Ad Council × Love Has No Labels · National public service

American Dreams: moving the people who believe in equality but don't extend it

As Campaign Director, I led strategy and rollout for a national campaign on LGBTQ+ discrimination in housing, safety and employment, aimed at the 28 states without those protections.

Campaign Director (contract) · Dec 2023 – Aug 2025 · Launched Aug 2024

$5.5MM+

campaign

states targeted

84MM

adults in the audience

The challenge

Most 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.

The insight

This audience responds to rights they already hold, not to an issue they're asked to adopt. The campaign framed three shared rights, a home, safety and work, as American Dreams vs. American Realities.

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.

That protected more than $200K in ad credits, and the platform became the campaign's top driver of site traffic, with an average click-through rate above 2%. We codified the lesson: a policy-compliant core message, plus full-spectrum messaging where the platform allows it.

Outcomes

50%

of exposed users sought more information

~36%

ad recall after a year

2%+

average CTR, top traffic driver

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.

What I'd carry forward

Design the message for the audience's own values, test it before it scales, and plan for the platform that says no.