What Character Taught Me About Advertising
About trade wars, culture wars & purpose marketing 2.0
I can’t remember a time in my life when the truth was more in doubt than now.
Trump is going full force; deconstructing democracy, altering history and reshaping reality.
AI is tearing through industries on a trillion-dollar bet, flooding us with spam, slop and sycophantic psychosis.
The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.
I’m scared sh*tless… but change is always a test of character.
In times of turmoil, it can be tempting to play it safe with marketing and branding.
Some of the biggest companies on the planet are being pressured into self-censorship by the orange guy in the White House.
The first wave of AI-generated advertising has left online consumers cynically numb to its promises.
With so much uncertainty, brands don’t know what they should or shouldn’t say… and with 95% of AI pilot projects failing to scale, many don’t know how to say it.
Anxious paralysis makes marketing homogeneous.
ChatGPT makes it worse.
And everybody loses.
Fortunately, there’s an antidote.
Spoiler: It’s character.
When everyone is ducking in fear and drowning in sameness, you can stand out simply by having a backbone and standing up for something.
Even if I’m scared sh*tless, I know that much.
Brave brands have a unique opportunity to earn attention by understanding their purpose.
Except, purpose marketing has been abused in fiascos so spectacular that the concept has almost lost its meaning.
We need a new map for brand courage.
In this essay, I dissect the buzzwords, dismantle the traps of virtue-signaling, and offer a framework for purpose marketing 2.0 — what I call Character Branding — to help brands be fearless by knowing themselves.
The brand strategy that moved Oatly from a $20M company to a $200M company — and their only strategic document 2012-17, according to John Schoolcraft in this talk.
Storytelling, Authenticity & Other Buzzwords
20 years ago, when I was still in college, storytelling was the hottest buzzword in marketing.
I rolled my eyes because I was a literature major, wanted to be a novelist, damn sure I was never going to work in advertising… and in my youthful arrogance, because it seemed kinda basic.
Other than cave paintings, storytelling is the oldest and most fundamental of the arts.
Hell, storytelling was born the moment our species gained consciousness and began telling stories to itself.
Why the hype?
By the time I graduated and had given up on my ideals, authenticity had replaced storytelling as the hottest buzzword in marketing — possibly because storytelling got reduced to lying.
The 00s had plenty of creative, story-driven campaigns flowing through the plentiful channels of the still-young internet… but suddenly people had the power to call bullsh*t.
In a way, the internet made advertising honest.
Once consumers could get together in online forums and discuss their experiences, lying was no longer a good story.
Now, the audience could see behind the scenes and analyze the act.
Suddenly, brands had to tell the truth, and people were demanding not only authentic stories but authentic actions.
Purpose & Back Again
The pressure from empowered digital consumers resulted in a foundational shift in brand marketing.
Storytelling became storydoing, and we got purpose marketing as the great trend of the 2010s.
In this brave new world, brands were expected to have a reason to exist — other than just making money.
Purpose marketing was baptized by Jim Stengel in his book Grow (2011), evangelized by YouTube-friendly Simon Sinek, and copied by just about every guru on LinkedIn.
When done right, it worked wonders and went viral.
Brands like Patagonia and Nike led the way with a bold new kind of activist advertising.
But many followed with less success.
Creative ad-people loooved it because it gave us a chance to come up with big, emotional save-the-world ideas.
Consumers hated it because it looked like more of the same half-assed virtue-signaling.
These days, purpose has gone from trend to cautionary tale, and authenticity has made it back as the industry’s most obnoxiously obvious buzzword.
I guess the collective memory of marketers isn’t very good.
Brand purpose was supposed to be earned and cultivated from the inside out — but instead, it became a cheap way to jump on trends until the very word had been reduced to the perverted opposite of its intention.
And now brands are trying to be authentic… again.
Why is it so hard to learn from history?
Nothing New to See Here
Trends and buzzwords change all the time, but the human brain doesn’t.
90% of Gen-Zers still want brands to have purpose beyond profit, according to Dentsu.
As a species, we’re emotional animals and can’t distinguish between an economic and an evolutionary organism.
Logically, we know that brand personas are anthropomorphic fiction, but emotionally we experience them all the same.
We expect the actors in our lives — whether they’re humans, companies, or now AI agents — to act with reliability and integrity.
Same sh*t, different day.
Whatever the latest buzzword is by the time you read this, human beings still have the same basic needs for consistency and trust.
People will always want brands to do as they say and say as they do.
And pretty soon, AI might help them.
Prediction: AI will make Purpose Perform
While we’re still waiting for the bubble to deliver or burst, AI search is changing the way consumers interact with brands — both online and in-store — giving them new ways to research which brands fit their needs and ideals.
Personally, I try to avoid buying Nestlé because I disagree with their politics… but they own so many sub-brands, it’s damn near impossible to keep track of.
Now, I can make my AI shopping list to tell me.
