Maybe it was part of a pending mid-life crisis, but when I was approaching my 40s I began to feel the need to find a way out of the industry I'd worked in for the previous fifteen or so years, the only industry I'd ever properly worked in, which was advertising. It had had its moments. I got to go to work in jeans and a T-shirt, write lines people laughed at and fleetingly admired me for, put my feet on my desk and honestly tell people I was working, and sit around eating crap on film sets. There's a lot to be said for having fun at work, and you should always have some, but even having a lot of it is not going to stop you from feeling a little empty.
I have a theory about why the advertising industry is so gaga about awards. (It's odd, isn't it? Architects don't award themselves, and certainly don't cough up obscene amounts of money to pat themselves on their backs, even though their work is far more lasting and, arguably, more important.) My theory is that advertising people know, deep down, that their work is seldom noble, that for the most part it makes no important contribution to society's betterment, that if anything it actually often does harm. So, to feel better about itself, the industry awards itself. In a way, awards are to advertising what sports cars are to men with small penises.
It may not be coincidental that this creeping awareness happened when my children were born. You watch nurses taking care of your baby and, later, teachers guiding and encouraging them, and you think, "that is important work". Helping to sell more booze or shoes or unsecured loans, not so much.
The surprising thing was that when I did manage to leave the industry, it suddenly became apparent how many people - people who were highly respected and were leading agencies and who I assumed loved everything about advertising - felt the same way, and either wanted to do or were doing something else.
But the point isn't to ad-bash. It's to highlight the need that people have to do something they find meaningful, to direct their energy toward things they feel are significant, to spend some of their time feeding needs higher up Maslow's hierarchy. And since we spend most of our waking hours in our jobs, it makes sense that we try to do it at work.
You don't have to change jobs or industries to do it. Admirably, one ad agency I know commits to doing more "work with purpose". And it's not a business sacrifice or compromise - they seem to be doing rather well. The ironic payoff of doing work that is about more than just selling stuff is that you often end up selling more stuff. Purposeful or responsible brands grow twice as fast as others and can charge almost 60% more, according to the Boston Consulting Group. Why? Because it isn't just employees who want to feel good about what they do; customers increasingly want to feel good about what they buy. Especially, encouragingly, customers who in a few years will be running and shaping the world.
More than 80% of millennials say it's a priority to make the world a better place, believe that businesses should place as much emphasis on society's interests as on their own, and that business has as much potential as government to meet society's challenges.
This gives me hope. Perhaps when my children's generation is in charge it'll be so commonplace for businesses to do more than just business that we won't even think it worth writing about. Perhaps the tide is turning in such a big way for commerce that there's no going back.
And perhaps it's even happening in advertising, and advertising award shows, where "good" work isn't only about a clever idea anymore, but about actually doing good, and making better. Who knows? If things keep going the way they are, my kids may end up in the industry, actually doing work with purpose.