We set a standard last June. Here’s the honest scorecard.

We’re not writing this one to take a lap. When we published our first standard for Pride marketing, we asked four questions of every brand, including ourselves: does the support run past June 30th, where does the ad money actually go, does internal policy back the external message, and who is the brand still doing business with. That standard hasn’t moved. What’s moved is the ground underneath it.

The easy story, the one that makes for a better headline, is that brands panicked in 2023 and have since either grown a spine or lost their nerve entirely. The real story has both of those things happening in the same industry, sometimes at the same company, in the same year. Some brands quietly did the harder, less photogenic work of building support that survives contact with a bad news cycle. Others learned exactly the wrong lesson from 2023 and are applying it right now, this June, by doing less and saying even less about why.

The topline number looks good. The comfort number tells a different story.

Start with the number every brand deck loves to cite. Support for LGBTQ+ equal rights among non-LGBTQ+ Americans sits at 84 percent, and 91 percent believe LGBTQ+ people should be able to live their lives free from discrimination, according to GLAAD’s Accelerating Acceptance research (GLAAD, Accelerating Acceptance 2023). Those are real, record-high numbers, and they’re worth saying out loud. The problem is that most Pride campaigns stop reading right there, and the same research doesn’t.

Comfort with LGBTQ+ people in advertising specifically runs lower than the headline number, at 75 percent. Comfort with LGBTQ+ families shown in ads drops further, to 68 percent (GLAAD, Accelerating Acceptance 2023). That gap between "I support equal rights in the abstract" and "I’m comfortable seeing this in a commercial" is exactly the gap a Pride campaign has to close, and it’s wider than the 84 percent number suggests. The same research found only 28 percent of non-LGBTQ+ Americans personally know a transgender person, and half find nonbinary and transgender identities unfamiliar territory (GLAAD, Accelerating Acceptance 2023). That’s not a hostile audience. It’s an under-informed one, and the two require completely different creative strategies.

It gets harder to call this a straight-line improvement once you look at how the community itself is doing. GLAAD’s prior year of research found 56 percent of Gen Z Americans reported feeling greater fear for their personal safety than they had the two years before, and 70 percent of LGBTQ+ people said discrimination against them had increased over that same window (GLAAD, Accelerating Acceptance 2022). Acceptance, in the abstract, is at a record high. Safety, on the ground, is not tracking the same line. A brand that only reads the first statistic and skips the second is building a campaign for an audience that doesn’t feel as safe as the headline number implies.

“Consumers continue to want the Bud Light brand to concentrate on the platforms that all consumers love, and we are doing just that through investing in partnerships with the NFL, Fields of Honor, news platforms, college football, and our recently announced return to partnering with the UFC.”

Michel Doukeris, CEO, AB InBev, October 2023 earnings call

The playbook got written once. It didn’t stay contained.

We covered the mechanics of the 2023 Bud Light and Target backlash in detail last year, so we won’t re-run it here. What matters for this scorecard is what happened next. By the end of that same May, "Bud Lighted" and "Bud Lighting" had become their own shorthand online for a repeatable strategy: brand a company "woke," organize a boycott, and watch it work. That exact playbook got pointed at Adidas over a gender-inclusive swimwear line and at The North Face over a campaign featuring drag queen and environmentalist Pattie Gonia, all inside the same month. It didn’t stay a Bud Light problem. It became a template.

And by that October, Bud Light’s own CEO said the quiet part in an earnings call, on the record, in the quote above. The pivot away from identity-specific marketing and toward "platforms that all consumers love" wasn’t a rumor or an anonymous source. It was the strategy, stated plainly, by the largest beer brand in the country. That’s the part of this two-years-later story that isn’t a win for anybody. The market didn’t get more confident between 2023 and now. It got more cautious, and caution is a bad neighbor for a campaign that’s supposed to say something real.

We’d be lying if we said that caution hasn’t shown up in our own client conversations too. More brands are asking us to keep a campaign smaller, run it in fewer channels, or drop the word "Pride" from a subject line entirely, not because their internal commitment changed, but because a legal or communications team read the same headlines we did. Some of that caution is reasonable risk management. Some of it is a brand mistaking a quieter voice for a safer one, when the two aren’t the same thing.

What "doing better" actually requires now

Our original four questions still hold: does the support run past June, where does the money go, does policy match the message, who else is the brand in business with. But the last two years added a fifth question that wasn’t as urgent in 2023, and it’s the one most brands are currently failing. Are you willing to keep running the campaign after it gets loud, not just before?

That’s a harder bar than "be inclusive year-round," and it’s the one the data above points straight at. A brand that builds a Pride campaign for the 84 percent who support equal rights in a survey, without accounting for the 75 percent who are actually comfortable seeing it in an ad, is building for an audience that’s smaller and more specific than the topline number implies. A brand that goes quiet the moment that smaller, more specific audience gets criticized in public is proving the "Bud Lighted" playbook works exactly as designed. Durability under pressure is the whole test now. Everything else on our original list was the entry fee.

“Support that only survives a good news cycle was never support. It was a bet, and the last two years taught every brand what happens when that bet gets called.”

Camille Fontaine, Director of People & Culture, HAUS XXIV

We’re not claiming the industry failed this test and we’re not claiming it passed. Some brands built something real and are still standing behind it, quieter but not gone. Others read 2023 as a permission slip to disappear and called it "staying out of politics." Both of those brands will run a Pride campaign this June. Only one of them will still be running it in October.