has tirelessly argued, is to end the tracking model that underpins so much of this. The internet needs advertising—it’s what allows us free access to so many useful sites and platforms. But it doesn’t need the tracking that comes with it. Getting rid of ad tracking wouldn’t solve societal issues at a stroke, but it’s the most radical intervention available. Unfortunately it’s one that would come as a potential cost to advertisers, rather than a benefit. (I say potential cost, but really it should be seen as a benefit, because so much of the advertising would be better and more creative, rather than another pop-up saying ‘We noticed you bought a lawnmower last month—here are 58 more’.)

Bob Hoffman has made this case to the European Parliament—you can read the short transcript here.

Over in the US, and in a similar spirit, Congresswomen Anna Eshoo and Jan Schakowsky and Senator Cory Booker have proposed the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act. It’s worth watching the campaign video above, and here’s how they sum it up in their own words:

Eshoo says: “This pernicious practice allows online platforms to chase user engagement at great cost to our society, and it fuels disinformation, discrimination, voter suppression, privacy abuses, and so many other harms.” Schakowsky says: “The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act will put a stop to this repulsive practice and therefore protect consumers by removing the financial incentive for companies to exploit consumers’ personal information and help stop a morass of online harms.” Booker says: “Surveillance advertising is a predatory and invasive practice. The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence.”

And what does the advertising industry say, when the violence flares up?

Nothing about getting rid of tracking, but plenty about scaling it up.

Some of the calls for the ad industry to ‘step up’ no doubt have good intentions behind them. But there’s a saying about where good intentions can lead. It’s not enough to trim surveillance advertising at the edges to cut out X or whoever is the current bête noire, then keeping the whole show on the road. Nor is it about continuing to buy the ads, but covering yourself with self-consciously purposeful messages. It’s about a radical change that shifts the rules of the game.

For now, I suspect we’ll see a lot of advertisers talking about anything but tracking, and continuing to turn the attention onto useful villains like Musk. But I’d love to see more agencies and clients joining the calls for an end to tracking and a revival in non-creepy, non-stalky, creative advertising. That would be a good way to step up.

Thanks for reading—please buy my book. And if you already have, a rating or review on Amazon is a useful way to boost it.

What follows is an excerpt from my new book The Road to Hell, tackling the case of Simon Sinek and his 2009 book Start With Why.

In other news, I’ve appeared on three podcasts recently, all quite different in tone and content. Check out The Marketing Book Podcast, In Clear Focus and the Fuel Podcast for some interesting conversations.

At the turn of the century, Simon Sinek was an adman, working at Euro RSCG (now Havas Worldwide) and Ogilvy & Mather, before launching his own consultancy in 2002.

It’s common practice in adland to come up with proprietary models that capture the way a brand works. On whiteboards from London to New York, you will find brand onions, brand pyramids, brand houses and brand doughnuts. Sinek’s version was three concentric circles: with the ‘why’ of the brand at the core, circled by the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.

In an ambitious reference to the golden ratio, he dubbed this the Golden Circle and pondered whether it might be the hidden pattern underlying all successful brands and leaders. It lay on the shelf for a while, but then Sinek describes a eureka moment when he realised this model might have echoes in neurobiology.

The initial source wasn’t a neurobiologist, but California actress, Democrat activist and former wife of Dennis Hopper, Victoria Duffy Hopper—daughter of two neuroscientists. Seated next to her at an event, Sinek fell into conversation about the structure of the brain, learning how the outer, rational neocortex was wrapped around the primal, emotional limbic system. “And I realised… that the way the brain works, and the way my little model was articulated—the why, how, what—perfectly overlapped. In other words, I had discovered why marketing works. I had discovered why people do what they do. And that profoundly changed my life.” [Savage Minds interview]

Sinek sought confirmation from a neuroscientist, appropriately named Peter Whybrow. It turned out the model wasn’t quite a perfect overlap: Whybrow advised Sinek to flip the order of the how and the what. But apart from that, there was just enough science to give Sinek confidence in his model, or his ‘discovery’ as he preferred to call it. “It’s not my opinion, it’s biology,” he later wrote.

The biology is contested. Sinek’s version comes from the ‘triune’ model of the brain, popularised by neuroscientist Paul MacLean (pictured above) in the 1960s. The idea is that our ‘lizard brain’ is the most primitive, non-verbal part that functions on instinct. Over the course of evolution, this was enveloped by the ancient limbic system, source of our emotions. More recently, this was encased in a sophisticated neocortex that separates our brains from those of other vertebrates and allows us to make rational, verbal decisions. If you want to inspire people to buy into your brand, you need to dig past the what and the how and get to the why, where the real action happens. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” Sinek repeats eight times in his book, Start With Why.

