A letter for Pride 2026

To the clients, the team, and the community this studio was built to serve,

I am writing this in the middle of Pride month, not at the start of it and not after it is over, because I think the middle is the only honest time to write it. At the start of the month everyone is still making promises. After it ends, everyone is grading results. Right now, in the middle, is when you can see what a brand is doing while the attention is highest and the risk is real, which is the only measurement that has ever mattered to me.

Here is what I know as I write this. Two years ago I watched brands pull back. Gravity Research's 2025 poll found 39 percent of large companies planned to scale back Pride engagement that year, up from 9 percent the year before. This February, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's Corporate Equality Index recorded a drop from 377 Fortune 500 participants to 131, companies choosing not to be measured at all. I wrote about both of those numbers when they came out, and I said the same thing each time: the pullback did not reveal a change of heart. It revealed which brands never had anything holding up the June campaign besides the June campaign itself.

How loud a brand was this season matters less than whether the community noticed, and it turns out the community noticed everything.

This month, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation published its Pride in the Marketplace research, and I want to put the two numbers in this letter because I think every brand still deciding how seriously to take this community should read them plainly. 71.5 percent of LGBTQ+ consumers report buying less from brands they see as retreating. 69.5 percent say they spend more with brands they see as staying present. That is not a close call. That is a market that has been watching every quiet exit and every quiet return for two straight years, and is already spending accordingly, independent of whether the brand thinks anyone noticed.

I want to be precise about what those two numbers do and do not prove. They do not prove that every brand retreating lost money this year, and I am not going to claim a causal line I cannot draw from a single report. What they prove is that the audience was paying attention this whole time, closely enough to report back on its own behavior in a formal study, which means the idea that nobody would notice a quiet exit was always a bet, not a fact. That bet has gotten worse.

What I want the people who stayed to hear

Written in the middle of the month, not at either end of it.

If your brand kept its commitments through the last two years without needing a report to tell you the community was watching, I want to say plainly that it mattered, and it was noticed. Not because a headline said so, but because the number of brands doing that shrank enough that staying became visible on its own. You did not need this letter to know what you were doing was right. But I wanted it written down somewhere, in the middle of this month, that the people it was for did notice.

To the clients on our roster specifically: none of you built your relationship with this community as a June initiative, and I have said that about every one of you in other places before this letter. This is just the moment in the calendar where it is most visible that the choice was the right one.

To the team reading this, I want to say something more specific than I usually put in writing. Building campaigns for this community during two years when a large share of the market was quietly leaving is not the easier version of this job. It would have been simpler, in a narrow sense, to work at a shop where this was one account among many, where a client's retreat was somebody else's problem to manage. Every one of you chose to build inside a studio where the entire client roster is this community, during the two years when doing that visibly carried more weight than it used to. I do not think that gets said out loud enough inside our own walls, so I am saying it here, in the middle of the month it is most relevant.

What I want the people still deciding to hear

If your brand is one of the ones still deciding how much of this to take seriously, I am not going to spend this letter scolding you. I will say this instead: the data above is a description of what already happened this year, while you were deciding, not a warning about next year. The buycott numbers HRC published this month are not a forecast. They are a receipt for a decision that has already been made by the audience you are trying to reach. The only question left is whether you want the next receipt to look different, and that is decided by what you do starting now, not by what you say in a caption next June.

I do not know what next year's numbers will show. I am done pretending I can forecast a political and cultural environment two years out, and anyone who claims they can is selling something. What I know is what this studio is going to keep doing regardless of which way the broader market moves: staying in the room past this month, for every client on our roster, the same way we have since 2022.

If you want to build something that holds up under this kind of scrutiny, our brand strategy work is where that conversation starts, and if you are ready to talk about your own business specifically, book a call.

Daniel Founder, The Gaygency