The best campaigns don’t just build brands. They build culture
Opinion
Strong campaigns give people an anchor and a mission to rally around, especially across teams that may not work closely together, writes NABS’ marketing director.
There’s a particular moment in most good campaigns when the work stops being abstract – a deck, a launch plan or a slightly terrifying spreadsheet. It becomes something people can gather around.
The language begins showing up in meetings. Someone from outside the marketing team asks you how they can get involved. You hear people repeating the idea back to you, not because they’ve been briefed to, but because it has given shape to something they already believed.
At this moment, a campaign starts to do more than communicate: it becomes a carrier for culture.
Most marketers rightly think about campaigns in terms of audiences, awareness and outcomes. We need to know who we’re speaking to, what we want them to understand, and what action we hope they’ll take. But the best campaigns don’t just speak outwards; they also speak inwards.
Every campaign sends a message to employees about what the organisation values, what it wants to celebrate, and where it is prepared to invest time, money and attention. The question therefore isn’t whether a campaign shapes culture. It’s whether leaders are being intentional about the culture a campaign is shaping.
This feels especially important now. Our industry is moving at a pace that can feel exhilarating on a good day and exhausting on a bad one. AI, restructures, economic pressure, changing expectations of work – people are being asked to adapt constantly.
At NABS, we believe that our industry needs to collectively come together to stay ahead, rather than struggling to respond in isolated pockets.
The need is real: NABS’ number one reason for calls continues to be mental wellness support, and the Advertising Association’s All In 2025 census found that a third of industry professionals are suffering with stress or anxiety.
That context matters because culture is not a nice extra – it’s how people make sense of change. It’s how people decide whether they feel safe enough to contribute, resilient enough to keep going and connected enough to care. And campaigns can help.
External campaigning and internal culture are often treated as separate disciplines. One sits with marketing, brand, comms and fundraising, the other sits somewhere between leadership, people teams and the unspoken “way we do things round here”, which is a phrase usually said when everyone realises nobody has defined it.
In reality, the two are deeply connected. A successful campaign doesn’t just change what people think about your organisation; it can change how your people feel about being part of it.
When a campaign aligns with organisational values, it becomes more than a marketing initiative; it becomes a cultural anchor. It gives teams a shared story in which your values and purpose are brought to life.
The Yay List
At NABS, The Yay List was created to celebrate the companies powering our purpose and to build a community of generous donors that our industry wants to be part of. It is, of course, a fundraising campaign; we need more people and companies from across advertising, media and marketing to support NABS to keep meeting demand for our services. NABS has supported over 25,000 people in the last five years. While demand has become more complex, fundraising has not kept pace in the same way.
But The Yay List is also something else: a celebration of generosity, community and people supporting one another. It recognises the organisations standing tall for the industry by donating to NABS. In 2025, 113 companies were recognised for powering NABS’ purpose.
That matters externally because it shows the wider industry who is stepping up, and it matters internally because it reminds our own teams what we are here to do.
Every supporter story, every fundraiser, every company recognised through the campaign contributes to a narrative about what matters to this industry and who is helping to make it a healthier, more human place to work.
That narrative reinforces internally that we are part of a community that values kindness, mutual support and shared responsibility. It also gives people energy. When our teams see the industry in our corner, it helps us keep going as we stay in theirs.
That is one of the halo effects of a strong campaign. It creates shared identity. It gives people an anchor and a mission to rally around, especially across teams that may not work closely together. When done well, it can model the behaviours you need more of: collaboration, clarity, generosity, pride, and momentum.
This only works if the campaign is credible. If the external message is at odds with the internal experience, people will spot it faster than you can say “living our values”. A campaign about mental wellness in a culture of burnout will ring hollow.
A campaign about inclusion that only features the usual voices will tell its own story, just not the one you intended.
A useful test is to ask:
- What behaviour does this campaign celebrate?
- What message does it send to our own people?
- Does it reinforce the culture we are trying to build, or expose a gap we need to address?
- Will employees feel proud to be associated with it?
- Does it give people a clear role to play?
- Are we prepared to live the message internally, not just publish it externally?
These are culturally strategic questions. When you choose to shine a light on something, you are telling people it matters. Be deliberate about that choice.
At NABS, we believe our industry has a bright future ahead, but we need to support our people to get there. That means more of us coming together, more of us playing our part, and more companies recognising that supporting NABS also supports their teams and the wider industry they rely on.
If your organisation wants to help the industry stay ahead by supporting the people who power it, now is a good moment to get involved with NABS.
Lou Thompson is marketing director at NABS.