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Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Carol Cone:
Welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast where we explore the power of purpose to drive business and personal growth and have deep societal and environmental impacts. I'm your host, Carol Cone.
I'm so excited about the discussion I'm going to have today because when I started doing this work in the '80s, it was really lonely. I had the vision because I grew up in the '60s and the '70s, very turbulent times for racial justice and the Vietnam War. That companies and brands could stand for something more than just features and benefits. And we did a lot of work and we did a lot of research, but it took over 20 years for some major voices to join into this important chorus.
Well, one of those voices, Thomas Kolster, is joining me today. Thomas has been called a climate change agent by Forbes and a pioneer of impact advertising by Shots Magazine. He's also become one of the industry's most provocative voices through his work at Goodvertising. It's a brand studio operating at the intersection of brand sustainability and behavior change. He's been challenging leaders to think differently about what doing good really means.
His mission to help brands getting back to being loved, not by shouting louder about their values, but by asking a more human question. Who can you help people become? How can a brand, how can a company enable its, I'll say, employees and its consumers to do more? Thomas argues that in today's volatile Polaroid and AI-driven world, people are desperate for meaning. I'll second that. And that authentic brands have the power and responsibility to supply it. And when they do it, they will be rewarded in sales, in reputation, in just being loved as he stated.
Through books he has written like Goodvertising and the Hero Trap, he's called out the performative side of purpose and urged companies to trade heroism for humility, to stop trying to save the world, and instead, coach people, guide people to change it. In our conversation, we'll explore how brands can regain trust, what bravery really looks like in an age of uncertainty, and whether purpose itself is evolving or finally being lived. Thomas, welcome to Purpose 360. This is such an important conversation, so let's get started.
Thomas Kolster:
You already gave away a few of my gray hairs, but that's okay, Carol.
Carol Cone:
So I love that when you go to Thomas' website, and it's the Goodvertising Agency. Then here's the tagline, "catalysts for positive change, established in 2010." And I love this, "before goodvertising was even the cool thing to do." So I'd love to start with I know there's a backstory about what was happening in the world that got you to really become the counter to advertising. But I want to know what growing up, what was the influence from your parents or your childhood, that created at least the fertile territory for you ultimately to lean in this direction?
Thomas Kolster:
It's such a good question and I think it's something I only realized much later in my life, that might have been the fertile ground for where I ended up. One of the moment where I got to reflect was in fact that my dad, a couple of years ago, had a bit of an accident. When I thought that I wouldn't get to be with him much longer and I wrote him a long letter, and part of that letter was reflecting back on my past. I grew up on a small, small island in the middle of the Baltic Sea called Bornholm, and I grew up with fisherman and farmers.
So in my early school years, what happened was in fact that the Baltic Sea, which felt that it was from one day to the next, that there was no more fish. So basically, the whole fishing industry on the island collapsed. The kids who in my class were the cool kids who had waterbeds with a radio built in, and might even some of them have had a helicopter which was fantasy land for me, just had to move out from the next day, the banks collapsed, et cetera. So I think that was my first environmental wake up call, which I didn't really think about at all when I wrote Goodvertising. It's not mentioned.
So our home, television wasn't allowed. We would sit around the dinner table and we would talk. So yeah, so just as an adult looking back at that, I think that was actually quite foundational. And plus, my parent's reaction when I, at the age of 21, dropped out of university and got my first job as a copywriter at an ad agency, they were like, "Hell, no."
Carol Cone:
Hell, no. No.
Thomas Kolster:
"Haven't we brought you up with good values? And now you go to this evil capitalist propaganda machine." So I think there's a lot to unpack there already.
Carol Cone:
Okay, there is. So let's go to your more current story. So it was 2009, and there was the COP meeting I believe in Copenhagen, and you had an epiphany. What was that epiphany?
