The great majority of consumers (86 percent) state that authenticity is an important factor when deciding what brands to support (Stackla Report). This number is even higher among millennials. Since people place more trust in humans than in brands, influencer marketing has been, and still is, trending up. We might be blind when it comes to ads. On the other hand, authentic content, generated voluntarily by fellow customers, catches our eyes easily.

In particular, I feel denoting the notion of “composing an ad campaign to inspire” as obsolete vs. “partnering with our customers” to be overstating the democratization of consumer input within the process at the expense of clever leadership of thought from the ad industry standpoint.

There is no question that in our era customers drive so much more of the conversation than previously, and rightly so. However, I believe the gulf between grasping a current cultural zeitgeist and leading a genuine inspirational movement is not only alive, well, and needed, but is precisely what we are tasked at doing.

The Colin Kaepernik/Nike campaign is just the latest example. Nike seized upon a movement within the US culture and then shepherded and bridged those emotional connection nodes in a colloid of copy, design, and direction which placed it squarely in the leadership role. By reaching into the ethos of sentiment in our culture and seizing upon what was generally felt, they absolutely struck an inspirational chord by making us proud of what are own individual beliefs may be and, in a larger context, what that means splayed out on a mass scale.

I see it less as “we know best because we are the brand” inso much as it arises as “Here is how we see the world, because there are right and wrong ways of approaching life. We are confident that you see it the same way, come join us.”