I'm not sure what your specific role in the industry was. However while it may not have the same sense of romance or moral imperative as something else, it can still help rally great teams around causes. I've found people, particularly teams of data-driven marketers, can get quite excited when seeing a business grow directly because of insights they distilled from data. It's the feeling of making a tangible impact.
My response was mostly aimed at statements like one of 8ytecoder's examples: "Let's improve the accuracy of ad targeting so small businesses can reduce their spend but attract customers and grow". This is because the focus on small businesses is often a foil, and reality is much more morally ambiguous.
Actual small businesses are at the far end of the long tail. Very few companies primarily serve small businesses or primarily make their money from small businesses. In practice, in order of how much money is spent, the list goes: (1) large brands, (2) local/state franchises and political campaigns, (3) small businesses.
Most companies (Google/Facebook, for example) might coincidentally serve small businesses, but the real infrastructure and engineering investments are for the other two groups.
Small businesses tend to be the least sophisticated of the campaigns, because they honestly don't need much sophistication. Their numbers are too low to bring in real data science anyway, so it's more about being savvy at community presence. However, when you get to franchises and politics, the sophistication really kicks in.
Also, some of those small/medium businesses were for things like predatory lending companies. That realization made me stop and think for a moment about what "small business" actually meant.
Point being that I've seen and used (earnestly, at the time) small businesses as a sort moral foil while actually aspiring to develop technology for the other groups. And you believe it because you're paid to believe it.
In that context, trying to make it about the businesses you are serving (external validation) may not be as interesting to that person as making it about them finding the key to the optimization settings that unlocked growth for the team and business that is credited to them. Helping them celebrate via recognition or whatever else drives that individual can let them get more out of the win than they otherwise would have, and become more engaged in their role.
Feels like it's shining the light of attention at the spot most aligned with human desires, but usually at expense of shrouding the holistic goals (which might not be in interest of participants).
It might be true, but the framing could still be dishonest because the specific focus is often intended to distract from a less savoury whole. <3