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah, it was strange because I, probably as a Dane and I probably over-value the meaning of that summit. It's one of many. But I felt there was an optimism at that point, and again, I say that as someone who lived in Copenhagen at the time. I think also at that time, it did seem like our elected leaders did care about those types of summits. So they all flew in, the Barack Obama's, and Tony Blair's, [inaudible 00:08:51] when she was still around. So when nothing came out of that, obviously I was disappointed and started asking myself those top questions, which led to me writing the first book.
But I think there was also another thing that happened at the very same time, which was that I began seeing advertising from, for example a car brand. And their claim on this big billboard, one of the most expensive spots you could buy like a Times Square in New York, was that they transported their cars by train. So that just wasn't really a thing I would normally have seen in my work in advertising at that time, where most car advertising would be about how cool the car was, or buy it now and you get extra heat in the seat, or whatever it might be.
So there was those two things that made me curious and start for myself, asking myself the question maybe there was actually a way forward for me in advertising. I was running a medium-sized agency at the time, a tourism agency basically. So maybe I could actually combine what my parents probably bottle-fed me with, a bit more of a value-aligned approach to my trade, my craft.
So yeah, I wrote a proposal and then that happened to turn into a book, and I'm still very, very thankful to my commissioning editor at the time because he bet on a crazy guy writing in from Denmark and a proposal landing in his inbox in London. And pitching, at that time, a quite outlandish pitch.
Carol Cone:
So what came first, the book or the name Goodvertising?
Thomas Kolster:
The book came first before the agency was turned around or anything like that.
Carol Cone:
That's great. So let's just talk a little bit about the first book because the first book really launched, I believe, your visibility. I know that you've traveled to 70 or 80 countries around the globe. You give thought leadership, you've got clients. So give our listeners and our viewers a little bit of sense of what's in that book?
Thomas Kolster:
So basically, again, remember I was probably late 20, early 30s when I wrote it. What I did was I looked at a lot of great work from around the world that I felt was best practices. And then what I also did, so it was basically a collection of great inspiring work aligned across a couple of chapters that I thought was important when I analyzed the work. That transparency, being personal, being simple, being purposeful, so they were sorted around those types of chapters. Then I had some interviews with different actors. So some from nonprofit, some from government, our climate minister at the time, leaders in the advertising world that today, still to this day are giants, like Alex Bogusky, David Drogo, who has obviously made an incredible career for himself since I spoke to him back then. So yeah.
What people sometimes ask me, I feel like it was a book that was written because I was a little bit angry. I think the opening sentence was, "I hate 99% of advertising."
Carol Cone:
I love that. It's so provocative, it's great. It's great. Yes, I love that.
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah. And in some ways, it's a case book. I think for me what at that time was fascinating was that it seemed like a little bit of a magic key that I found in the sense that I felt that, "Wow, you can really cut through in the market, you can really differentiate your brand." The simple premise I put in the book was actually that if you do something good for people and planet, it's good for brand and bottom line. It was a very simple premise I put forward, but it's how I felt at that time. It was, when I looked at ... And again, more or less probably around the same time you were doing your speech in Cannes, Chipotle, 2010, the year after, did the Grand Prix for Back to the Start, which had this beautiful-
Carol Cone:
Which was great. Yeah.
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah, a beautiful narration about how we got farming wrong and how we need to go back to honoring the soil and rotation, and all that stuff. So I really felt, and that was my belief at that time, and when I ran around knocking doors client side was that this is just an amazing opportunity. You guys can run into this, find your issue, find your fight, and people will reward you for it. Because if you're in a landscape of bad food, you can create a narrative around good food, you're going to win. It's that simple.
I probably had quite a na�ve view at that time, but it was different times. And I think that little advantage I think actually did last for quite a couple of years in fact, before it became much more mainstream.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. And then we got into purpose washing, so we'll get there in a minute. But then, you also worked with Act Responsible to set up that display, I don't know if it was an awards at Cannes, which I loved those ads because they were so in your face. Can you share with our listeners and viewers why you set that up with Act Responsible and the impact that it had at Cannes? Because Cannes is, if you haven't been for the Festival of Creativity, you've got to go. It is so fun. It's crazy, but it's fun. And it instructs.