The political consumer is rare because it’s hard work to keep up with all the shady sh*t most companies do behind the scenes. It takes diligence and discipline, and people usually forget after a while.
But what happens when AI can do it for them?
When consumers get comfortable with agentic AI, any discrepancy between brand truth and fiction may be researched and analyzed by a super-assistant in a matter of seconds.
For the time being, deceptive marketers can find clever hacks to exploit and flood AI SEO — but it’s low-hanging fruit, rotten the moment an update changes the rules.
AI has the potential to be the most advanced spam filter and ad-blocker ever.
Soon enough, the masses will catch up to marketing.
History repeats itself, consumers push back, and brands are exposed in new ways.
Advertising in the age of AI will be the sum of all brand actions.
If there ever was a time for holistic, purpose-driven marketing, it’s now.
We just need to learn from our mistakes.
Case Study: What Not to Do on Purpose
The most (in)famously tone-deaf example of misunderstood purpose marketing must be Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner commercial from 2017.
I mean… just look at it.
While half the U.S. was protesting police violence, Pepsi figured it could capture some zeitgeist with an expensive film and a popular influencer, famous for her ultra-wealthy privilege, symbolically suggesting that the solution to police violence is somehow soda.
With an impressive lack of awareness and no skin in the game, Pepsi stumbled into a cultural arena where they hadn’t earned the right to fight — and got their ass kicked.
The result was the most widely panned and mercilessly mocked commercial in recent memory.
Conservatives hated it for being woke, liberals hated it for being parasitical, and everyone else thought it was delusional.
A slightly more elegant example of failed purpose is Gillette’s The Best A Man Can Be from 2019.
For the first time in company history, Gillette tweaked its iconic slogan from “The Best a Man Can Get” to “The Best a Man Can Be” in a campaign film condemning violence against women.
It was a sympathetic message — but an emotionally shallow shift for a brand that had never seemed to care about the women its advertising objectified.
Well-meaning as it may have been, it was out of character and got panned for it.
Right-wingers thought it was woke, left-wingers thought it was unearned.
I actually thought the idea was pretty good… but I’m biased by being a copywriter and knowing how hard it is to make heritage brands change their assets. I wildly overestimate the symbolic value of a modified tagline.
So did Gillette. To them, changing the historic slogan was a big deal — but to consumers, it was just words. Gillette could have put weight behind them but didn’t.
Faced with the early gusts of a sh*t storm, they chickened out and cancelled the campaign almost immediately. — only proving their lack of conviction.
4 lessons
Find out how the audience really sees you — The “Curse of Knowledge” in organizations is the theory explaining why in-house marketing will (sooner or later) go blind to how everyone else sees the brand. Without a reality check from outside voices, internal mythologies can produce wildly mismatched messaging.
Earn the right to join the fight — David Ogilvy said that truth and cultural tension are the most valuable elements in advertising. He was right, but beware! Entering a culturally charged conversation without history or genuine stakes is just opportunistic. Pepsi and Gillette tried to borrow relevance from social movements they hadn’t invested in, and got called out. “Cultural tension” is everywhere these days, but “truth” is only in the earned arenas where the brand has history.
Be prepared to play “chicken” — Conviction matters. Backing down at the first sign of a backlash sends a clear message that the stance was just a theatre. Audiences reward commitment and punish retreat.
Stay in character — Brand identity is not the logo. It’s the accumulated narrative of actions; the accrued record of brand choices and its manifestation in the collective consumer consciousness. If the messaging doesn’t match, it creates cognitive dissonance and erodes trust. Know who you are, and act like it.
Case Study: How Nike Won on Purpose
In 2018, Nike and Colin Kaepernick (the NFL quarterback who was blacklisted and lost his career for kneeling against police violence) launched the campaign that made purpose marketing explode.
Dream Crazy caused outrage and made headlines — and then became Nike’s most successful ad campaign ever.
The commercial urged athletes to follow their dreams and “believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”… with a controversial twist; it was voiced by someone who had done just that.
The message itself wasn’t unusual for Nike, whose mission statement had been the same since 1977: We exist to inspire athletes everywhere to achieve their goals.
The narrative had been cultivated for years. In many ways, Dream Crazy was just a more elaborate version of the brand ethos… Except when narrated by Kaepernick, the words took on double meaning and triggered the political right.
MAGA was outraged — but had a hard time explaining why.
After all, they couldn’t disagree with the core message. Belief and sacrifice? That’s a story old as the bible. Hell, it is the bible!
It would have made a good tagline for Passion of the Christ 2: Full Metal Rapture.
That’s what triggered MAGA — their own beliefs quoted back to them by someone they’d rather see silenced.
First, the backlash hit: The trolls burned their shoes, Nike’s stock dipped, and boycotts threatened.
But Nike didn’t blink.
They understood that earned attention is a calculated game of chicken.
