It is May 31, which in my industry is not a date, it is a deadline. Somewhere tonight a social manager is sitting with a folder of pre-approved avatars, waiting for midnight so the logo can bloom into six stripes at 12:01. A second folder, already built, holds the plain version scheduled for July 1. Both files were made in the same afternoon, probably in March.
I know because I have made both files.
Thirty days of color, then back to navy. The whole arc drafted, approved, and queued before anyone in the company had a single conversation about what they actually believe.
A brand's position on a community is measured in the eleven months the avatar is not rainbow, not the one month it is.
That measure is especially blunt this year. There are hundreds of bills moving through state legislatures right now aimed squarely at queer and trans people, and a real number of the companies changing their avatar tomorrow have given money to the legislators sponsoring them. Those two facts sit in the same quarter of the same fiscal year. Employees can read a campaign finance database as easily as they can read an Instagram grid, and increasingly they do, and then they screenshot both.
The geotargeting is the tell that bothers me most. The stripes go up in Portland and San Francisco and stay off in markets where the company decided it would be inconvenient. A value that changes by IP address is not a value. It is a media plan.
Here is the part that gets lost. Nobody is asking brands to be brave. The bar is lower and more embarrassing than that. The bar is consistency: fund something in October, say something in February when it is uncomfortable, protect your own employees' healthcare in the states where that is now a live question. Do that, and the June avatar reads as a summary of your year. Skip it, and the avatar reads as what it is, a calendar entry with a design ticket attached.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and the giveaway is always the same question. Someone asks what the risk is of participating. Nobody asks what the obligation is. Risk is a marketing question. Obligation is a company question.
Ben & Jerry's gets away with June because Ben & Jerry's does not shut up in November. That is the entire trick and it is not a trick.
A value that changes by IP address is not a value.
At karaoke last Thursday in Southeast Portland, the host who calls everyone baby announced that Pride is next week and the room lost its mind, and then somebody sang 'True Colors' badly, at length, with total commitment. That was free, unscheduled, and worth more than a hundred avatar swaps. Nobody had to approve the file.