Sinek’s advisor, Peter Whybrow, subscribes to MacLean’s triune model. In 1997, Whybrow published A Mood Apart, including a chapter on the lizard brain that opens with a quote from MacLean. And in 2010, Whybrow published another paper, titled ‘After Freud: What do neuroscience advances tell us about human nature?’, which shows continued faith in MacLean’s ideas. Sample quote:

“The human brain is not a single organ but a hybrid: an evolved hierarchy of three-brains-in-one. Thus human behavior is best understood when brain anatomy is placed within an evolutionary context. A primitive ‘lizard’ brain, designed millennia ago for survival, lies at the core of the human brain and cradles the roots of ancient dopamine reward pathways that are the superhighways of pleasure, curiosity and desire.”

Even when Sinek published Start With Why in 2009, this triune model had long fallen out of favour. A 2008 article in the Yale School of Medicine journal is titled ‘A theory abandoned but still compelling’. The article discusses how the science has been debunked, but “the force of MacLean’s personality gave his ideas a special resonance”.

More recently, celebrated neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett included a dismantling of the triune brain myth in her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020), which you can hear her discussing with fellow neuroscientist Sam Harris on episode 247 of his Making Sense podcast [or check out the video above]. As she writes elsewhere: “This model, called the triune brain, is a fantasy… The brain didn’t evolve in layers like sedimentary rocks. Rather (in the words of the neuroscientist Georg Striedter), brains evolve like companies do: they reorganise as they expand. The brain regions that MacLean considered emotional, which he referred to as the ‘limbic system’, are now known to contain major hubs for general communication throughout the brain. They control the various systems of the body, and they’re important for many phenomena besides emotion, such as including language, concepts, stress, and even the coordination of the five senses into a cohesive experience.”

I include this scientific detour because I’ve yet to see a debunking of Sinek’s ‘discovery’ anywhere else. This may be a case of Brandolini’s Law, which states that ‘The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it’. There are deep questions about the relationship between emotion, thought and language, but those questions are not reducible to a cartoon model that claims to reveal the truth of humans, marketing, business or anything else.

Nevertheless, Sinek’s book made a deep impression on the business and marketing worlds, aided by a TED talk that became one of the most viewed of all time. From the start, Sinek’s idea of ‘why’ was synonymous with purpose—“By why, I mean ‘What’s your purpose, cause, belief’”. Its power was that it flattered business leaders into seeing themselves as heroes driven by a higher cause, of which business was just the outward expression. And the beauty of the theory was that anyone puzzled by the ‘why’ question was simply confirming Sinek’s model: it’s meant to be hard to answer, because it lies deep in the non-verbal brain.

So if you ask the boss of a widget company, “Why do you do what you do?” she might be nonplussed by the obviousness of the answer: “Well, we do it to sell widgets and make a living, and there was a gap in the market for widgets.” Or she might be forced to grope around for some faux-psychological origin story: “I guess I saw a gap in the market for widgets, and became passionate about how… people had been living for so long without widgets of this particular kind… at this particular price point… so I wanted to… democratise?.. the widgets and maybe… break the taboo?.. around the widgets, and… make people’s lives easier with the widgets… and I definitely want to sell the widgets to everyone… so I guess I’m on a mission to improve life for everyone, everywhere… and encourage the world to… widget itself happy?” Soon the widget company has recast itself as a ‘challenge the status quo’ company that just happens to make widgets.

This sounds like a parody, but it’s the story that Sinek projects back onto Apple (his favoured example of a start-with-why company). The other two leading case studies in his business book don’t come from the business world.

First, there are the Wright brothers. Sinek’s version of events is that they won the race to develop the first motor-powered airplane because they were driven by a stronger internal sense of ‘why’:

“It wasn’t luck. Both the Wright brothers and [their rival] Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. They were pursuing exactly the same goal, but only the Wright brothers were able to inspire those around them and truly lead their team to develop a technology that would change the world. Only the Wright brothers started with Why.”

