San Francisco Pride loses $300,000 as companies including Comcast and Diageo reevaluate sponsorships

[ThatRobGuy]

Per Business Insider:

• SF Pride will lose at least $300,000 in sponsorships from major companies for this year's event.
• Sponsors cited local budget constraints for their reduced support in 2025, SF Pride exec says.
• NYC Pride said partners are also scaling back visibility or reassessing their spending on the event.

I have some theories as to perhaps why some corporate sponsors are pulling back.

When an advocacy or activism movement becomes a "brand" of sorts and gets monetized (to the point where it becomes a corporate entity and people build actual careers around it), they have a need to keep broadening their scope in order to stay relevant, and the movement becomes abstracted to the point that people aren't 100% sure what they're even financially supporting anymore.

That could explain why we've seen both the acronym, and the number of pride flags, explode in a relatively short amount of time. In order for advocacy organizations to stay relevant, they have to be "fighting for something", and that "something" has to be something that there's a certain amount of societal pushback against.

That's why the pattern seems to be, as soon as most of society accepts something (or at least becomes tolerant of it), they have to quickly incorporate other things that most of society doesn't accept, so that they can have something to fight against. In essence, they have to keep nudging their advocacy just outside the Overton Window, so they have a "reason" for their activism.

When it gets watered down too much, I would imagine some of these big organizations that used to be corporate funders of some of these activism movements were probably scratching their heads thinking "Back in the 2000's when we started giving them money, we just wanted to show our support for equal protection laws and marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples...all of those original goals were achieved... and now we're giving money to sponsor Furries, Pony Play, and random fetishes??"

 

[RocksInMyHead]

Or, perhaps, they see the government retaliating against things that it deems "DEI" - including against private companies - and have decided that it's better not to risk it.

 

[Hazelelponi]

Or, perhaps, they see the government retaliating against things that it deems "DEI" - including against private companies - and have decided that it's better not to risk it.

I would honestly consider it a Trump effect.

The country just spoke saying no, there's definitely a "too far" with this stuff, and companies are trying to strike a balance with their image profile to reflect a better balance more in line with the people they are wanting to sell their products to.

That's what I figured.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Or, perhaps, they see the government retaliating against things that it deems "DEI" - including against private companies - and have decided that it's better not to risk it.

This trend actually started back in 2022-2023.

Per NBC in an article titled "Pride Organizations see timid sponsors":

InterPride (a big umbrella entity that oversees many of the pride events around the world) noted that in 2023, 22% of their corporate sponsors pulled back.

Indy Pride faced some challenges after some corporate sponsors learned of a planned "Youth LGBTQ Carnival" and wanted their logos removed from the event.

Kroger, Terminix, and Wells Fargo all scaled back sponsorships in 2022 and 2023.


With each new cause or thing they shoehorn into the umbrella activism movement, that's one more "risk of alienating donors".


While pride organizers may see "LGBTQIAP2S+" as "one team" in order to bolster their headcount...there's still a sizeable portion of the population that draws a line after the "B" with regards to support for certain forms of activism.

 

[Pommer]

Or, perhaps, they see the government retaliating against things that it deems "DEI" - including against private companies - and have decided that it's better not to risk it.

If it’s cheaper to not do “the right thing”, then companies will “see the light” and it’s Principle Officers will likely get “bonuses”.
Win-win!

 

[durangodawood]

If it’s cheaper to not do “the right thing”, then companies will “see the light” and it’s Principle Officers will likely get “bonuses”.
Win-win!

They will "see the Bud light".

 

[durangodawood]

I can see SF pride as being a bit over the top for image conscious companies in the current times.

It would be sad if pride type events everywhere were affected. My local ones are very G rated - which I personally prefer.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

If it’s cheaper to not do “the right thing”, then companies will “see the light” and it’s Principle Officers will likely get “bonuses”.
Win-win!

It is entirely possible that a company could've been 100% on board with supporting the causes of getting equal protection laws and marriage rights for gay people, but perhaps don't want their brand associated with some of the other things that go on at certain Pride events.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

I can see SF pride as being a bit over the top for image conscious companies in the current times.