Thomas Kolster:
This is crazy. I've been to Cannes every year since I was 22. Every year, I never missed a year. So I've been there when it was the early days, as you mentioned as well, where it was just a bunch of creatives coming together. There was no checks, there was barely any clients, and it was just a lot of fun. There was a lot of drinking as well, there was a lot of [inaudible 00:24:18] work.
Thomas Kolster:
But back to Act. So my involvement with Act in fact started because I won an Act Award, it's one of the first awards I won, when I was at a Danish agency. Many, many, many years later, I meet Herve, the founder, and his two amazing daughters in Cannes that runs this basically nonprofit who have for many, many years focused on, especially at that time, the nonprofit elements of the power of advertising, so the good power of advertising. So that remit had expanded again and now they look at brands' initiatives much more broadly.
So they brought up this exhibition in Cannes now for 25 odd years, it's absolutely astonishing what they've achieved. So my role in that is I think very little. I try and help reset agenda as much as I can. Last year, we got Cannes convinced to create a sustainability hub. We got them, a couple of years, also to create an open house for good because it's very, very expensive to go into the Palais. So I had this idea as a young creative, everybody couldn't afford the Palais. I thought in the name of sustainability, it shouldn't be an exclusive party, it should be an inclusive one. And I'm so thankful to Cannes for opening up a couple of hours on Wednesday between 2:00 and 5:00, the Act Responsible exhibition for everyone without a pass. Yeah.
Carol Cone:
Oh, lovely. I love that. So I'd love to hear just right now, before we get into The Hero Trap and others, what is the state of purpose today? Or maybe even a few years ago, because I know you see a shift. But what's the state of it? And what lessons can you give to people in the ad business, young creatives or agency leaders?
Thomas Kolster:
I think a couple years ago, and I think it's difficult to talk about it without not just touching briefly on The Hero Trap, was that I felt a need that the space became quite crowded and very inauthentic, in the sense that everybody suddenly pitched themself as Mother Theresa or Gandhi. For me, that was a little bit disheartening in fact. And one of the questions that sparked the writing of the second book was in fact that I asked myself the question who do I trust? Who is authentic, who is not authentic?
And what that unlocked was in fact another question, which was with all these brands around claiming to make the world healthier and more climate resilient, who have in fact created change in my own life? And the list was very short. And it was interesting because, when I wrote Goodvertising back then, it was difficult to find a lot of good examples of brands. When I then wrote The Hero Trap and I started talking about transformative brands, so brands that actually create real change in my life, so they didn't make the brand the hero, they made me the hero, there wasn't a lot of brands around again and that was an interesting shift for me.
So I focused much more on the types of brands that focused on, that had a life-centric, almost a human-centric focus. And that I felt, at least for me, cut through a lot of that noise where you'd go into a corporate headquarters and where they would say do good for people and planet.
No, but in some ways, it was also because I started seeing that purpose pushback and that talk about anti-woke. And that, for me, was unsettling. It was unsettling to have that pushback. So I felt that maybe I had done something wrong with my first book because after all, Goodvertising has a moral imperative to it, good or bad. And I was young and probably that was never really the intention, pointing fingers at someone to say, "You're bad, I'm good." So there was a lot of ... Yeah, there was a lot of things going into that at that time. The biggest difference between the first and the second book was this time around I thought I'm going to create a model, a tool because then at least I have something that people can apply in their businesses, through their leadership, whatever it might be.
Carol Cone:
Okay. So one, if you don't mind naming names, I'd love you to say who do you really admire?