So a fascinating story of incremental engineering innovation is flattened into a simple question of desire—Sinek writes like a sports commentator who declares that the winning team ‘wanted it more’. Meanwhile, he overlooks a key aspect of the Wright brothers’ story, which ought to interest the business community he’s addressing. There’s a reason we’re not all flying on Wright Airlines. Larry Tise, historian and Wright brothers biographer, sums it up like this:

“Most historians treat the Wright Brothers as great American heroes. I see them partly as tragic figures. Once they had the invention, they wanted to be like Henry Ford and Alexander Graham Bell and become rich off their invention and work. They got the patent on their flying machine, and then they didn’t work to further flight. They worked to protect the patent. They became obsessed with making money and protecting the patent.”

There is nothing wrong with this desire to monetise their work, but you have to squint hard to see a ‘start with why’ narrative anywhere in the picture.

The other example is Martin Luther King—which, no doubt unfairly, brings to mind David Brent’s admiration of Nelson Mandela in British comedy The Office. On the face of it, this one stands up better. As Sinek notes, King said “I have a dream”, not “I have a plan”. But if that dream was King’s ‘why’, it was one he shared with many who went before him. Sinek’s view misreads the true dynamic of King’s Lincoln Memorial address, where the line immediately following the first instance of “I have a dream” is: “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”

Throughout the speech, King anchors his case not in his own inner ‘why’, but in the values of the audience he is trying to persuade. Emancipation wasn’t a threat to the American dream, he argued, but instead represented its true fulfilment:

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

This is the clear ‘what’ and ‘how’ that runs throughout the speech. You have the what: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Christian values, the liberal tradition. This is ‘how’ you live up to them.

All this is a contested area, and King’s speech was only one moment in a lifetime of tough political activism. But reducing his life to an inspirational parable for CEOs is unserious.

A year after the publication of his book, Sinek recorded an interview with Adam Fish on anthropology podcast Savage Minds. He recounts the origin story of the Golden Circle, then moves on to wider thoughts about the distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, and the nature of corporate leadership.

Some might wonder if the existence of not-for-profits is a problem for Sinek’s idea of purpose-driven companies. After all, if you were truly driven by a higher purpose that goes beyond profit, wouldn’t you choose to be a not-for-profit in the first place? But for Sinek, it’s a matter of language:

“All organisations are for-profit; it’s just how they measure their profit that’s different. For-profits measure their profit in dollars and cents; not-for-profits measure their profit in terms of making a particular impact in the world.”

This curious distinction leads Sinek into further thoughts about the superiority of for-profits when it comes to executing on their cause:

“You talk to non-profits all the time and they’re carrying a lot of dead weight in terms of talent, but they are loath to fire anybody because they’re so devoted to the cause. But in reality they’re bad employees. A for-profit would have no problem trimming out dead wood because they need people who produce. It’s the social entrepreneur who understands that what you need to do is combine those models. Strong on cause and strong on structure. Not one or the other: two sides of the same coin… The best organisations function as if they were social movements.”

Many will recognise the criticisms of the not-for-profit world, which can be prone to institutional inertia. For Sinek, the answer is not to improve that world, but to look instead to cause-driven corporations. And the way they should function is through strong, purposeful leadership, not consensus or democracy.

“Consensus-driven organisations don’t work… The best form of government is the benevolent dictatorship. And the same is true in organisations. The whole idea of consensus is lowest common denominator. How do you please as many people as possible? You end up with something incredibly diluted. Look at any congressional bill that passes… Rare are the bills that are truly profound and great because you have to please as many people and as many constituents as possible. So a leader is the single person, or no more than a pair of people, at the top, who explains their vision of the world and asks those in their organisation who believe what they believe to help build it. Consensus is not the way. There is only one vision and there can be only one vision.”

There is only one vision and there can be only one vision. This is where Sinek’s model of social purpose ends up: for-profits grappling with social causes based on the gut feelings of their benevolently dictatorial leaders, with the idea of employee consensus a tiresome distraction. It might be an efficient way to make decisions on the price of your widgets or the location of your warehouse. But when it comes to adopting social causes, and pushing a ‘make the world a better place’ agenda, many would see the benefits of slow political consensus, based on the same Constitution that Martin Luther King embraced.

Sinek has much to teach the marketing world, but none of it is about purpose. His skill lies in marketing and rhetoric. He knows the power of a three-word imperative slogan (Just Do It… Take Back Control… Start With Why); he knows the power of repetition (note the many examples in the TED talk); he knows the importance of scienceyness to persuasion (like the 1920s marketer who unearthed the obscure term ‘halitosis’ to start selling Listerine); he knows words like ‘discovery’ are more powerful than ‘theory’; he knows that branding himself an ‘optimist’ is a power move to cast any questioners as pessimists and cynics; he has the gift of spoken fluency that makes his ideas more compelling in person than on the page.

