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Pride Month with Alon Rivel - Epi 22 · WOI Unfiltered

• speaker-0: All right, ⁓ I just hit record. Wait. speaker-1: Wait a second, wait a second, let me grab coffee. Good morning, Jenna. How you doing today? Good mor speaker-0: Morning. Please excuse my squeaky voice today. It's a struggle. Okay, so today. Today is one of my favorite episodes. We have one of my favorite people on. And I actually texted him before this and was like, we need to start five minutes late. I need a coffee to keep up with your amazing energy. So that is his level. So so excited this morning to have Alon Ravel on. He is one of my favorite people, former client, which is how we met. speaker-2: Been drinking mine since five A. ⁓ so speaker-0: Now, friend, he is a VP of marketing at Joy. He has worked across so many different amazing companies. and you are a father of a three-year-old, a gay man, very proud. And we're gonna talk about Pride Month today, which is amazing because you can just bring the most wonderful lens to this. So welcome, Milan. Thank you for joining us. speaker-2: Thank you for having me. It's so nice to be on like the other side of it with you guys and actually just get to do something fun like this and not just like client partner relationships. So really excited to be here. speaker-0: ⁓ can you just start just you don't have to go crazy in your background, but just give us a little bit to ground us in who you are and what your experience has been professional. speaker-2: Yeah, sure. I mean, so as you said, I'm currently ⁓ VP of marketing at Joy. It's a parenting platform app. ⁓ I spend my days marketing to, you know, one of the most emotionally and easily stereotyped audiences out there, new parents. ⁓ so I think that that in and of itself is a challenge. As you said, I am a gay dad too. So I built my family through surrogacy and IVF, which we could get into, but I've always been on the receiving end of every brand that markets to moms. ⁓ and forget sort of the rest of us even exist in the market. So I come to stuff like this from both sides of the table. And as a marketer who's worked at big brands like New York Times, Bloomberg, and you know, smaller startups in the B2C app world, I kind of seen it all. ⁓ I've been head of marketing, I've been CMO, I've been VP, I've had a team of 20, I've been an individual individual contributor. So I've, you know, seen companies rise, fall, get acquired, sold. And I think ⁓ all of that kind of shapes. My resiliency when it comes to all of these conversations. speaker-0: I have a question that's just I'm dying to ask you. speaker-2: Go ahead, go ahead, ask. speaker-0: I know. Well, I was gonna say you you touched on it, right? You've worked in the space of marketing to to families and to parents and to moms. But as a gay man, I can't think of very many programs or campaigns. We talk about CPG a lot on here. I can't think of very many that actually market to that community ever. So as we're looking at Pride Month and who's doing it right and who's doing it wrong, and I'm thinking about all the companies that are celebrating Pride Month. Can you think of an example of someone who were where you actually felt like they weren't just marketing to moms? speaker-2: Yes, but they've done it wrong. ⁓ so I have a house on the Cape in Province Town, which is one of the gayest places in America, and there's something there called Family Week. So during Family Week, it's like the biggest community of queer families come and congregate. It's actually the biggest gathering in America and it's really special for the kids and for the other, you know, lesbian parents, gay parents, trans parents, and there are brands that show up there. ⁓ but one particular, and I'm not gonna name their name in the past has shown up and almost was like marketing to like queer dads, gay dads, in kind of like a sexy way. And it was like, this feels off. Like we're talking about like it's family units. And like, yes, gay men are, you know, stereotypically very promiscuous, but you have that mixed with fatherhood. And like there is no blur there. Like that should not be blurred. And it was just like speaker-0: It's family week. Yeah. speaker-2: You know, there in queer culture there's like the term daddy and it's like, no, no, I'm a dad when I'm with my son. I'm not a daddy. And like actually so I think that like I've seen that and that's felt off. So no, I don't think to be honest, but actually there's a huge gap in the market, clearly, or there isn't a big enough market for any company to want to do that because it's so niche still. Like if if you think about like our surrogacy agency and IVF like clinics we worked with. They've only given had like in the thousands in terms of like how many births they've helped families come through in the last twenty plus years. It's not in the hundreds of thousands. So I don't think there's a big enough market for any company to wanna invest there. speaker-0: I'm even just thinking about like the diaper ads that we see, the the formula ads that we see, the bottles, that all all of that sort of stuff that you encounter when you're a new parent. Mm-hmm. And how isolating that must feel that none of them are targeted at you, you know, none of them are speaking to you. speaker-2: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think as a gay dad, you don't go into it feeling that you know you're gonna be different. And it's assumed, like I talk about this all the time. When gay men decide to go through surrogacy and IVF, I don't think we have that like trauma that like straight couples do. We knew we couldn't have a kid. Yeah. So if we did this, and it's like positive. There isn't that like emotional barrier that the IVF clinic needs to walk through with us that a lot of times there's like the hand holding that straight people need, which is, you know, a very real thing. But to us, it's, I don't know. We just we know that the diaper ads are not going to be for us. So we don't care. We just want the best diapers. We're going to go on wire cutter. We're not going to like cry that the diaper ad is for moms. