Purpose: The Future of Advertising

There likely weren’t many well-established marketing firms that read Danielle Sacks’s recent article in Fast Company, "The Future of Advertising: Mayhem on Madison Avenue," that felt vindicated. Yet, rather than abdicating our four hundred thousand year-old upright posture and skulking around on ancestral all-fours like the ad execs in the article, we stood erect, chests out, chins up, fists in the air.

BrightHouse has been a proponent of reaching individuals through meaningful and direct methods versus mass media for nearly two decades. Hardly adversarial with advertising agencies, we frequently partner with and help them become believers in our long-standing conviction, “If you’re paying for the media, you have the wrong message.” Not as sexy as Fast Company’s quotation from Jon Bond, but equal in character, "Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it."

The media landscape will continue to change and become increasingly complex as technology progresses at its mind-warping speed. But there is a constant, a Rosetta Stone that we use with clients from Bounty to Secret to Carlsberg, that helps determine where to be, when, how and with whom.

It’s called purpose, or as we named it twelve years ago, the Master Idea. If your company or client has an authentic purpose, one that’s relevant to your ethos, culture and values, then you have a lens, magic goggles, through which to view this daunting digital landscape—and everything else, for that matter, from innovation to HR. This perspective helps ground you, like a foot on the floor during a bad case of the bed spins. It will help you create, edit and make decisions in real time because you’ll know exactly why you’re here. And if you know your why, you can deal with any what, who, where or when.

The other piece of good news is on the content for this revolution — movies didn’t replace theater, the Kindle didn’t replace books. Content that feeds the soul—that helps people become part of something bigger than themselves, purpose-inspired content, will always be craved. So, if your company or client has an authentic purpose, then no matter whether the content is crowd-sourced, for a media event, a motion picture or a picture on a package, it will be guided by this authentic purpose that meets a need in the world.

Human truths, not taglines, purposes that help improve not just public perception, but also public life—these are the things the marketing world will need to adapt to if it wants to stand tall and keep evolving.

Cathy Carlisi is leader of the BrightHouse creative engine. Cathy has worked for agencies such as Carmichael Lynch and Fallon in Minneapolis, as well as for several agencies in Atlanta, including Babbit and Reiman. Cathy’s work has appeared in national and international award shows such as The One Show, Communication Arts, The New York Art Directors Annual, Graphis Advertising Annual, Print Regional Design Annual and the Addys—including Best of Show. She has worked for world-class organizations such as CNN, Delta Air Lines, Rollerblade, Schwinn, Energizer, The Cartoon Network, Graco, Children's Defense Fund, Georgia-Pacific, and Coca-Cola. She is also a published poet and graduate of The University of the South—Sewanee, where she received Magna Cum Laude/Phi Beta Kappa distinction.