And he knows that people generally don’t look at evidence claims too closely— especially when the story is so seductive to the business leaders he’s addressing.

And so it transpired. Global business leaders, so maligned after the unregulated excesses that led to 2008, would go on to present themselves as the self-regulating moral heroes of the next decade, claiming to do social good while doing very well out of it. The rest of that story is told and unpicked in the book.

Please order a copy and/or consider leaving a rating or review—all helps get the word out. And thanks as ever for reading.

First, it’s fair to ask—why write about Cannes at all? Isn’t it just a pay-to-play circus generating vast amounts of revenue while reputation-washing the ad industry by presenting a feel-good shop window that’s ludicrously detached from the day-to-day realities of advertising, design and commercial creativity?

Well, yes. But, judging by last week’s events, it’s also undeniably growing in influence and relevance. The inclusion of Cannes-bashing commentator Mark Ritson could be seen as a case of ‘keep your enemies close’, but it’s also a welcome sign of reconnection to the realities of marketing. And if nothing else, the appearance of Elon Musk is testament to the influence that Cannes now wields. If you want to talk to the big players in advertising, tech, and multinational marketing, Cannes is the place to do it.

As someone who values creativity, I think it’s also worth paying attention to anything billing itself as the International Festival of Creativity. After all, even if many creatives roll their eyes, it affects the way clients and the wider world perceive what we do.

So, I will write about Cannes. And what follows are eight notes that came to mind as I’ve observed events from afar.

1. ‘Post-purpose’—saying it won’t make it so

“We live in a post-purpose world,” reports Marco Venturelli, Chief Creative Officer at Publicis and president of the Outdoor category, quoting one of the judges on his panel. Mark Ritson agrees we’re now in the “post-purpose era”, according to Marketing Week. Elsewhere, LBBOnline reports that “Celebrating commercial creativity was in, as was questioning purpose—it was to be celebrated but also interrogated.” The same report expands on Marco Venturelli’s comments: “[Venturelli] also drew attention to the need for purpose to connect with sales, saying that we need to remember that ‘selling is okay’; it was a big topic of discussion among his jury with many saying that the industry might now be ‘post purpose’ at large.”

The renewed talk of selling being ‘okay’ has to be welcomed. And the idea of interrogating purpose seriously should be embraced by purpose people as much as anyone. If the claim is that the work is having a positive impact on society, then it’s important to examine that rigorously, rather than on the basis of an emotive case study video. Unfortunately, judges chosen for their creative expertise aren’t in the best position to do that effectively—which is why it’s so important to have separate charity and social purpose categories judged by people who bring expertise in social change, and following a different judging process where rigorous questioning is the norm, rather than coming from one or two outliers on the creative juries who take it upon themselves to do some Googling and are usually dismissed as heartless cynics.

But talk of post-purpose remains just that for now. At the same festival, Richard Edelman, CEO of the world’s biggest PR agency, was urging brands to get more involved in politics. “Politics is not something to run away from as marketers; politics is something to wade into,” said Edelman (as reported by WARC). “It is a competitive advantage if you understand who your audience is.” 

All this is based on research that asks consumers how they make buying decisions, eliciting answers that have little bearing on how consumers actually make buying decisions. According to Edelman, “A majority of consumers say brands have to take a stand: on climate (by five to one), on fair pay (by four to one), on race and diversity (by two to one).” Similarly: “There has been a jump in nationalism, with eight in ten people choosing not to buy brands from particular markets—for example, Americans not buying Chinese brands, or vice versa.” 

When a survey asks whether ethics are important to you when buying a product, the natural answer is always ‘yes’. But the best measure of what makes customers buy things is… the things customers buy. One of the biggest Gen Z success stories in recent years is Shein—the Chinese-owned fast fashion chain that is thriving in a world where Edelman’s research says people are boycotting Chinese brands and demanding brands take a stand on climate. Chinese-owned TikTok has become the platform of choice for this politically conscious generation. Alongside Shein and TikTok, other top-ten brands for Gen Z include Amazon, YouTube and (at number one) Nike—which Ethical Consumer criticises for its use of forced labour, gender discrimination, and lack of support for a fair wage.

Edelman must be smart enough to know this, but purpose and purpose-washing are such a useful revenue stream that no one wants the tap to be turned off. Edelman itself has worked with ExxonMobil, the Saudi government and the Sackler family—and Adam Lowenstein has written in the Guardian about how preposterous their talk of ‘trust’ really is.