It took a few weeks — commitment takes time — but what started as a sh*t storm became a love storm.
By the end of the year, the initial stock dip (3% after the commercial first aired) had turned into 36% growth.
MAGA couldn’t articulate their hatred without revealing their hypocrisy. And even the most “radical leftist” marketing critics — like myself — couldn’t find any evidence of virtue-signaling.
Every word, every syllable, every detail was 100% on-brand.
As a copywriter, I’m forever in awe of the craftsmanship and could go on and on about it — in fact, I already did in another essay — but if you only take away one thing from my obsession with this commercial, let it be this:
It was the undeniable expression of brand character that made Dream Crazy insanely good.
Introducing: Character Branding™
Character Branding is a strategic tool rooted in Jungian archetypes with elements from dramaturgic analysis and game theory.
Or at least it’s going to be… once I develop it further.
Because really, Character Branding is what I call the still-WIP framework that has spawned from my brain after half a life of trying to figure out “authentic” storytelling.
The premise is simple:
The market is a stage, all brands play a role, and the whole world is watching.
Brands are dynamic characters in global stories, where credibility is earned by balancing identity, actions, stakes and perception.
The actors who align words and actions can be identified and trusted by the audience — maybe even as heroes — but the actors who can’t, end up faceless at best and villains at worst.
The more well-defined the brand character is, the better it can earn attention — by deserving attention.
By truly understanding the brand character, marketers can say and do things that the competitors couldn’t dream of.
I call it Character Branding because the word holds poetic double-meaning.
Character is both the role performed onstage for the audience to witness — and it’s who you are when no one’s watching.
It’s both theatre and integrity, both act and authenticity.
Online consumers are ever-watching (and ever-gossiping), and brands are under constant scrutiny.
Actions are advertising.
There is no more “below-the-line marketing” because every gesture and every word is a potential PR move… or disaster.
Every detail is an expression of character — and only with a holistic model can brands align them.
Character Framework v. 0.9
Character is the behavioral operating system that guides the brand by aligning identity, stakes, actions and perception.
1. Identity (Who the brand is)
Core Traits: ethos, values, mission
Persona: Brand archetype, e.g Jungian (Hero, Rebel, Caregiver, etc.)
Role: The persona in market context; the role it plays in public discourse
Key question: Is business and brand motivation aligned?
2. Conflict & Stakes (Challenges taken and given)
External pressures: market competition, regulation, social expectations
Internal pressures: organizational trade-offs, risk tolerance, culture
Earned arenas: where the fight happens — in the domains and conversations where the brand has history
Key question: Where does the brand character get tested? What’s the risk?
3. Actions (What the brand does)
What are the non-negotiables? Without limits, no character
Identify actions that can reflect identity traits consistently
Rate strategic decisions after storytelling potential — a small financial gain can still be a big PR opportunity
Key question: Do the brand’s actions reinforce or contradict its identity?
4. Audience Perception (How the world sees it)
It’s an attention economy, and you're only perceived as interesting if you can do something others can’t
Behavioral signals: customer loyalty, advocacy, engagement metrics
Explore value in the character extremities — make hardcore fans say “of course they did” and make outsiders say “oh no, they didn’t!”
Key question: Does the audience see authenticity or virtue-signaling?
Pressure Test (What to look out for)
Consequence test: Does it cost us anything other than money? If not, it’s cheap.
Time test: Would we have done this before it trended?
Arena fit: Is this our fight, or are we play-acting in someone else’s?
Red-line check: Are we crossing our own lines to make this happen?
Audience contract: Does the audience see our actions as natural expressions of character? Or have we Frankensteined the brand image?
Conclusion: Something Worth Fighting For
As I’m writing this, the EU has just agreed to 15% tariffs with Trump.
It brings a false sense of stability to the markets, but the trade war is far from over.
The hegemonic pressure on businesses to adapt to Trump’s world order is clear: fall in line, give up DEI, and adopt “America-friendly messaging”.
Meta, Google, and Amazon have all cancelled their diversity programs.
Media platforms pay bribes frivolous settlements or buy Trump Coin. CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert, and Apple gifted Trump a gold trophy to appease him.
Hell, by the time you read this, we can probably add another dozen to the list of megacorps that have kneeled to the spray-tanned emperor.
For the biggest companies on the planet, it’s a choice between two evils.
For the rest of us, it’s a test of character.
When the big global players buckle under pressure, smaller brands can take a stand, get attention, and win in local markets.
And better yet, they can do it in the arenas where it’s actually earned.
When purpose marketing was at its height, it was employed by brands that knew their role in consumer lives and public conversation.
And when it failed, it was because brands tried to score unearned points in other people’s struggles.
Now, companies have their own fights to face.
With the world at trade war, the battle is being fought in the backyard of every business.
When the free markets are no longer free, transparency and integrity become acts of resistance.
Don’t be scared shitless.
Show some character.