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that. speaker-2: You know, like it's just like there are books out there for queer families, but again, th they I don't know, they almost like they lean almost too weird into like, ⁓ what it means as a gay dad. And I think it just matters also where you live. You're gonna have a very different experience. I live in one of the most liberal places in America in Massachusetts. Yeah. If I was in the South, which I have been in the South with my son and my husband, wasn't great. Wasn't wasn't good feeling. So it's different. speaker-0: Right. I took us off track, but I I had to ask that because you and I haven't actually personally talked about that nuance before and I was just curious. Yeah. Let's go back to Pride Month. Let's just talk about Pride Month in general. It's June. There are a lot of companies doing Pride Month. What's just your general take on Pride marketing? speaker-2: It's funny. I'm actually gonna take something you say and already argue with you. I would argue that a lot of companies are not doing stuff this year for Pride Month. So like if you look at like the human rights campaign, like corporate equality index participation for Fortune 500 companies, for example, I mean it it fell sixty-five percent. Right. So I was Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Just in one year. No, in one year. So right now ⁓ it went from three hundred and seventy seven companies. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ speaker-2: to 130, 131 companies. So I like looked this up because I was really interesting. And I think it's that alone needs to be discussed. Even in 2025, there was a huge drop too ⁓ companies cutting their pride engagement. ⁓ I think it's a combination of obviously political climate. and also really do these companies ever care about pride or did they care about bottom line margins, right? And profitability. And in 2019 it was like slap a logo on it, gay men have money, they're gonna buy things. And now it's sort of changed to being, well, what are you really doing for the queer community? And hot take, right? If you're you know, the cheapest thing you could do is just change your logo to a rainbow. But if that's all you can do, then it that's exactly what it is. It's cheap. There's nothing there, it's empty. speaker-0: I I would hope. And I do you're right. I think twenty fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, there were brands that were just doing that. And now people are interrogating that more and saying, Well, wait, but do you actually support us? Or is this just a thing to jump onto? Yep. And with that and with the idea of rainbow washing or pride washing, I do think you've seen some companies step back and say, Should we even do this? Are we really supporting them? So the companies that are still activating hopefully do have a stronger leg to stand on. But I don't know if that's true across the board still. I don't know if I really think that that's the case for those that are still activating, you know? speaker-2: Yeah. I mean, b before it was like, are you doing it? And now it's almost there's like, what are you not doing? Right. So it's almost like there's the p campaigns suddenly that aren't being activated, right? Like the target of the world, you know, the core slide, like all these companies that did stuff in the past, now they're not doing it. There's You can't like quietly leave pride. Like the exit is actually quite loud, even though you think the silence saves you for the queer community. We're noticing. and that's that's a huge problem. Target is a great use case. I mean, ⁓ it's been discussed ad nauseum. ⁓ but they were the go-to queer brand. Like that they built on that. They they beyond Pride Month, like they really seemed to stand on that. And the second it became out of vogue or not cool or it hurt their margins, they pulled back, but they didn't pull back enough. Right. So then like they actually upset both sides. They pissed off the queer people, they pissed off like the MAGA people. And suddenly they're everyone's like, Well, ooh, like it's like you either fully pull back or you fully pull in, but being like neutral, you can't be neutral on something like this. ⁓ so I think that that's also really important to know. speaker-0: So wait, I know Target's been talked about a lot, but let's just for anyone who's not familiar, I wanna go into that a little bit more. I wanna talk a little bit more about what happened because what I was reading, I was trying to make sure I could remember this correctly, was they got some flack in twenty twenty three, I think it was. But prior to that, to your point, it was baked into the products that they had that speaker-2: It was a strategy, right? It was this is something that ⁓ helps us sell. It helps us have a, you know, a go to market for pride. It's part of our audience we're speaking to. Over time, though, it hurt their larger base, it seems seemingly. So they pulled away, thinking that, ⁓ it's not gonna really matter, or pride used to be front and center in front of their store. Then it was like hidden in the back or completely taken out of certain stores. Like I used I used to remember actually getting excited for what pride gear they'd come out with every year for Pride Month because it was so cool and trendy. We bought it like our surrogate bought things for us from Target in 2022 for Pride in 2023 like that I had in my closet. And then came 2023, 2024, and I was like, ugh, I want this out of my closet. What was sentimental and pretty, suddenly had this really negative, gross feeling. ⁓ which is That alone says everything you need to know. Like I don't, I don't feel good about shopping there anymore. I feel like I'm just a number. I'm just disposable, which is the worst feeling you can have going into something. I feel more upset by them than Pampers not having gay men on the diapers. I don't care. Pampers never claim to do that. Right. So like they that that's so problematic to me, more than Pampers not having like a queer campaign. speaker-0: Great point. Yeah. speaker-1: Are there any brands you feel are doing it right for the queer community? speaker-2: You know, this is an interesting one. It's not about doing it right at Pride Month. It's how are you doing it all year, which has been discussed also in depth. But it's like, are you hiring queer folks? Are your benefits thinking of queer people? Are you donating to queer related organizations quietly? What are you