Meanwhile, for all the judges’ comments, purpose still looms large among the winners at Cannes. After years of favouring feel-good work, it’s become a default expectation among judges that the top awards aren’t ‘just’ for creativity, but for creativity that ‘makes a difference’ or ‘moves things forward’. When a brilliantly funny, exceptionally crafted or commercially popular ad breaks through, it’s seen as purpose graciously making space on the podium for the stuff that’s ‘just’ selling. When that mindset changes, we might finally be ready to talk ‘post-purpose’.

2. ‘Empowering’ creative judges to… judge creativity

Speaking of which, there was an interesting aside from Simon Cook, CEO of Cannes Lions. “Jury presidents felt empowered by Cannes not to just reward work that was doing good,” he said on the Campaign podcast. Campaign also reports: “Jurors at this year’s event were given guidance by the awards organisers to scrutinise more closely work aimed at improving the world.” Jury president Simon Vicars is quoted as saying: “Previously there was an ‘inability to question the purpose of the work because it appears you are questioning the purpose itself’”.

I find this both encouraging and frustrating.

Encouraging, because I’ve argued time and again that awards bodies have a responsibility to make sure judging is based on the same criteria that are advertised to paying entrants, right up to the top awards. If you accept money for a fast food or airline entry on the basis that it will be judged on creativity, then you can’t allow judges to invoke their own personal criteria when it comes to the big awards (“It’s brilliant, but I just don’t think it’s the right signal to award a meat brand, an airline” etc.) When a judge says “This cause just means so much to me”, it should be met with an understanding nod, but also a clear reminder that this isn’t what’s being judged—there are other categories where social impact can be judged more rigorously, rather than just on vibes. If a vegan judge wants to abstain, that’s valid, but if they’re proudly marking down the McDonald’s entries that are paying for their hotel, it’s unethical.

It’s frustrating because no such reminder should ever be needed. Creative judges shouldn’t need to feel ‘empowered’ to do the basics of the job. But I’ve sat on Black Pencil juries at D&AD and I know that some degree of empowerment is needed. Purpose is so deeply baked into some people’s mindsets that the ‘Shouldn’t we just judge on creative excellence?’ person is usually seen as the awkward contrarian. It shouldn’t be on them to ensure the awards body does the right thing by its entrants.

And that’s what it’s really about: empowering entrants rather than judges. They’re the ones who fork out large sums to keep the show on the road. Their voices should be top-of-mind in the judging room. If creative entrants aren’t being judged on creativity, refund the money and don’t call it a creative award.

3. Creativity devalued

None of the above is simply about who gets the gongs. It’s about the wider effect on the industry—because it ends up having a corrosive effect on the idea of creativity itself.

Mark Ritson arrived at Cannes for the first time to bring a welcome reminder that the award-winning stuff over the past 15 years has become increasingly detached from the work the public actually likes.

The trouble is, all this is framed as ‘Creativity isn’t enough’. Or even worse, in the accompanying Marketing Week report, “Creativity is distracting marketers from what matters”.

Creativity matters! And the problem in the last 15 years is that its own award schemes have become purpose awards schemes, which accounts for the increasing detachment from reality. Purpose is the distraction that should be called out in the headlines, but instead we get talk of a Crisis of creative effectiveness or entire articles titled Creatively awarded ads, once effective, are now officially average that never once mention purpose.

On one side, creativity gets elbowed out of its own awards schemes—“Creativity means something different now” says the CEO of D&AD, as though apologising for not being purpose-y enough in previous decades. On the other side, creativity takes the blame when those awards schemes become increasingly unrepresentative and irrelevant. And all the big tech companies and clients in attendance go away with the impression that creativity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, when they should be full of renewed belief in the power of creativity to drive business success and elevate genuine good causes.

Marketing effectiveness people and creative people are on the same side. It would be great if creative festivals could re-centre creativity, in deed as well as word, and champion it loudly.

4. Alt text facepalms

For this one, I’m just going to reproduce what I wrote on LinkedIn. Positioned at the entrance to the main venue at Cannes, this campaign is a reminder of how profoundly unserious ad agencies can be when it comes to actual social causes.

(For previous post, see Have purpose agencies forgotten how to do charity ads?)

5. Diverse judges and convergent judging

An incidental point, and a tricky one to make without sounding like I’m somehow against the basic idea of diversity and inclusion. It’s particularly tricky when it involves the admirable Cindy Gallop and fellow juror Ren Rigby. (I saw Ren talk in Birmingham recently and it was both creatively and personally inspirational).

