Whether you celebrate in June, July or in other months based on where you are in the world, this year’s Pride comes at an interesting time: its 50th anniversary intersects with shelter-in-place orders and protests around the world, particularly in the United States where the Pride marches began. These events prompt a more reflective look at Pride and what it means to members of the LGBTQ+ community—and to the contributions that brands make to the movement.

For example, how long should you keep your rainbow-infused logo? How does your commitment to LGBTQ+ equality translate to more meaningful action than a visual cue or a limited-release product? Consumers support brands that truly show up and act in support of social movements and societal needs, recognizing those causes are sincere drivers of the brand—and Pride is no different. Highlighting recent work from Netflix and Circus Marketing, which joined MediaMonks earlier this year, we’re taking a look at how brands can drive real support during Pride.

“We wanted to stand up to say something we truly believe: this is not just a day, Pride is a lifetime,” says Pablo Miranda, Sr. Creative at Circus. “Our goal for Pride Day was to celebrate and highlight stories that prove Pride is bigger than 24 hours. Instead of just talking about the LGTBQ+ Netflix shows, our efforts were focused on spotlighting the real people out there who inspire them.”

LGBTQ+ Support Must Extend Beyond a Month

True allyship requires passionate advocacy for a given cause or community internally—not just in your messaging. Brands exhibit this through internal employee resource groups, committees led by those who identify within the community or through external partnerships.

In partnering with GLADD, Netflix found how entertainment uniquely serves as a vehicle for building empathy and understanding toward the LGBTQ+ community—which meant the platform has a significant responsibility to portray diverse stories and highlight marginalized voices. This insight highlights Netflix’s long-term commitment and year-round support to depicting authentic LGBTQ+ stories. For example, La Casa de las Flores is one of the platform’s most popular international series—particularly in Latin America, where it’s been celebrated for its open and positive portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters (and where Circus produced a live, digital extravaganza celebrating the series’ end).

Through social listening, Circus also found that brands generally focus LGBTQ+ efforts in June only, often with messaging that consumers find passive or superficial. In our work with Netflix, the focus wasn’t to deliver just a message for Pride, but rather signal the brand’s commitment toward supporting diversity throughout the year through visibility and representation.

And this work was deeply personal for some of those involved in Circus’ creative team, too. “I came out of the closet after a deep process of self-acceptance, and I know representation makes a huge impact in the way you can embrace your reality and share who you are with others,” says Isabella Soto, Project Manager. “Being part of this project let me work for my community and tell their stories.”

Support LGBTQ+ Communities at Home with Virtualization

Pride is characterized by marches and parades that hearken back to its protest origins. This makes Pride celebrations especially challenging this year, when many must stay at home and keep physically apart due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And stay-at-home orders especially impact those who feel they can’t be themselves at home, highlighting the need for spaces and events where the LGBTQ+ community can thrive and be more open.

This made it important to offer a virtual safe space where LGBTQ+ viewers could be themselves and surround themselves with their community. Absent of a physical Pride event, we helped Netflix–who was listed in Newsweek as one of 50 US businesses that stood out during the pandemic–virtualize the festivities.

“As a part of the LGBTQ+ community, Pride happening at home meant a number of things,” says Naville Obeso, Creative Content Creator at Circus Marketing “But the most important was the fact that a range of young and adult LGBTQ+ members of the community were going to be uncomfortable, unsafe or sad to be at home ‘back in the closet.’ We knew that we had to deliver something warm at heart to those people. We wanted to build a bridge of empathy, tell them stories that could let them know that this too shall pass and that it gets better.”

We developed video content that invites the LGBTQ+ community to not only watch and relate to character portrayals, but also become active participants in sharing their own personal stories. The first of these is a hero video that remixes previous Pride march footage with scenes from Netflix shows—and from viewers, highlighting messages and tender moments of real lives in a stylized picture-in-picture look.

But the centerpiece of the festivities was “Stories that Unite Us,” a live show kicking off Pride Day. Inspired by quotes from LGBTQ+ Netflix characters, the show prompted real people to share their own stories—including a real, live marriage proposal from the show’s host to his partner.

“During the show, we could read in comments that some were watching it secretly, because at home it is not possible for them to consume LGBTQ+ content with their family,” says Yaneth Velázquez, Global Head of Client at Circus Marketing. “We hope that bringing visibility to stories of the community (real and fictional) can eventually help to open homes and hearts.”

Others on the team agree. “For me, the work represents the power we have to educate thousands of people like my family, people that often don’t have the opportunity to see other realities,” says Sebastián Urrutia, Sr. Creative at Circus. These projects show different ways that a brand can show up and provide support—whether supporting LGBTQ+ people at a time when lack of visibility and a safe space stifles the freedom to connect with others and be yourself, or whether driving change and commitment internally to support the LGBTQ+ and other diverse communities into the long term. These steps go well beyond changing a logo or packaging, and consumers appreciate brands that feel such a responsibility to their audiences.