Thomas Kolster:
It's so interesting because the list is unfortunately getting shorter and shorter, and I think it's down to consistency. There's very few brands that survived this decade of being or keeping the purpose alive. Let me explain that, because in some ways I think what has happened is that operating in the world of big multinationals with multiple brands and complexities, one has to ask the question if, in so many ways, that business model is not just outdated. That the very business model that a lot of these brands have founded upon is around cheap labor, is around pushing ingredients down to the lowest possible price, bulk, all this stuff. And as that happens, at the same time, what have happened over this last 10 to 15 years is that we've had brands that was build with purpose. I think an advertising land, back to the jargon, I think we like to call them challenger brands.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. Yeah, there you go.
Thomas Kolster:
So I think that just puts an unprecedented pressure on these big legacy brands because these folks can do it right. And in that sense, then suddenly a brand that doesn't stay up to date, that see others moving faster, challenging them, pushing them. So I think the challenge is always between there's a saying and a doing.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. The satiety gap, which Paul Polman talked a lot about. Yeah.
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah. And it's difficult. If you're Paul Polman and you're heading up a big multinational which have a lot of products, even Ben & Jerry's. I do mention this example in the book as well. That if I compare a bucket of Ben & Jerry's to my local ice cream maker down here who gets organic fresh milk in the door every day, Ben & Jerry's is not organic. I know the cows have been out, they've had fun.
That's a difficult reality to operate in when you're a brand like Ben & Jerry's. And then that Ben & Jerry's can seem like a bland commercial product with more purpose talk than actually purpose walk. I think that's unfortunately the operating world that I think a lot of CMOs don't like to wake up in and doesn't know how to navigate.
Carol Cone:
What do you feel we need to share with CMOs today? Because I know that they are on the hot seat. They got to sell more stuff and the turnover for CMOs is real. But there's some that truly believe in it.
Thomas Kolster:
For me it's almost like the journey that I've been on anyways, it's almost like I felt I had found the way back to actually what makes a brand loved. In the sense that when a company starts or when a brand begins its early journey, they were there because they were fulfilling a need or a want. And somehow along the way, they might have got lost. So the framework that I use based on basically one simple question, who can you hope people become? So how can you play a meaningful, transformative role in people's lives?
So what I always challenge the CMOs or even the C-suite in general is to go back to that. I think the best brands in my life, I can say because it's in my nextdoor country, Sweden, Spotify. What's so amazing about Spotify is it plays a transformative difference in my life because they make me discover new music. They push me into new genres that I didn't even know that I would like. I'm a piano, I didn't know I'm a piano fan, now I love it. So by having this transformational idea behind it, I could probably go to Apple Music, but now my whole listening story is there, my whole relationship is built up with Spotify. I don't want to let that go.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to give a shout-out to Airbnb because their purpose is belong. And they have done such amazing things, especially in crises in terms of opening up, whether it's a flood, a fire, et cetera, et cetera, their homes and such to house people. And they constantly push what the product provides, so I think that's a great one.
I want you to talk a little bit about the Ben & Jerry's situation because you wrote an interesting article and I grew up with them, so I knew Ben, I knew Jerry. But Jerry decided because of the changes at Unilever to leave and you had a very important point of view about that.
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah. Again, obviously even though I do critique the brand somehow in my book, I also love the brand for what it is. Again, as I said, there are two different worlds that are clashing. There's the world of multinationals and then there are the challenger brands. For me, I just don't know what a multinational such as Unilever want with a Ben & Jerry's if it's not Ben and Jerry.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, there we go. Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah. The authenticity, they're the guys, yeah.
Thomas Kolster:
I don't understand that. And I think it was the same thing we saw when L'Oreal purchased the Body Shop, but they didn't actually want the Body Shop. So I think there are these types of clashes that, when you already have an ice cream portfolio that is quite substantial from a-
Carol Cone:
Magnum and such, yeah.
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah, certainly.
Carol Cone:
Yeah.
Thomas Kolster:
Why wouldn't you serve a group of folks that we know are very passionate about Ben & Jerry's? Again, it's almost back to my early book again right here. Here, you actually figured out speaking to a certain group of people that just absolutely love these guys. Why risk it? Why jeopardize it?