But I still find the sentiment of the above tweet weird. The most common argument brought forward for diverse judging panels is that those judges will bring radically different perspectives based on a wider range of lived experience. On the face of it, you would think this would make consensus slower to arrive at, rather than faster than ever. The argument seems to be that, by virtue of their diversity, all these people are more ideologically aligned, as well as being more open-minded and better at listening than your average juror—which seem like big generalisations to make about large ethnic and gender groups.

I’m very much in favour of judges being open to changing their minds in judging sessions—I think the best sign of a good judge is if you manage to change someone’s mind and likewise have yours changed at some point. But in my experience of judging, that’s never mapped onto the gender or ethnicity of the judges in question. There are plenty of introverts, extroverts, good listeners and terrible listeners on all sides. And if agreement comes too easily, it could be a sign of something awry (though I can understand the urge to get out the basement and back into the sun).

6. Progressive research

Not unrelated to the above, Cannes saw the launch of new research titled The Business Case for Progressive Advertising, produced by the Unstereotype Alliance (an industry body convened by UN Women). So far, the full research hasn’t been released (just this two-pager), but the suggestion is that ‘progressive’ advertising leads to a 16.26% increase in long-term sales over one to two years, a 52% rise in pricing power, a 43% rise in purchase consideration, and a 29% rise in customer loyalty—all huge commercial claims that ought to have Chief Financial Officers rushing to the marketing department to demand they get on board.

It’s not yet possible to dig deep into the research, but two things seem immediately apparent.

First, ‘progressive’ is a broad term for the researchers to use given that they’re measuring the very specific issue of casting and storytelling in advertising (using the metrics above). Usually, ‘progressive’ has broader connotations. For example, a glance at Wikipedia offers this: “In the 21st century, progressives continue to favour public policy that they theorise will reduce or lessen the harmful effects of economic inequality as well as systemic discrimination such as institutional racism; to advocate for social safety nets and workers’ rights; and to oppose corporate influence on the democratic process.” It’s hard to see many ads doing that kind of progressivism, especially when it comes to the last point.

But even once you’ve defined the terms, there seems to be an obvious question of correlation vs causation. Does progressive advertising lead to commercial success, or does commercial success enable you to do more progressive advertising? Or does neither lead to the other, but they nevertheless correlate in some meaningful way? And where do cases like Bud Light fit in, where progressive advertising seemed to lead to a sustained business downturn? Maybe the research tackles all of that. For my part, I’ve written in The Road to Hell about how casting in advertising has indeed been a positive contributor to social change (in the days long before purpose), albeit one that can end up creating new stereotypes of its own. So I hope there’s something to the report, even if the broad framing of the title seems unhelpful.

7. The meaning of Musk

When it comes to Musk, it seems the most interesting aspect of the story is not about anything he said, but the fact he was there at all.

Following the exodus of big brands when Musk took over Twitter, and months after the ‘Go fuck yourself’ message that he broadcast from the stage in 2023, the simple fact of his presence at an advertising event speaks volumes. For all Musk’s talk of a ‘public square’, Twitter resembles Times Square at best, except with so many billboards that there’s hardly any square left. Everything about the way it operates—the boosting of loud voices, the amplifying of extreme opinions, the incentivising of news headlines to become provocative clickbait, the polarisation of politics that has resulted… all of it is driven by the ad-funded model, and that was the case long before Musk took over.

For a while, Musk’s anti-advertising stance appeared to hint at a new model, maybe driven by paid membership tiers or micropayments for content providers. But none of that has fully materialised, and Musk knows X needs advertisers more than advertisers need X. So here he is at Cannes, pitching to all the brands who want to ‘lead the conversation’ on everything from declining mental health to our dysfunctional politics—all while exacerbating those problems by their very presence on social media platforms, most of which now exist in service of advertisers more than users.

Someone should write a new Bonfire of the Vanities about it all.

8. The creativity never celebrated

Finally, a small flag-wave for the vast hinterland of creativity that never gets anywhere near Cannes. At least with non-profit D&AD, there’s the semi-realistic prospect of forking out somewhere in the low hundreds for a single entry, with discounts for smaller businesses. But in the case of Cannes, you’re often forking out more than some campaigns would cost in the first place: €1,075 for a poster, or €650 if you get in early. Look at the agencies who enter purpose campaigns across multiple categories and you’re looking at tens of thousands of pounds that might have been invested in the supposed purpose—all promoted by the ubiquitous case study videos that many entrants pay up to £20,000 to produce.