It would be sad if pride type events everywhere were affected. My local ones are very G rated - which I personally prefer.

Yeah, the SF pride events (and the Portland and Chicago ones I've seen pictures of -- which obviously aren't shareable here) have stuff that's certainly not G-rated.


But I still think a bigger portion of it could be what I mentioned earlier... "Pride" has morphed into something different than it used to be.

What started off as a movement that had specific demands, specific points of awareness, and specific legislative proposals...has morphed into "whatever idea pops into the head of anyone who identifies as anything other than cis/straight", or sometimes just for flaunting things for shock value.

That's how you end up with a pride flag (and event representation) for "polyamorous pony play" (with a bunch of people wearing horse masks and butt-less chaps) dancing by on a parade float.

What once was
"Hey, we're going to march down main street holding hands and dancing to so that people can see we're here, we're not going anywhere, and we deserve marriage rights and legal protections just as much as everyone else"

Has become
"Yeah, we actually have all of the same rights now, but we're just going to flaunt whatever forms of unconventional stuff we know makes people uncomfortable...just cuz"



The writer David Sedaris, in a recent interview, quipped "this whole thing has been rebranded and redefined 4 different times now in my lifetime, I don't even understand what this is anymore and quite frankly don't see what I have in common with a lot of these people who now identify as queer".

It's more or less just become a blanket term to define "anything pertaining to sex that makes old conservatives uncomfortable"

 

[durangodawood]

Yeah, the SF pride events (and the Portland and Chicago ones I've seen pictures of -- which obviously aren't shareable here) have stuff that's certainly not G-rated......

You dont see picture of the regular old boring ones because..... who cares? No fun outrage to stir up!

 

[Tropical Wilds]

The other factor is safety, to be perfectly frank. Last year for Black History Month, a completely benign event my employer was holding made it onto the crazy portion of Twitter. Despite the fact we had done it twice a year (once in Feb, once in June) since 2013, for some reason last year all the pearl-clutchers got all hysterical about it. Before all was said and done, we had gotten about 3,000 calls from less than (2,000 numbers…) about said event, and the calls were just… Disgusting. Seriously. The things people said and threatened (despite claiming they were against our event for “woke immorality” reasons) was insane. INSANE. We got bomb threats. We got people causing scenes on site. Employees got death threats. I was called a race traitor like 100 times over the course of about a month. And that was the nice stuff.

We decided it was a fluke, held it again for Pride Month, and, again, it made it to the dark side of Twitter and we got hundreds of calls. Lots of “you haven’t learned your lesson, we will make sure you get it this time” threats. More threats. More scenes. More bomb threats. Employees got outed on social media and doxxed. Employees got threats in their home mail. Our cars got vandalized. We had to redo our security systems, our ID badge system, where we parked, even our lighting and our hours so employees wouldn’t ever be alone on site.

This year? We skipped the BHM event in favor of making contributions privately to the organizations we hold the events for and we are trying to figure out what to do about the Pride one… We still want to do them, but we also don’t want having a bomb threat called in every day for 10 days. Or employees being found on social media and their home addresses put on Twitter. We don’t want nut jobs coming in and causing scenes. We want to not feel unsafe at work.

In this, the supposed land of the free, in the pursuit of universal morality, people are acting like immoral lunatics and see zero contradiction in that lunacy. Even in Salem Mass, weirdos are screaming at people while they shop, vandalizing Pride flags, BLM signs, and generally invoking a God they don’t follow and a Christianity they clearly don’t practice while telling everybody else how bad they are.

 

[rjs330]

I'm sure that there are plenty of places where pride is just we want equal rights everywhere. And so the parade is just about that. But there are plenty of places where it's about public displays of all the sexual perversions and fetishes humans can come up with just to claim they are part of the lgb group. The public displays are an actual turn on to these people.

Companies are learning that those things aren't really values that they want to support with their money. The public isn't really for that either.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

You dont see picture of the regular old boring ones because..... who cares? No fun outrage to stir up!

They also don't necessarily go out of their way to distance themselves from it either despite all participating under the same organizational banner.

Sounds like an internal discussion that needs to be had at InterPride HQ.