In building assistive experiences across the customer decision journey, effective channel strategy is key. Tobias Wilson, VP of Growth, recently made this point clear to Campaign, where he advised brands whose strategies were affected by COVID-19 to “pivot in a way that makes sense. If the channels you’d invested effort in were no longer viable (such as out of home or in-person experiential, in this case), the worst thing you can do is just try to haphazardly replicate that activity online.”

This requires brands to not only look at digital channels they may know, like owned social feeds, but beyond what may have been previously thought possible, reaching audiences where they’re at in this moment. This need led MediaMonks, Reporters Without Borders and DDB to collaborate in building the Uncensored Library, a Minecraft map that users can explore to discover stories written by journalists who have been jailed, exiled or even killed for their work, even if censorship stops them from accessing such stories through other channels. Recognizing Minecraft as an increasingly important space for global youth to gather, socialize and exchange ideas, the virtual library demonstrates how far brands can go to actually connect audiences like never before.

We’ve long advocated for digital, user-centered strategies, which are even more critical as brands look for ways to connect with socially-isolated consumers. We find that customer obsessed organizations (which we explore in-depth in our latest report) are better set up to reimagine what these connections can look like and execute them swiftly.

“Astute brands seize the power of digital and flex it to their categories’ unique need profiles to build experiences of irreplaceable value,” according to Dipanjan Chatterjee, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester, et al., in the report, “Generate Brand Energy With Digital Experiences: Engage, Excite, And Entangle Your Customer.” Focusing on user needs is vital for brands that want to maintain and improve their connection with consumers. By reinforcing native user behaviors and aligning them with brand values in a creative way, brands can offer relevant solutions that build an emotional impact.

Improve Connections by Fostering Interactions

In today’s changed landscape, brands can no longer rely on face-to-face interactions with their customers. “As we come to grips with a world where we can’t shortcut to experience through physical engagement and personal proximity, the challenge is to deliver on the original intent of digital,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar. “Interactive, tactile and personalized moments of magic that create conversation, conversion and commercial opportunities.”

Spotify has exhibited these moments of magic since its start, by receiving, connecting, and interacting diverse social and cultural inputs from thousands of channels and content. One such event is Spotify’s recent digital-native take on musical award ceremonies, including a livestream around the world and via TV broadcast, awarding winners across 57 different categories chosen by user-driven data.

In the months leading up to the ceremony, fans were encouraged to promote their favorite artists and music on social media to boost their chances of winning. “Knowing that their behavior could have a real impact became an incentive for fans to help their favorite artist win by consuming their music on Spotify, whether it was by listening to their tracks, adding them to playlists or following them on the platform,” explains Alejandro Ortiz-Izquierdo, Creative Director at Circus, which merged with MediaMonks in January 2020. 

Tasked by Spotify to build the visual identity surrounding the show, the creative team led by Ortiz-Izquierdo and Alberto Guerra, used a data-driven approach as inspiration. Its main motif was the polygon, designed by connecting the top five streaming cities in Mexico, the regional focus of the show, together. Other polygons took shape by connecting the top streaming cities for different artists, resulting in a series of unique shapes used to develop graphic materials for all communications. “After this, we launched a personalized campaign that focused on celebrating the power of the fans through the data that they generated on Spotify,” says Ortiz-Izquierdo. “From the get-go, there was a great response from the users, with a lot of excitement, engagement and involvement. When we launched the awards, people actually campaigned for their artists.”

Users’ excitement to engage highlights an important part of meeting consumers’ needs in impactful, new ways: operating with transparency. With a focus on user-generated data at every level of the award show’s planning and visual design, listeners understood how their actions made impact. And it drove results, too: “With the event, the number of conversions to premium users grew; new users, streams, and general behavior on the platform increased from the moment we launched the list of finalists,” says Daniela González, Head of Digital Strategy at Circus.

There Are No Borders, Your Playground is Digital

In a world defined by globalization, digital platforms allow users to connect, engage and share with people all over the world, irrespective of nationalities, languages, or cultures––and this, in turn, helps them define their own identities and the communities with which they seek to connect. 

If brands want to connect with their target audience, especially with Gen Z, it’s vital for them to remain aware of how communities are built and redefined. This includes understating the new ways that younger consumers reshape the ways they gather, build identity and engage with brands, which is the focus of a recent whitepaper from IMA, our influencer activation team.

Social channels, in particular, have allowed people from different backgrounds and across the world to connect in virtual spaces, where they can congregate with others who share their interests, beliefs and values. But to recognize these interests and what truly resonates with audiences spread across the CDJ, brands must improve their digital maturity through smarter investments in personalization.

“Social media has become a true melting pot, where everyone and everything fits; interests, similarities and differences in culture, ethnicity or gender, as well as attitudes, personalities and values. Making room for all users to feel at home within a massively globalized world,” says Bruno Lambertini, Founder and CEO of Circus. 

