Purpose Disruptors was conceived by Lisa Merrick-Lawless, Jonathan Wise and Rob McFaulrob – a few sparky minds in the ad industry, who began combining their creativity for environmental purposes after getting chatting in a pub back in November 2018. Since then the community has ripely grown to over 1,400: a ‘network of advertising insiders’ working to accelerate the evolution of the industry, into alignment with climate change. These active minds have been behind the Great Reset, Ecoffectiveness ’21, six climate crisis summits, #ChangeTheBrief and Create and Strike to name a few. This virtual gathering was the start of a new creative endeavour – built to run alongside Race to Zero – to imagine, design, and affect a sustainable shift in our cultural lifestyle.

Race to Zero is a global campaign mobilising leadership and action from non-state actors. The campaign advances system transformation through redesigning “an economy that puts life first”. It follows the scientific criteria of the world’s leading experts, to map out practical steps towards a net-zero world “shifting pledges into plans, ambition into action”. The campaign acts as an alliance –  a growing initiative of prominent businesses, investors, universities – seeking to escalate momentum for system change to begin “now”,  because “delay is the new denial”. The campaign’s momentum is intended to amplify pressure on governments, ahead of COP26, ‘where governments must set up their climate ambition’ to rapidly and radically substantiate their agreements. However, this new project stems from their recognition that “system change doesn’t happen in isolation; in deep relationship with it, entangled with it, we also need transformational lifestyle change.” Paddy pointed out that this claim is “not just because two thirds of emissions come from lifestyle and consumption” but because lifestyle influences our greater culture and that “culture sits upstream from politics”, as suggested by Andrew Breitbart.