In fairness, you can't really fault people for forming perceptions about what goes on a Pride events based on what happens at the 5 largest (most visible) events of the "brand".
(NYC, San Fran, Seattle, LA, and Chicago)

That's how most people form their perceptions.


Here's a good example of what I'm talking about:

The Salt Lake City chapter of the Proud Boys have collaborated on co-events with the local BLM chapter out there. Should perceptions be formed based on the small one-off chapters? would people be content with a "let's just judge every Proud Boys chapter on their own merits"

Or would it be a better reflection of "what the group is about" to evaluate what the bigger, more high-profile & influential, chapters are doing?

 

[rjs330]

The other factor is safety, to be perfectly frank. Last year for Black History Month, a completely benign event my employer was holding made it onto the crazy portion of Twitter. Despite the fact we had done it twice a year (once in Feb, once in June) since 2013, for some reason last year all the pearl-clutchers got all hysterical about it. Before all was said and done, we had gotten about 3,000 calls from less than (2,000 numbers…) about said event, and the calls were just… Disgusting. Seriously. The things people said and threatened (despite claiming they were against our event for “woke immorality” reasons) was insane. INSANE. We got bomb threats. We got people causing scenes on site. Employees got death threats. I was called a race traitor like 100 times over the course of about a month. And that was the nice stuff.

We decided it was a fluke, held it again for Pride Month, and, again, it made it to the dark side of Twitter and we got hundreds of calls. Lots of “you haven’t learned your lesson, we will make sure you get it this time” threats. More threats. More scenes. More bomb threats. Employees got outed on social media and doxxed. Employees got threats in their home mail. Our cars got vandalized. We had to redo our security systems, our ID badge system, where we parked, even our lighting and our hours so employees wouldn’t ever be alone on site.

This year? We skipped the BHM event in favor of making contributions privately to the organizations we hold the events for and we are trying to figure out what to do about the Pride one… We still want to do them, but we also don’t want having a bomb threat called in every day for 10 days. Or employees being found on social media and their home addresses put on Twitter. We don’t want nut jobs coming in and causing scenes. We want to not feel unsafe at work.

In this, the supposed land of the free, in the pursuit of universal morality, people are acting like immoral lunatics and see zero contradiction in that lunacy. Even in Salem Mass, weirdos are screaming at people while they shop, vandalizing Pride flags, BLM signs, and generally invoking a God they don’t follow and a Christianity they clearly don’t practice while telling everybody else how bad they are.

To be fair, these kinds of things are the predominant response for events people disagree with. That's part of our society today. It happens all the time to any conservative event. Bomb threats, death threats, boxing etc. This is NOT an left vs right issue. Both sides are equally as bad about it.

It stinks and it's wrong. Thankfully though MOST of the time it's just disruptive threats and not actually carried out. They are meant to disrupt or even shut down an event from taking place due to the fear they produce. The left and the right do this. They have learned that doing this can stop the event they don't like. We even see this in the attacks on Teslas and people that own them.

 

[BNR32FAN]

Per Business Insider:

• SF Pride will lose at least $300,000 in sponsorships from major companies for this year's event.
• Sponsors cited local budget constraints for their reduced support in 2025, SF Pride exec says.
• NYC Pride said partners are also scaling back visibility or reassessing their spending on the event.

I have some theories as to perhaps why some corporate sponsors are pulling back.

When an advocacy or activism movement becomes a "brand" of sorts and gets monetized (to the point where it becomes a corporate entity and people build actual careers around it), they have a need to keep broadening their scope in order to stay relevant, and the movement becomes abstracted to the point that people aren't 100% sure what they're even financially supporting anymore.

That could explain why we've seen both the acronym, and the number of pride flags, explode in a relatively short amount of time. In order for advocacy organizations to stay relevant, they have to be "fighting for something", and that "something" has to be something that there's a certain amount of societal pushback against.

That's why the pattern seems to be, as soon as most of society accepts something (or at least becomes tolerant of it), they have to quickly incorporate other things that most of society doesn't accept, so that they can have something to fight against. In essence, they have to keep nudging their advocacy just outside the Overton Window, so they have a "reason" for their activism.

