Twenty years of Tambuli
What we learned about Purpose
Dr. Jerry Kliatchko
Dean, School of Media and Marketing
It began with a conviction.
In 2002, we, at what was then the UA&P School of Communication, now the School of Media and Marketing, started asking a question that the advertising industry was not yet asking loudly enough: Can marketing and advertising be a force for human good, not despite its commercial nature, but because of it? The seed of the Asia Pacific Tambuli Awards was planted in that question. Three years later, in 2005, we launched the inaugural edition of the show. From the very beginning, Tambuli stood on two legs: values and effectiveness. Not one or the other. Both. Always both.
We rooted that vision in a specific tradition, the Christian tradition, the Catholic understanding of the human person and the common good. We believed, and still believe, that authentic human values are not a constraint on business performance. They are at the core to it.
The language changed. The idea didn’t.
For several years, we called it values in advertising. Then industry caught on and called it advertising for good, then purpose. And when that word began to travel—carried forward by the global wave of corporate social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism, and “advertising for good”—people started telling us that Tambuli had arrived ahead of its time. They were right, though perhaps not in the way they meant. We hadn’t predicted a trend. We had simply named a truth earlier, and named it differently.
But here is where the divergence matters. When the industry caught the purpose wave, it largely rode it in one direction: toward advocacy advertising, cause campaigns, the good work done outside the mainstream brand portfolio. The special project. The pro-bono effort. The one brief per year that let a creative team feel something. That was not what Tambuli was ever about.
We were—and are—interested in purpose inside the mainstream campaign. The television commercial that moves product off shelves while also moving something in the viewer. The brand platform that is rooted so deeply in organizational belief that it cannot be separated from the company’s reason for existing. That is a fundamentally different ambition. And it demands a fundamentally different standard.
When purpose became a punchline
In the early 2020s, purpose took a beating. Business commentators, marketers, and CEOs began to push back—hard. The argument, stated plainly, was that purpose had become a distraction. That brands had wandered so far into the territory of social positioning and values signaling that they had forgotten to sell. Sales were suffering. Brand equity was eroding. And “purpose” was being blamed.
If that is what purpose had become in practice, then the critics were correct. A brand that chases cultural relevance at the expense of commercial clarity has lost the plot. A company that performs values externally while ignoring them internally has not embraced purpose—it has merely decorated itself with the word.
But here is what two decades of Tambuli have taught me: the problem was never with purpose itself. The problem was with a counterfeit version of it—purpose as campaign idea rather than organizational truth, purpose as trend adoption rather than conviction, purpose as category award rather than business imperative. Purpose as one-offs.
Authentic purpose was never the distraction. The imitation was.
Twenty years. Four lessons.
What have we actually learned? Let me offer four principles that have sharpened through the years of judging, debating, and awarding the work that comes through Tambuli.
First: Authenticity is non-negotiable, and authenticity means truth-telling. Purpose cannot be borrowed from a cultural moment or manufactured to meet a brief. It must emerge from what a brand genuinely is, what it genuinely stands for, and what it has the standing—earned over time—to say. Brands that chase purpose as a trend will always be found out, and usually at the worst moment.
Second: Purpose lives in the organization before it lives in the advertising. A brand’s values are only credible when they are lived in every dimension of corporate life—in how the company treats its employees, makes its products, engages its communities, governs itself. When purpose exists only in the communications function, it is not purpose. It is messaging. It misses the point. The best work we have recognized at Tambuli over the years has always pointed back to companies that meant it—companies where the marketing was the last expression of something already true.
Third: Purpose scales. When it is authentic and embedded in the organization, purpose has the capacity to move beyond a brand’s immediate community and speak to something larger in society. This is not a mandate to always aim for the grand societal statement—but it is an invitation to understand that truly powerful brand ideas are not merely transactional. They resonate outward. They travel. They accumulate meaning over time. They change what is considered normal.
Fourth—and perhaps the most important: Purpose does not always have to save the planet. This is the lesson that the industry can understand and appreciate better. Purpose is not synonymous with always being profound. A product that does what it promises—reliably, beautifully, accessibly—is already doing something purposeful. It is improving someone’s quality of life. It is keeping a commitment. That is not a small thing. Some of the most purposeful communication does not announce itself as such. It simply tells the truth about a product that works, in a way that connects with what actually matters to people.
Not every brand needs to save the world. Every brand needs to serve its people well, and say so honestly.
Why this still matters
Twenty years is long enough to watch ideas rise and fall and rise again. The APAC Tambuli Awards were built on the premise that business and human good are not at odds—that business conducted with integrity and empathy is not a compromise between making money and doing right, but a more complete expression of both.
That premise has not aged. It has only become more urgent.
The question the industry is asking today—what is marketing for?—is the same question we asked in 2002. The answer, then as now, is both simpler and more demanding than any trend cycle will admit. Marketing is for people. When it serves them with honesty, with craft, and with genuine care—it also serves the business. That is not idealism. That is the whole point of Tambuli. And we are just getting started.