Do you remember the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad? Released on April 4, 2017, the ad showed her joining a protest in which young people held up placards saying ‘Love’ and ‘Join the conversation’. Breaking off from a glamorous photo shoot, Kendall Jenner joins the marchers and hands an ice-cold can of Pepsi to a stern-faced cop, who breaks into a smile as the crowd cheers.

It’s possible you missed the ad as it was pulled the next day, after a global outcry over its adoption of a BLM aesthetic to sell a soft drink.

It’s partly what prompted me to write my first article about purpose. Other examples included McDonald’s telling the story of a boy bonding with his dead father over a shared love of filet o’ fish, Heineken getting culture war opponents together over a product shot, Dove introducing a range of curly-haired emojis and packaging that mimicked different body shapes, and Cannes Lions celebrating the I Sea app that claimed to help rescue refugees lost at sea, but turned out to be a paper-thin ‘proof of concept’.

Back then, it felt like we must have reached a tipping point, where brands would finally abandon the purpose doctrine that had taken hold after the 2008 crash, and was pushing them to strain ever harder to create a connection between their product and a higher social cause. But the response from business and adland was to double down.