The other point I think I made in that piece that you're referring to is that operating in the world of business, but having a separate foundation is just Frankenstein from the very onset. Of course, those two worlds will not go down very well. When we see, for example, Patagonia, what they have done, at least they took a fundamentally different view to it because the foundation owns the business and has certain other rules to follow by. I see that in my neck of the world as well with a brand like Carlsberg, for example, that in some ways is also foundation owned, not to the same degree, but it's a different way. So I think they also build themself a Frankenstein, probably because that was part of the deal when that deal was made. So it's a hot potato for Unilever to manage.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. They should let them go. They really should. So I want to talk about the political, because I just started talking about it, the political situation. Interestingly, you're not in the US, you're in Europe, but during COVID-19, that was a shock. And then George Floyd was another shock, which the country truly over-indexed in terms of DE&I. And then we started getting over that and getting back into the normalcy of our lives, et cetera, et cetera, and then we have a new president and such. And all of a sudden, DE&I is anathema, and ESG is anathema and such. So in this in polarized, highly polarized situation, can brands, should they even consider being purposeful and providing meaning to people?
Thomas Kolster:
Absolutely. It's an interesting time, as you say. I'm spending most of my time on the other side of the pond and watching US politics is really a passion for me. It's kind of like watching House of Cards.
It's a crazy time we live in. There's two sides to the political situation. I will very much say that I feel that I'm also to blame for part of that polarization in some ways.
Carol Cone:
You are?
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah, because-
Carol Cone:
Okay, do tell.
Thomas Kolster:
No. But as I said, with Goodvertising and this idea about framing purpose around good or bad, or pointing fingers, or saying, "We do this," there's a lot of ... Back to the story about where I grew up. I grew up on this small island, obviously with all the farmers and fisherman. What has happened during this period is that there has been a lot of finger pointing. When people point fingers at farmers and things, "They are climate sinners." What does that do to a farmer who lives off nature? And suddenly you have a city boy like me, pointing fingers. That's not a very great way of winning someone over. So I think the sustainability movement in some ways have also alienated a lot of people by the rhetoric that we have had. And I regret that.
So for me, the most daunting, most bold, most audacious purpose for me is one that builds bridges. And it's tough to do that. I think we all know that in a great piece of storytelling, you've got a villain and you've got a hero, so it's difficult. On one hand, I often revert back to is, for example United Colors of Benetton when Oliviero Toscani was there.
Carol Cone:
Oh, wonderful, wonderful.
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah, I still see a lot of that stuff. There's this ad, when there was the war in Yugoslavia. Basically what he did was he took a picture of a dead soldier's clothing, the T-shirt was bloody, the pants. I think it was a Bosnian soldier. It was a very dramatic image to put up on a billboard, grueling. But the story behind it is so amazing because what he wanted to do was he wanted to portray humanity. He didn't want to pick a side in this war. He wanted people to understand that here's a Bosnian soldier, the father that didn't come back. So whether you are a Muslim or Christian, or whether you're in Serbia or whether you're in Croatia, it doesn't really matter because we forgot that.
So I think this is where my disappointment comes from in the climate movement because we've been very good at pointing fingers at other people, saying what they shouldn't be doing, what they shouldn't be eating. And in some ways, that came from a place of often privilege and affluence. I think when you're in school and you're good at math, you don't bully the kid who's not good at maths. And I think maybe that's unfortunately what I was part of in my early career and some of the things that I regret in the type of leadership that I gave to the world.
Carol Cone:
Well, that's very I think humble of you to say, but I think that you are sticking your neck out there. And I love the work of Toscani. I love the two hands together. That was really early in your face, beautiful, beautiful. And that was advertising, it was imagery, it was communications. They weren't trying to sell stuff, they were trying to sell the issue, which was beautiful.
Thomas Kolster:
The big difference was that it really, it made us think.
Carol Cone:
Think.
Thomas Kolster:
It made us question our biases and it didn't want to sell us a certain-
Carol Cone:
It wasn't preachy.