The rate of hyperadoption, in which consumers quickly develop new behaviors, has picked up at a critical time when meeting consumers’ needs across the customer decision journey has become table stakes for brands. By recognizing and rewarding such behaviors through relevant channel strategies, brands better position themselves to bring diverse audiences together online ––and across the world.

Through local shelter-in-place policies and the cancellation of entire professional sporting seasons, COVID-19 has disrupted athletics to the dismay of fans and gym-goers. This is because sports and athletics revolve around community; whether it’s a fitness class you attend regularly or a regional sports team you root for, athletics are as much about gathering and competing with others in addition to one’s own personal development.

With a sudden shift from the field to digital platforms, consumers are craving that sense of connection—and looking for inspiration to get moving while staying at home, often without equipment they’d find at a gym. Below, we look at a couple of ways that sports-focused brands can fill the void and continue to support restless audiences.

Get People Moving Without Leaving the Home

With consumers staying home, it can be difficult to keep active and get proper exercise. Realizing this opportunity, gyms and fitness influencers have retained connection with audiences through fitness-focused livestreams (kind of like the good old days of Richard Simmons workout tapes—who’s also putting workout routines online). Such broadcasts offer a relatively simple way to keep connected with audiences by supporting their need to keep moving.

One brand with a digital advantage here is Nike; the brand had capped off Q4 in APAC with impressive numbers—only about a 5% decrease in sales during the worst of China’s COVID-19 crisis, with 75% of its retail stores closed—thanks to its strong digital ecosystem and network of elite trainers. As part of its “Play Inside” campaign, which offers content, gear and workouts to keep healthy at home, MediaMonks partnered with Nike and Wieden+Kennedy to livestream weekly community workout sessions via YouTube, bringing viewers and fitness fans together.

The livestreams—which are intentionally lo-fi, informal and broadcast from trainers’ homes—make Nike’s existing network of trainers more accessible to audiences, than ever giving them a chance to interact directly. “It’s about people tuning in together. The chat is wild, and there’s a Q&A at the end of each workout,” says Ciaran Woods, EP Experiential & Virtual Solutions at MediaMonks. “There is a sense of community, that we’re in this together and people just want to make it work.”

There’s also value in having a weekly routine for audiences to stick to. “In many conversations, we’re asking ourselves: what does it mean to have an experience online?” says Travis Craw, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. “One of the interesting things about livestreams is having something to put on your calendar and look forward to.”

Despite the casual feel of the livestream, the production remains professional: disinfected equipment including a camera, tripod, lighting and a LiveU (a live video transmitter) are packaged in cardboard, delivered to trainers with zero contact. Because COVID-19 can only survive on a cardboard surface for 24 hours, the trainers set up the equipment the following day.

With foolproof diagrams and stickers added to equipment to show what goes where, this process enables anyone to build a professional livestreaming setup—and during the stream itself, a remote crew enables production by serving questions from the live chat, mixing audio and more. “With live switching and live editing, we’ll see these livestreams look more like how a news or sports broadcast works,” says Craw.

Fuel Competition Through Digital Alternatives

Getting people moving is just one side of tackling sports and athletics within a world of social distancing. Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of interesting ways that sports organizations and resourceful fans have adapted to the new normal: Formula 1 is launching a Virtual Grand Prix series to entertain audiences as they wait for postponed races, and some NBA players have joined fans in NBA 2K20 video game tournaments. Basically, esports is extending outside of its niche—and viewership on Twitch, a livestreaming site that focuses primarily on videogame content, has risen since stay-at-home orders were put in place throughout different regions around the world.

While these digitized competitions offer an interesting alternative now, there’s no permanent replacement for the excitement of entering a stadium, being surrounded by fans and watching a game played right before your eyes. How might sports organizations experiment with emerging digital behaviors today and pay those learnings forward into a post-COVID-19 world?

The Red Bull 3×3 Online Basketball Contest serves as a possible example. We built an arcade-style browser game that lets fans compete in a virtual 3×3 basketball contest, learning about the game format and racking up high scores. The game leans into the fast-paced excitement of 3×3 basketball and fuels a sense of competition online, building excitement for the eventual live tournament.

“A while back, LeBron James said he didn’t want to play without fans present,” says Olivier Koelemij, Managing Director at MediaMonks LA, noting that the reality has changed in the global pandemic. “Whether you fight or embrace that outlook, be creative by leveraging the power of digital platforms.” Koelemij suggests diving head-first into the unique offerings of a given digital platform, and aligning content with user behaviors there.

“Another interesting aspect is the ability to combine channels and platforms to make content more relevant,” he adds. “You want to consider the whole experience journey: from buying a ticket to the lead-up, to the experience itself and the aftercare.”

Critical to tailoring such an experience is having the data needed to engage at the right place and time, as well as an understanding of what makes a given platform unique. By considering what sets one digital medium apart from another and why fans gather there, brands can apply those learnings and discover new ways to engage with customers through value-added experiences.

A focus on customer obsession is key to delivering assistive digital experiences.