Building Credibility with Skeptical Audiences
I transformed AT&T's multicultural marketing by replacing campaigns with cultural platforms that earned trust, strengthened brand preference, and ultimately gave the brand permission to create within culture.
Nine frames from the tour: stage, house, and street.
Turn Up the Love Tour: stage design and audience.
A visible brand in a skeptical community.
AT&T had been present at Pride for more than a decade, but presence is not participation. The community had learned to distinguish between brands that showed up in June and brands that showed up for real, and it graded on that difference.
The business need was more consequential than a marketing refresh. Preference among LGBTQ+ households had plateaued. Employees inside the company wanted a program they could defend. And competitors were moving into the same territory with better craft and clearer conviction.
The brief was to earn a role AT&T could credibly keep the other eleven months of the year.
Consumers don't build trust campaign by campaign.
The research kept pointing us in the same direction: people were paying attention to what AT&T actually did, not just what we said. And they had years of experience with us to judge.
The brands that had earned real standing inside LGBTQ+ culture were the ones that had funded infrastructure, including artists, community organizations, employee resource groups, and civic partners, long before asking for cultural credit.
That changed the work to be done first. We had to build the relationship before we could ask for credit. The brand had to build the room before it could host a party in it.
People don’t decide whether to trust a brand because of one campaign. They decide based on what the brand does over time.
Retire the campaign. Commission a platform.
Three decisions shaped the work.
- iMove investment upstream, into artists, community organizations, and civic partners, before spending it on advertising surfaces.
- iiStructure the program as a multi-year commitment with a shared editorial line, not an annual sponsorship cycle.
- iiiHold the work to a standard employees would defend inside the company. Internal credibility was the first proof of external credibility.
One platform, coordinated on a single calendar.
Turn Up the Love gave all of that work a common home. Music, live experiences, community investment, artist investment, partner amplification, and employee programming could build on one another instead of operating as separate efforts.
Music commissioned with LGBTQ+ artists, including Wrabel's Pride anthem 'Turn Up the Love,' released on their terms and credited on the record.
A national tour hosted in AT&T flagship retail environments across Chicago, San Francisco, and Dallas, converting commercial space into cultural space.
Multi-year giving to The Trevor Project and LOVELOUD Foundation, structured for durability rather than announcement value.
Internal experiences that gave the workforce a program to participate in.
The metrics that mattered.
The platform lifted brand perception 43 points and consideration 27 points among target audiences, and drove $40M in lifetime value from new subscribers: durable gains that held through economic cycles and category price competition.
Internal survey gains, resource-group participation, and voluntary contribution to the platform's execution moved in parallel, and the workforce became a first line of proof.
Coverage the platform earned.
Trade and mainstream press covered the work as culture, the outcome the platform was designed to earn.
Wrabel on Writing Pride Anthem 'Turn Up the Love'
LOVELOUD powered by AT&T music festival celebrates and supports LGBTQ+ youth
AT&T Releases LOVELOUD Mini-Series for National Coming Out Day
Trevor Project Takes Text, Chat Services 24/7 with AT&T Financial Support
Industry honors across the platform's run.
Shorty Impact Awards recognition, twice, for programs that treated community partnership as the point rather than the packaging.
AT&T x Miami Beach Pride: Connecting to Pride
8th Annual Shorty Impact Awards
AT&T The Love Connection
7th Annual Shorty Impact Awards
From sponsor, to participant, to creator.
Over time, the role AT&T was allowed to play changed. AT&T entered the room as a sponsor, and contribution turned it into a participant. Sustained investment in artists, community organizations, and civic partners earned the brand something a media plan cannot buy: permission to create within LGBTQ+ culture.
Original music was commissioned, flagship retail stores became performance venues, and the Turn Up the Love Tour , featuring Wrabel, Slayyyter, Years & Years, Gigi Perez, Kelechi, Wuhryn Dumas, and Coco & Breezy, was livestreamed nationally, with artists asking to participate.
We started as a sponsor. We earned the chance to become a creator.
The most durable brand programs are the ones a company would be embarrassed to stop running.
“What role does the brand actually play in our lives?”
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