Thomas Kolster:
Yeah, exactly.
Carol Cone:
I always like to bring up quotes from my guests. You say, "The only weapon is bravery right now for brands." What does that mean?
Thomas Kolster:
It goes for leaders, it goes for brands, it goes for all of us at this day and age. I feel that when ... We are in a fight and we cannot ignore that. And if you go back to the CMOs as well, I don't think there's ever been a time in our industry where there's been so much change happening. AI, the social media, everything seems to be turning upside down. And I always felt that great communication, great leadership is built on bravery. 1984, that piece of communication demanded bravery. I remember there's a story that Steve Jobs actually had to tell his board and risk his saying, "I believe that we should run this ad during Super Bowl. I don't have any really good arguments besides I believe in this."
So I think we need that bravery. And it's very easy to be complacent or to think that someone else somewhere is going to do something about this. So I always love these stories, whether it's someone insignificant or somewhere else in the organization who actually rises up to the challenge, or again, being a European on the other side of the pond and we see the underdog today in New York punch above his weight, it's just absolutely amazing.
What I feel disheartening is that a lot of brands don't dare to pick up that fight because a lot of brands ... I do understand when you have a brand that serve everyone that you might want to take more of the bridge builder approach. But if you're a brand that serve a certain someone, fight. Say, "This is enough." When we saw the first time around with the current US president, then it was a different matter. We saw Airbnb run ads, we saw a lot of other brands being very bold about how they view the world and they stood up for the values. And a lot of those, unfortunately, have been quite silent and that's disheartening.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, it is disheartening. I think the one thing that we see so much is that companies in the US, they haven't discarded their commitments to DE&I and they haven't discarded their ESG because there's so much value creation, especially in the environmental work, but they're changing how much they're talking about it. This has been a phenomenal conversation. Unfortunately, we have to wind it down. But what's next for you?
Thomas Kolster:
Following up on what I just said in terms of the bridge building and all that stuff, I think that's something that's very close to my heart so that is something I'm working on. Trying to understand that better and how I can better serve to fight that polarization that's going on right now, fight that misinformation. As a professional, I'm disheartened by seeing how AI is accelerating this even more, the attacks on journalism, et cetera. So that's one of the things that I'm looking at going into 2026 and hope that I can in some way contribute.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. What is the role of AI in purpose and purpose branding? Good role, bad role? Is it going to help us be more creative?
Thomas Kolster:
I don't buy that. I don't think any of the technology, technological advances that I've seen in our industry have done much for creativity. I think everything has made our craft worse. I don't buy that. I think AI, if it wants a purpose, don't tech wash it. I see so much tech washing from ChatGPT and others where they pretend like they're putting the humans behind the steering wheel. We know that's not true, so stop telling that narrative, be honest about it. Yeah. Let's get back to AI being a tool and let's be brave enough to understand that we can take the lead. Hollywood script writers took the lead on AI and set a boundary as an industry. As an advertising industry, it doesn't seem like we like any types of boundaries, we don't like any type of legislation. And that unfortunately I think hurts my colleagues. I never came back from a Cannes this year where so many of my peers are afraid of losing their jobs. For me, that's absolutely disheartening to see that.
Carol Cone:
It is disheartening.
Thomas Kolster:
We're reliant on our people.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, totally. I always love to give the last word to my guest. So is there anything you want to add, or accentuate that you've said, or something new?
Thomas Kolster:
I wish that 2026, let's take the opportunity to be brave together. I think that's probably just going to be the closing remarks. We need it and I think we need each other as a community. Carol, I've always been looking up to work and your leadership, and I'm really thankful for having this conversation with me today. And I think all of us need to stick more together and fight together in 2026.
Carol Cone:
I love that. That's a great conclusion, but to be continued because, yeah, we do need to be a stronger community. So kudos to your great work and your bravery. And we will continue this in the future. Thanks so much, Thomas Kolster, for joining me on Purpose 360. It's been a joy.
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone on Purpose. Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, our listener, please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
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