The most expensive sentence in business is often the one nobody agrees on. Ask the chief executive what the company does and you hear a revolution. Ask sales and you get three features and a discount. Ask the customer and, if you are lucky, you get seven words. Then the public-relations team arrives on Thursday and is asked to make the product famous by Monday.
Purpose Worldwide has built a business in that awkward space before the announcement, where a company must decide what it means before it can persuade anyone else. Founded in Austin in 2019 by Lana McGilvray and Cassady Nordeen, the independent firm combines brand and growth advice with the ordinary machinery of communications: media relations, content, events, demand generation, crisis work, analyst and investor relations, and measurement.
This sounds like a long menu. The sharper idea is structural. McGilvray came to the firm as a former CMO with years in marketing, technology and agency leadership. Nordeen brought an editor's discipline from Time Inc. One thinks about the commercial machine; the other asks whether the story survives contact with a reader. Purpose's public team roster extends the pattern: former journalists, media trainers, strategists and operators gathered around the same brief.
Publicity is the last mile
Purpose says its work begins with measurable goals, market positioning, customer journeys and go-to-market plans. Only then come the pitch lists, bylines, social posts and stages. That ordering matters. A headline can amplify a strategy, but it cannot repair one. The agency's difference is less a proprietary process than the refusal to separate the people defining the company from the people explaining it.
The clients make the case better than the service list. Purpose's published portfolio moves from Lowe's, Salesforce and The Trade Desk to AI and adtech firms, then to USAFacts, Civics Unplugged and the International Panel on the Information Environment. These organizations have little in common at first glance. What they share is a translation problem: complicated work, consequential claims and multiple audiences who do not naturally speak to one another.
For Digital Turbine, the task followed acquisitions. Purpose and Pentagram listened to customers and partners, then helped turn a house of brands into a branded house. With IPIE, the firm supported the 2023 launch of a global scientific organization addressing threats to the information environment. For USAFacts, its stated assignment was to widen awareness of nonpartisan government data during the pandemic and an election. Different sectors, same underlying job: reduce the distance between what an institution knows and what the world can understand.
“We also feel like we got a third CMO to strategize alongside.”Pierre Casuto, CMO of Humanz
A boutique with a wide aperture
LinkedIn lists Purpose as an 11-to-50-person company and shows 17 associated employees. That is small enough for senior people to remain close to accounts, but the firm stretches its reach through advisers and collaborators. Its public roster includes specialists in creative production, inclusive advertising, brand marketing, research and strategy. In 2025 it appointed Hollis Guerra as its first president and added Louis Jones, Jeff Hirsch and climate journalist and investor Molly Wood to the advisory board.
That model places Purpose between three familiar choices. A company could hire a large global agency with specialist departments and geographic scale. It could retain a narrow technology PR shop with a dense reporter network. Or it could use a fractional CMO for executive counsel and keep execution elsewhere. Purpose attempts to compress all three: senior commercial advice, sector fluency and a team that still writes and pitches.
The business model is professional services, sold through projects and ongoing relationships. There is no public rate card, and the firm does not disclose campaign costs. That absence matters because the service is not a box of media placements. The scope can run from a positioning sprint to a continuing communications program. Buyers are paying for judgment, access and execution time, which makes comparison shopping untidy by design.
A leadership team facing a launch, category shift, acquisition, policy debate or growth stage where sales, product and communications must tell one story.
A company seeking guaranteed headlines without giving its advisers access to executives, customers, commercial goals or uncomfortable internal disagreement.
Purpose, with a spreadsheet
The word “purpose” invites suspicion because it is so easy to rent. A brand can borrow a cause for a month, put it in a film and call the work complete. McGilvray has written publicly about avoiding purpose-washing, and the firm's response is deliberately unromantic: attach purpose to strategy, decisions and measurement. Its services page promises a measurement platform for every project so that data, rather than assumption, drives the next move.
The promise should be read carefully. Communications measurement is notoriously slippery. A sale can begin with a conference conversation, accelerate through a trade article and close because the product worked. No dashboard can assign perfect ownership. Purpose's more credible claim is that teams should agree on the desired behavior before they choose the activity. Awareness may be the goal. Sometimes it is qualified demand, investor confidence, partner interest, employee clarity or permission to enter a new category.
This is also where the approach can fail first. If leadership wants the halo of purpose but will not change a decision, the story has no ballast. If sales hoards customer intelligence, positioning becomes guesswork. If the product disappoints, communications can only advertise the gap. The model works when the agency receives access and the client tolerates diagnosis before promotion.
The move worth stealing
A company does not need to hire Purpose to borrow its most useful habit. Before the next launch, put the CEO, a salesperson, a product lead, a customer and the person writing the announcement in one conversation. Ask each to finish the same sentence: “This matters now because…” Write down the five answers. Where they disagree is the work.
Then choose one measurable change. Not “buzz.” A meeting booked, a misconception corrected, a partner recruited, a category understood. Decide which audience can make that change happen and what evidence it would need. Only after that should anyone debate a press target or a social calendar.
Purpose Worldwide's proposition is that the sentence before the story determines everything after it. In a communications market crowded with louder promises, that is a quiet, practical claim. The firm is selling alignment - and then giving alignment somewhere to go.