awareness days: this is why we can’t have nice things
Heart beats faster, breathing intensifies, a bead of sweat trickles down. The social media campaign is about to go live. All the hashtags are there. All the glitzy designs are ready. Some poor soul’s testimonial is about to hit the feeds. ‘This is the story of [insert name]. At [insert organisation], we remain committed to raising much needed awareness about [insert cause], today and every day’. And scene. Another social issue, solved.
The idea of an awareness moment in time comes from grassroots groups, community leaders and human rights activists. It was always intended as a tactic to draw the attention of the public and decision-makers to specific causes, events, or conditions by having a designated moment in time to focus on educating, building community and promoting solutions. One of the earliest examples is the first International Workers’ Day (May Day) observed in 1889 to support workers’ rights in Europe and the US.
Later, the United Nations and other institutions began adopting resolutions proclaiming international days such as International Women’s Day, World Humanitarian Day or World Refugee Day to draw attention of and to mobilize support for significant objectives. Observance, commemoration and celebration ones like Black History Month or Pride Month are similar in nature.
Civil society organisations and groups also came up with and launched other unofficial yet widely recognized awareness days like World Cancer Day or International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia in recent years, which we saw take off globally exactly because of that shared struggle and need for education, movement building and action.
Then there’s the other side of the coin.
The side that saw an opportunity for sales and brand awareness, which in return, washed out purpose, commodified and made it all cheap and kitsch. This was long coming though. Once Christmas, Día de Muertos, Easter and other public and religious holidays were exhausted and Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Halloween and the rest weren’t really filling up those milestone calendars, corporate ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’ came through. Brands began casting a wider net and started racing to colonize and cash in wherever and however possible.
Witnessing this exploitation for the sake of sales and brand awareness is a bitter pill to swallow as someone whose career grew up in comms agencies. I find a semblance of glee in the attempts that backfire and expose how out of touch the majority of them are as are their clients. Remember the ‘Pride Whopper’ from last year which followed the ‘Women belong in the kitchen’ the year before? Rather than the odd one out, it’s the standard. I’ve had to work on enough of these types of campaigns, albeit not consumer because yuck, to know that the end goal has nothing to do with positive action and everything to do with growth, sales and visibility. That most of the time, no community voices are involved and that proposals are led by principles of ‘not rocking the boat’ and ‘not reinventing the wheel’. If I got a pound for every time I’ve heard leaders say that, I could afford to go on a pointlessly dangerous expedition by now.
But if it’s not causing more harm, does it really matter what this or that company posts on their social media or says in their press release? Surely people can exercise judgment and decide for themselves.
Even if we were to completely ignore the ethical failure, the exploitative intent and the fact that not everyone has critical thinking skills or understands how the capitalist machinery works, it still causes plenty of harm.
The agencies who have mastered corporate tokenism wasted no time in exploiting this further. Recruitment is a pertinent example. I have personally found it soul-crushing having to weed out potential employers due to the disconnect between their public face and what truly happens once you’ve crossed the electric gates in the lobby. During interviews, hiring managers smile proudly after revealing their employee resource group has done mindfulness sessions for Mental Health Awareness Week while their teams are severely under-resourced, overworked and underpaid. Or talk extensively about their commitments to neurodivergent employees during Neurodiversity Week, yet don’t have any policies or plans in place to accommodate needs. They boast about taking pride in their diverse leadership which almost exclusively means white, middle-class women and even that excludes C-suite roles and conveniently overlooks pay gaps. Therefore, after a grueling process of seeking, applying and interviewing for positions, you can end up in a job that is nowhere near the over-inflated messaging they push out externally. Whether and when you can leave is then dependent on your background, circumstances and the job market, and it still means you must start the stressful, overwhelming and time-consuming process all over again.
Secondly, piggybacking on awareness days, weeks or months has become the norm for businesses that saw an opportunity to capitalize on D,E&I and ESGs products and offers, which have been springing up like mushrooms in the past four years or so. This endangers their clients, whether other businesses or organizations, seeking to hire experts who can get their house in order. More critically, it further impacts people from historically marginalized communities who are employees or end users of those services who rightfully expect change.
Thirdly, in today’s crowded digital environment, there is a limit to share of voice, algorithm ranking and people’s attention spans. Content from big businesses will get prioritized and sky-rocketed to the top of people’s feeds and news, making them front and centre rather than the cause. This dilutes and distracts from the work, messages and calls to action of those on the frontlines. A grassroots organisation’s campaign won’t be able to compete with a corporation’s massive ad budget. The current state in which media outlets operate, especially large ones like BBC or the Daily Mail, will also prioritize covering brand-led soft news over social justice efforts that may be deemed controversial.
Is there a happy medium in all of this?
The happy medium is less talk, fewer stunts, more intentional practice and corporate humility. Say International Transgender Day of Visibility is coming up. Instead of briefing the communications and marketing department on ‘coming up with something within a £5,000 budget’ which will contribute to absolutely nothing to the community, donate that to a grassroots organization where it can have a significant impact to their work, ensure trans inclusive policies and processes exist and are upheld, hire and retain trans employees, centre trans voices in debates that affect them, lead by example of doing now, not at some point in the future when it’s convenient. It takes time and it’s not as sexy as a GIF with pronouns (which for the life of me, I still cannot understand the strategy or logic behind) but anything less is not enough.
So many times I’ve been in meeting where metrics from awareness activations were presented, extrapolating by exaggeration that real-life change was achieved when in fact, it’s all brand related.
Whenever the corporate world has crossed over into civil society and grassroots work, it only poisoned. Whatever little trust there was, has been eroded and a life insurance discount or a teary video testimonial won’t fix that. Multinationals like Coca-Cola or MasterCard can interject themselves into community-led moments like Pride all they want, most of us will reject, retaliate and counter. The rest will catch up.
The need for a moment in time to come together, speak up and demand justice did not come from boardrooms and corridors of powers. It was not born at the epicentre of humanity’s nadir that plunges people into poverty and the planet into destruction while they pat themselves on the back for doing less than the very least to address the issues they themselves created and perpetuated. In the words of the South African disability rights movement in the 1990s, nothing about us, without us, is for us, the only happy medium I see is where this is authentically and honestly put in practice.