This is not a sign of judging being taken seriously. Imagine lawyers cuing up Coldplay when making the closing defence case for their client. Imagine contestants on Dragon’s Den making their pitches to inspirational piano music, with the ‘dragons’ faced with a barrage of Sigur Rós whenever they ask about the sales figures. Case study videos have become an industry in themselves—ads for ads. It’s ridiculous that juries are assessing work on this basis, and impossible for low-budget entrants to send in a poster and expect a fair hearing.

I don’t see what’s stopping Cannes or D&AD from making changes. No background music in case study videos. No news clips from a random news channel at 3am talking about your campaign. No montages of ecstatic tweets that no one can fact-check. The default should be to enter the work and nothing more. In the exceptional cases where it needs further explanation, either write it down or do an informational video—the work, the voiceover, nothing else. Let the best creative work compete on a level playing field, without the absurd PR spin to which judges are as susceptible as anyone else.

Of course, it won’t happen. But in the meantime, I look around at the brilliant creative work coming out of smaller design and branding studios, or specialist charity agencies, or in-house agencies (remember that nice ‘Lights, camera... action’ ad that ITV’s in-house agency did?)—and I wonder if there’s any international festival of creativity that recognises even a fraction of it.

Anyway, onwards. For anyone who doesn’t know, I have a book about all this. I’ve greatly appreciated all the feedback and invitations to talk about it in various places—I’ll be appearing on a few podcasts imminently, and you can find more links here:

Contagious interview
Marketing Week article
WARC article
WARC podcast
Creative Review article

First, the invitation
The Road to Hell is out (buy it here!) and I’m having a book launch in London. Entry is free but you need to book on Eventbrite. Open invite so pass on if you like—just need to have your name down to come in.

If you book and subsequently can’t make it, please unbook on Eventbrite or let me know so that I’m not talking to an empty hall.

Cover designer David Pearson will make a cameo appearance. (If you think you don’t know his work, you actually probably do.)

Mainly I’ll talk about purpose and how the book came about and merge seamlessly into a bit of Q&A.

Next, some social proof

Look at all these other people who’ve bought The Road to Hell!

Do you feel the subtle reinforcement of social proof, nudging you to make a decision on the basis of the opinions and decisions of your wider peer group? I hope so.

Now, a prod
If you’ve bought it, read it, skim-read it, or just vaguely liked these posts and reckon the book is probably decent, then it really helps to leave a rating and/or review on Amazon. This will push me further to the top of Jeff Bezos’s mind. And the better it does in his shop, the more likely independent shops are to order their own stock. I think that’s how it works.

K. Baxter has reviewed it and K. is right about everything.

Finally, a proper read

Given that I’m not always the kindest observer of Cannes, I greatly appreciate being invited to write on the WARC website, where I lay out some of the arguments of the book. I was also invited to talk on their podcast alongside purpose advocate Thomas Kolster—that should be out next week. Not quite a full-on ‘debate’, but a good conversation that goes places most advertising conversations avoid.

I have a few podcast appearances lined up in the coming weeks and hope to place a few more articles. If any readers out there want to point me in useful directions, I’m all ears. (Or 0.01% ears if we go by bodyweight.)

Many thanks for reading. For anyone new here, I’m a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, books about design, and occasional songs. The Road to Hell is out now.

If you’re a regular reader of this Substack, you’re part of the hallowed crowd who have helped me shape my thoughts over the years—thank you. This is the one part where I hit you with a ‘call to action’—ideally to buy the book, even more ideally to tell people about it, and/or review it on Amazon and elsewhere. If you’ve already pre-ordered, copies should land within days—just as soon as Jeff Bezos gets to the Post Office.

Here’s the introduction that I include in the book.

8 October 2008. The United Kingdom is hours away from a “breakdown of law and order” as the Labour chancellor Alistair Darling would later describe it. The Chief Executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group has stepped down and the government has stepped in with £50 billion of public money to save the banking sector.

25 July 2023. The Chief Executive of Coutts, part of the NatWest Group, formerly known as the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, has stepped down following a row about the withdrawal of banking services from former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage. The decision comes after an internal report detailing how Farage no longer aligned with the ‘values’ of the bank. The bank is still nearly 40% owned by the UK taxpayer.

10 November 2010. Parliament Square in London is packed with 50,000 students protesting the trebling of tuition fees by the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition government, despite an electoral pledge by the Liberal Democrats to oppose such an increase. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will later apologise for the u-turn, which heralds a decade of austerity politics.

