Your Best Campaign is a Liability.
We just spent five years pretending that "purpose" was the future. Now I guess we should forget that sentiment.
Two years ago every brief was asking me to find the cultural tension. Take a stand. Make the brand feel like it believed in something.
Purpose-driven work won pitches. It won awards. It gave CMOs something to talk about. I mean, in many ways, it gave me purpose. I built many campaigns around representation, around equity, around the idea that a brand’s values were a competitive advantage. In 2021, I worked on the team that launched Meta’s We The Culture initiative on Instagram and Facebook, which showed the creative process of Black creatives working in different mediums. I don’t think that brief would exist in 2026. (And looking back, maybe that’s for the best. Maybe co-opting Black culture wasn't something Meta should have ever been dabbling in. Also, was I the right fit to lead a project dedicated to celebrating Black voices? So many after the fact reflections on that one.)
But other brands are following Meta’s path. Scrubbing their website of initiatives, pulling impact case studies, and letting the commitments they made expire. Public DEI disclosure within Fortune 500 companies dropped 65% this year. More.
You're supposed to act like those commitments were never made.
The creative directors who staffed up purpose-focused teams in 2021 are dissolving them in 2026. The CMOs who stood on stages at Cannes talking about "brand bravery" are now in boardrooms talking about "focus" and "core competency" and whatever other corporate speak words mean we don't do that anymore. I don’t think they ever believed it. They believed the market believed it.
Nobody in leadership will say this out loud: the retreat isn't strategic. It's cowardice. Brands aren't pulling back because purpose didn't work. Some of those campaigns drove real results. Real audience growth. Real cultural relevance. (I can say that for a fact. I have the reporting.)
But that's the new brief: Make something that can't offend anyone. Make something that doesn't say anything. Make something that, if someone screenshotted it and posted it with a furious caption, would be so bland that the fury would have nowhere to go.
You can build a career on that kind of work. People do. But let's not pretend it's creative direction. It's risk management and a boring as fuck mood board.
If your portfolio includes purposeful work, keep it. Meta is staying up on my portfolio (even though most of the campaign is now stripped from the internet). Right now, the industry will not reward you for purpose-first work. But I think you keep it in. Because you made something that meant something to someone, and the fact that a holding company got skittish doesn't actually matter. The work can be real/good, even if the commitment wasn't.
The industry will find its next big idea about what brands should stand for. It always does. And when it does, it will need people who know how to make that work.
Xx, Caitlin.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.
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