By the third day of my first Cannes Festival, I’d cracked it. I’d realised that if you stand in the right position from 4pm onwards, it’s possible to pay apparently unwavering attention to someone talking vigorously at you, while also enjoying a view of the ocean and the very agreeable sensation of the late-afternoon sun flickering across your face.

If you wear polarised spectacles, provided you do an occasional head nod, you can even get away with closing your eyes for four or five minutes during the interaction. As your new friend grows ever more enthused about AI or trust or 3D-printed toasters, you steadily float off into wine-fuelled early-evening bliss.

Yes, Tuesday afternoon was going beautifully. Until someone thrust a microphone into my hand and pushed me onto a couch next to other marketing people to answer a set of random questions.

I am opposed to ‘fireside chats’ and ’roundtables’. I avoid them at all costs because they are just an excuse to fill a conference programme with vacuous content from people who have done zero preparation on a topic they know nothing about and earnestly don’t want to offend others on. “That was a brilliant panel session,” said no marketer ever.

And, sure enough, my hastily convened session was a mish-mash. Fortunately the audience, like the speakers, were all pleasantly shitfaced. And I found that if I moved my seat ever so slightly, I could see the ocean, close my eyes and enjoy the sun dancing across my face once again while someone on the podium discussed privacy or robots or creative tension. I just had to say “interesting” or “hmm” into the mic every now and again for cover.

Signalling inclusivity

But my bliss was again disturbed by someone asking me something specific. Pride month was coming to an end, the questioner pointed out. Fewer brands had “rainbowed” their logo this year. What was my take?

“Fuck,” I thought. This is a a proper question. Then I remembered I had written a column about the topic. I pulled it dustily out of long-term memory and summarised it, badly.

Every brand had gone down the path of rainbowing their logo in recent years, I observed, thus making the act itself less meaningful. And while brands happily repainted logos, they were doing sweet fuck-all about proper representation for the LGBTQ+ community. So, it did make sense to pull back.

Ritson: Transforming logos for Pride has lost brand impact and become ‘rainbow-washing’

I may have slurred a bit, but my general answer was accepted and someone quickly asked Rory Sutherland about framing, then I was back in ocean mode before you could hum the first bars of Club Tropicana.

As the sun faded and the panel ended, Tamara Littleton, the founder of Social Element, sat next to me on the sofa and did an amazing job of making me realise I was entirely full of shit without saying I was entirely full of shit.

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, her point was simple but powerful. She feels “othered” all the time. Most members of the community do. Especially younger, more vulnerable marketers, employees and customers. Seeing rainbow flags and logos during pride was not virtue signalling, it made these people feel seen and safe. Fewer brands supporting Pride than in previous years was a worrying thing because the community feels less supported.

I took in what Tamara was telling me. I sing baritone for the hetero-out-of-tune men’s choir, so I had totally missed this perspective. I saw only the business ramifications of supporting Pride and not the deeper, more important signalling effects of making people who sometimes don’t feel part of it, feel part of it.

Showing your audience an LGBTQ+ consumer in your ad will not damage either the short-term impact or long-term brand-building potential of your campaign.

So, I agreed with her. But we hit on an interesting discussion about what companies will do if the corporate implications of supporting Pride are neutral or even negative. You will recall the last decade of purpose wank had incorrectly portrayed every socio-cultural purpose as also being fiscally positive, claiming that not only are you doing the right thing, you will also make more money doing it.

That’s total pants of course. For the most part, taking a stand for others, animals, the planet or any other socio-cultural cause is much more likely to cost you money than make it. Now that we are entering this more realistic, nuanced and complex era, I am fascinated by how many companies will still proclaim purpose to be at the heart of what they do.

Take the sword of LGBTQ+ representation. It is surely righteous, but it also cuts both ways for the companies that wield it. Yes, you attract more members of the community and those who support them. But you also lose those who don’t support the gay community. And in many cases that latter group, at least for this small period in history, might be larger than the former. Do brands still want to do the right thing when the benefits aren’t commercially apparent? Or when they are outweighed by the costs?

‘The penny has dropped’: Is purpose having a crisis of confidence?

Inclusion versus exclusion

One of the great things about Cannes is that you are usually only five paces away from the marketer you want to talk to. Sure enough, Andrew Tindall from System1 was sitting at the next table. He carries with him the mighty System1 database, so I asked him two questions. How many brands feature LGBTQ+ consumers in their ads? Second, how do these ads perform versus the general database? He promised to get back to me.

When System1 looks at the degree to which TV ads in June, Pride month, did or didn’t present LGBTQ+ within their content, it’s apparent that there is a shortfall. Around 9% of the British population belong to the community, but only 2.5% of British ads show that community prominently in their narratives.

There is an obvious and important explanation for this shortfall, other than good old-fashioned homophobia: sexual orientation and identity don’t explicitly play a role in the majority of commercial executions. A bisexual man buys a burger the same way that a heterosexual man does. A lesbian walks into a bank just like anyone else. While the blue in the first pie chart, above, appears to show ads featuring heterosexual consumers, the reality is more complex. It mostly just features people whose orientation is entirely indeterminate.

Brands can, of course, make the decision to overtly identify the protagonists in their ads as being members of the LGBTQ+ community. That would certainly achieve the signalling effect that Tamara Littleton described in Cannes. But it may also detract from the nature of the brand’s objectives and advertising effect. Not because of any residual homophobia on the part of the audience, but simply because when you are selling burgers or banking, the orientation of the consumer has literally nothing to do with it.

Whether brands do or don’t do that is less important than my second question. Namely, whether brands do face a commercial penalty if they represent members of the LGBTQ+ community in their ads. And Tindall sent me that data too, comparing the set of all UK TV ads from June against those featuring LGBTQ+ visible consumers.

The reassuring result is that there is fuck-all difference. There is a small improvement in short-term ‘Spike’ ratings for LGBTQ+ ads but, generally speaking, it’s apparent that what you lose from some sections of the audience you gain from others. And that the net result of representation is essentially zero.

What’s Pride got to do with it? Exploring gay men’s views on representation

No reason not to be inclusive

Normally that’s an outcome that tells marketers not to bother. If we were testing the inclusion of distinctive assets or an emotional storyline and the difference was this minor, we’d forget about it and close the book. But the good news for marketers, assuming they support diversity, is they can do the right thing with their ads and not be penalised for it. Showing your audience an LGBTQ+ consumer in your ad will not damage either the short-term impact or long-term brand-building potential of your campaign.

Obviously, this is a broad average result drawn from more than 200,000 British consumers. One might expect certain customer bases to skew more negatively against LGBTQ+ representation. And indeed that others will go the other way. But we should avoid assumptions and settle, for now, with the perspective that most brands can expect a neutral response from their consumers, should they show LGBTQ+ consumers in their ads.

That neutrality is important because it speaks to a more realistic, more challenging but ultimately more worthwhile debate about purpose and about brands doing the right thing. Whether it is food waste, animal rights, social inclusion or a raft of other non-commercial objectives, it’s time to accept that marketers now inhabit a neo-purpose world. One in which the purpose of purpose is purpose. One where we choose to do these things not because of a spurious 10% increase in top-line sales, but because as a company we want to do them.

The good news is that in many cases – take LGBTQ+ representation – the upside may be zero but so is the downside. And that opens the possibility to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Whether companies can make this case when the commercial impact is a negative one is an intriguing question. But at least we are now starting to have proper, grown-up discussions about the power (and lack of power) of purpose.

Mark Ritson is the founder of the Mini MBA in Marketing. He is (now) steadfastly in favour of brands using the rainbow colours of Pride to jazz up their logos every June.