Meaning has no department

As humans, meaning is everything. What am I working for. What does my life add up to. What will I leave behind. Meaning is the currency we spend our life pursuing. It was just a matter of time before brands began recognizing its power to move us.

For brands, it’s urgent for a specific reason: the feed now looks like those images of the beach on which plastic and clothing washed up in huge piles. Our digital world is that beach. Content, advertising, more content, more AI-slop. We say attention is scarce because of this overload, but I believe it’s scarce because we are not giving anyone anything real to care about. We are not creating anything meaningful, or at least not enough of it.

Only we are to blame.

We let the performance era create piles and piles of content clothes and flooded the internet with it. I remember the beginning of cookies and targeted ads and remember thinking, this is awful (as a consumer). And now we’re repeating this behavior in the AI era.

Businesses know this. And I applaud the rising importance of Meaning. The fix is going to be tricky because Meaning moves. It means something different to each person, and something different again next year. You can’t build a strategy on a moving target.

Or can you?

Meaning doesn’t need to hold still. It just needs a more complete approach.

Right now, brand teams are tasked with creating meaning. But real meaning gets made the way any organizing principle gets made: named, then operationalized, then defended internally. Brand can name it, but commercial has to prove it’s worth paying for and operations has to make it true. Leave any one of the three out and you get a claim, not a center of gravity.

We’re watching meaning become the next strategy hype cycle. And while I do agree that strategy has never mattered more than it does right now for answering this, I also see other departments' responsibilities, across the entire business, for contributing to that answer. Or else it’s just very good marketing; and it might as well wash up on our feed’s content beach.