When it gets watered down too much, I would imagine some of these big organizations that used to be corporate funders of some of these activism movements were probably scratching their heads thinking "Back in the 2000's when we started giving them money, we just wanted to show our support for equal protection laws and marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples...all of those original goals were achieved... and now we're giving money to sponsor Furries, Pony Play, and random fetishes??"

It just shows that these corporate sponsors don’t really care about anything except going with the flow instead of actually having a spine and making a stand on a particular issue. They’re just publicly stunts.

 

[Tropical Wilds]

To be fair, these kinds of things are the predominant response for events people disagree with. That's part of our society today. It happens all the time to any conservative event. Bomb threats, death threats, boxing etc. This is NOT an left vs right issue. Both sides are equally as bad about it.

It stinks and it's wrong. Thankfully though MOST of the time it's just disruptive threats and not actually carried out. They are meant to disrupt or even shut down an event from taking place due to the fear they produce. The left and the right do this. They have learned that doing this can stop the event they don't like. We even see this in the attacks on Teslas and people that own them.

Ah yes. I never get tired of the “but they do it too” and then talking about why it’s so much worse when it happens to you than when it happens to the person you don’t like. Yawn.

 

[FireDragon76]

It just shows that these corporate sponsors don’t really care about anything except going with the flow instead of actually having a spine and making a stand on a particular issue. They’re just publicly stunts.

And it's not like Pride events are going to go away just because a few corporate sponsors have no spine, either. Pride marches predate the relatively recent fad of companies falling over themselves to engage in this kind of political/social signalling.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

It just shows that these corporate sponsors don’t really care about anything except going with the flow instead of actually having a spine and making a stand on a particular issue. They’re just publicly stunts.

I don't think it's a publicity stunt in all cases.

I'm a bit cynical, but not quite that cynical lol.


It's perfectly feasible and realistic to suggest that there are plenty of people who've "gotten over it" and are okay with things like gay marriage, and don't recoil in shock when they see a gay couple out in public, but don't like the kind of stuff that goes on at some of the Pride events.


I've mentioned this before, but a good litmus test is...

Look at the act being performed/demonstrated, if it would put people off if straight people were doing it, then the objections have nothing to do with the LGBT aspect.

If there was a town parade, portrayed as an "event for the whole family", and me and my GF showed up wearing leather bondage gear and nipple clamps, and I got on all fours in a gimp mask while she whipped my bottom in plain view of a bunch of kids. People would understandably have some objections to that. But because the people involved happen to be gay at the Pride events, everyone is supposed to pretend it's "empowerment" instead of what it really is, which is just fetish exhibitionism (and would be labelled as such if it were straight people doing it)

If anything, the exhibitionists of the bunch are making things harder for the regular gay couples who are just normal members of society.

Granted, I'm willing to acknowledge the fact that when something is forced into the "underground subcultures" for decades (like being gay was), people get sucked into those subcultures.

 

[Merrill]

The NY Times indicated a recent, large survey of Americans indicated that 79% of people disagreed with biological men competing in women's sports, changing in women's locker rooms, etc.

An even greater percentage of Americans objected to transgender procedures for children

From a purely objective, business standpoint, allowing your company or brand to be associated with any of this is absolute poison. You risk lower sales, boycotts, and even shareholder revolts

on the other end of the spectrum, businesses who take hardline pro-life stances, or anti-gay-marriage positions, may also risk alienating some customers and creating unwanted controversy.

Private businesses have more flexibility in what they say --but publicly-held corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Target found this out the hard way (their share price has never recovered and is 25% lower than when the incident with the kid's underwear happened).

business is business. It isn't politics or religion. smart ones stay out of both

 

[rjs330]

Ah yes. I never get tired of the “but they do it too” and then talking about why it’s so much worse when it happens to you than when it happens to the person you don’t like. Yawn.

Exactly, we do that all the time. Thats why I said it's completely wrong, regardless who's doing it. We should be honest about this. I've seen it many times. The left has an event and some clowns threaten people and threaten bombings. People are doxed etc. The right has an event and the left threatens them, threatens bombings and doxes those who they disagree with. It's the society we live in now. And it's a real shame. Wouldn't you agree?