Moving the people who believe in equality but don’t extend it
A national campaign on LGBTQ+ discrimination in housing, safety and employment, aimed at the 28 states without those protections and rebuilt a week before launch when a platform said no.
The Challenge
ost people who would never call themselves anti-LGBTQ+ also don’t connect their values to what happens when someone is turned away from an apartment or a job. Issue-based messaging, the usual public service register, tends to reach people who already agree.
I started from two hypotheses: that issue framing would not move this audience, and that many apparent non-supporters were really fence-sitters who could be reached.
The Audience
Desk research, GWI segmentation and qualitative work on barriers led to one segment: Selective Equality Believers, about 84 million U.S. adults who value equality but don’t extend it equally.
Market tests in Austin, Phoenix and Oklahoma City shaped the message before national rollout.
The Strategy
One narrative architecture carried across every surface, so each channel did a distinct job without changing the story.
- A Good Morning America premiere for the launch moment
- TV, CTV and online video for the films
- Out-of-home and digital out-of-home in the target markets
- Social, programmatic, radio, audio and podcasts for reach and frequency
I worked with the creative agency R/GA through production and consulted the campaign’s disability partner on accessibility, which led me to reject statistic-heavy captions that broke closed-caption best practice.
The Pivot a Week Before Launch
One week out, a major social platform rejected the campaign’s ads under its policies. Rather than lose the channel, we rebuilt around it with R/GA: new “We all deserve a place to call home” assets and a stripped-down landing page that met the policy without diluting the message.
We codified the lesson: a policy-compliant core message, plus full-spectrum messaging where the platform allows it.
What I’d Carry Forward
In 2025 the climate around the issue shifted. I widened the campaign’s aperture using Targeted Universalism, tested it with focus groups and message testing, and kept the Love Has No Labels ethos.
Design the message for the audience’s own values, test it before it scales, and plan for the platform that says no.