14 March 2022. The former Head of Strategy for the 2010 Liberal Democrat election campaign, and Director of Policy from 2010 to 2015, takes on a newly created position at University of the Arts London. Her mission is to lead a rising generation of politically aware students who see ‘art as a form of activism’. Her title is Chief Social Purpose Officer.

17 September 2011. Wall Street is packed with protestors angry about economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics—a protest sparked by the editors of anti-consumerist publication Adbusters and publicised with an image of a dancer atop the iconic bull sculpture.

8 March 2017. The protestors have disappeared from Wall Street. In their place is a bronze statue of a girl facing down the bull. Fearless Girl is the brain child of ad agency McCann and asset management firm State Street, who will later be sued by their female employees for systemic pay inequality, and by the female sculptor for curtailing her creative expression. The idea is hailed by the global ad industry and becomes one of the most awarded campaigns in Cannes history.

This book is about what happened in between.

It’s about a single word: purpose.

Some readers will be unaware of the special meaning that gathered round this word in the marketing and business world over the course of the 2010s. Maybe you noticed how ads became more earnest over that period: more saving the world, fewer laughs or catchy jingles. Maybe you noticed business leaders becoming more vocal about social issues. If you’re in the UK, you might remember a culture war skirmish, in which Conservative minister Kemi Badenoch criticised the political stance of Ben and Jerry’s. If you’re in the US, you might recall the Battle of Bud Light or the cat-and-mouse fights between DeSantis and the Disney Corporation. Wherever you are in the world, you can’t fail to have noticed the rise of trillion-dollar companies, celebrity oligarchs and a widening wealth gap.

Other readers will be more attuned to the marketing and business world debate, and already tired of it. Those readers will be aware that the word ‘purpose’ has been at the centre of a tangled debate about the social role of businesses, and how that affects their marketing. Some may have arrived at the conclusion that purpose is all in the nuance. Sure, there are charlatans and hypocrites who talk a good purpose game to conceal what’s really happening. But it shouldn’t put us off the real thing: purpose is good when it’s real, bad when it isn’t. End of book.

That would be an easy book to write, and many have written it.

This is a harder book to write, and no one else has written it in the way I’d like. I’ll be making the case that purpose—even, or especially, when it’s ‘real’—is an incoherent way to think about marketing, business and business ethics.

The clue to my argument is in the title of the book.

It comes from an English proverb: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. And my argument is that, for all the (sometimes) good intentions behind purpose, it’s a fundamentally flawed concept that leads to bad marketing and worse outcomes for society.

I’ll make that argument by talking about what purpose is, where it came from, how it leads to worse marketing, and how it leads to a worse world. Then I’ll make a positive case for an alternative, based on a combination of creativity, cognitive empathy, and valuing the human over the corporate.

All this matters because, even if you are tired of the purpose debate, you can’t afford to be tired of what it’s fundamentally about: the role of business in society, and the political and ethical dimensions of what businesses and marketers do every day.

For over a decade, purpose has warped clear thinking around that question, to the point where things have happened that would have seemed inconceivable to the Wall Street protestors in 2011, the student protestors in 2010, and the public watching in 2008 as £50 billion of their money disappeared into the ether.

From there, we leap straight into definitions, which means leaping into the heart of the argument. 220 pages later, you’ll hopefully emerge blinking into the sunlight of a new era of creativity, cognitive empathy, humour, humility and humanity. Or you might write your own book about why I’m wrong.

I’m proud to have five fine readers chiming in with a back cover quote: Eliza Williams of Creative Review, who published purpose critiques before it was cool; Byron Sharp, a rare and unshakeable empiricist in adland; Paul Feldwick, whose erudite books on advertising are more vital than mine; Michael Johnson, the brilliant designer and writer about branding, whose work is often on behalf of actually purposeful non-profits; and Andrew Kelly, a reader of this Substack who does meaningful work at the Antarctic Science Foundation and shares the frustrations with corporate posturing.

I’m also proud to have a cover design by David Pearson, whose work is one of the best adverts for craft and creativity you’ll find.

I’m beginning a month of podcasting and other PR and will keep you posted on a launch event. In the meantime, here’s the call to action: please go buy my book.

Blackwells
Foyles
Barnes and Noble
Waterstones
Hatchards
Amazon UK
Amazon World

NB: for the time being, there’s no audio or Kindle edition—it’s an old-school print-only book. For the right fee, I’ll read it down the phone to you. (Or seriously, you could ask me to come and give a talk.)