doing that isn't loud? What are you doing as just part of your culture and your hiring practices? And your benefits? Like, do you have benefits that support trans folks? Do you have benefits that support gay men through surrogacy and adoption? Do you have funding for them when insurance companies are not, you know, funding us at all and helping us create our families? It's not about like, ⁓ look at our logo and here's our t shirt that has a rainbow on it. The brand I can think of that is has had a big like 180, I would say is like Abercrombie. Right? Like they are so queer coded and queer culture growing up. Like everything felt very gay. And then they had their huge issues with the way they treated staff and the way that they were anti-black people and were really problematic with their models and and their owners. But now it's kind of gotten cool again and pride for them, they Donate to the Trevor Project, right? They like put $400,000 towards Trevor Project that's front and center. You go into their stores, they have Pride Gear front and center. They speak to the queer community all year long. So it's integrated, right? Like, is it perfect? No. But I I hate this term, but it's like they're learning and like going back to their roots, kind of without going back to their bad roots. speaker-1: think the journey is okay even if you stumble, right? It that that's okay even if you recover well and you make it authentic to who you are is what is the most important. speaker-2: Yeah, like Abercrombie was always a queer brand, right? So it's just like let's not forget that. ⁓ but all these companies, like, right? It goes into the whole, like, I mean, Jenna and Emily, you know, we worked on corporate social responsibility for months when we worked together. And I think that corporate social responsibility is kind of dead. ⁓ it's performative, it shouldn't be. But when it's a for profit company, unless you're a Patagonia and you really are doing something and it's rooted in who you are and what you're doing and what you're giving back to the great old world. ⁓ like it why did these things even exist? They existed because they were look good for us to make money. I've been in closed door conversations as an executive where it's like we don't really have to do good. We just have to make our customer feel like we are. And that's that's what's really happening behind closed doors at a lot of places. And that's important to know. speaker-0: Think it I think it depends on the company. I think the larger companies have a much higher risk of getting just absolutely drived through the mud if they get it wrong, but they do also have the flexibility to put their money where their mouth is and really do it right. And, you know, now I'm kind of thinking on like the sustainability side of the house versus Pride. But I I think you do see some companies who have invested millions and millions, millions of dollars on sustainability initiatives. They are putting the money there and making a difference and it has become speaker-2: Yeah, like I don't know. Like I almost this is like a weird thing to say because it's talking about people as brands, but celebrities are brands in and of themselves. It's almost like if you go back to like when it was hard to come out, like you look at Alan de Generis, you look and then you look at like Ricky Martin. Ricky Martin pretended to be straight, right? And he had Livin' La Vita Loca and all these women pouring hot like wax on his body. But he was gay. And he is gay. And now gay people are like, ugh. Like, did we really take you in now? No. The the gay culture, queer communities will forgive you, but you have to sort of like still be ethical and still be a good person and do it when it's hard, not when it's like cool and fun and easy. So yeah, Ellen's like a monster and people say she's an awful person, but did she like come out when it was super hard? And did she have a big movement for like lesbian women back in the day? Absolutely. So give her her flowers for that. You could still be ⁓ huge icon in queer culture and also be a bad person, or you can be like a good person and not an icon because you did it wrong. Like you know what I mean? speaker-0: You're talking here about authenticity, right? You're talking about being authentic to who you are and standing behind it. Parallel this to the work that you do with marketing to moms and families, right? Why is authenticity so important? I'm a mom. I've I've had meds push to me where I'm like, this no, no, thank you. And then I've had some where I'm like, you see me, you hear me, you see the 4 a.m. feedings and like that sort of thing. But What's the line there? Why is it so important and how do brands get it right? speaker-2: Because you actually you touched on it when you market to moms, all you need to think of is what feeling are you solving for? What time are you giving back to them? What value are you adding to their life? And how do you do it in a way that they can trust you? That's what you have to think about as a marketer. So it's not necessarily like, ⁓ we have a parenting app, right? At Joy. It's not that. It's more about like, are we authentically showing up with our experts? Answering a question where a mom is freaking out at 3 a.m. and crying and feeling alone, does she feel relief? Does she feel safe? Does she have the answer she needs to be there for her baby so that then she could go and have an hour of sleep and get through the next day? Right. Like that's the that's where trust is built in that like ugly, difficult to like track metric. And that That's the thing. It's not the best food. It's not the best app. It's not the best baby tracker. It's not even the best diaper. It's the feeling seen, validated, and actually delivering on the promise. speaker-0: Yeah. It's I'm jumping back and forth between parenting and pride because I think there are some really strong parallels here. Yeah. And I'm sitting here as a mom thinking, yeah, there are some brands that have made me feel really seen, have have felt like they understand the experience. But as a gay man, what are those commercial, larger brands? I'm not talking like the little niche brands that make you feel like that. Are there any? speaker-2: I I f I go to the feeling, not the representation in the feeling. So like there's a recent ⁓ you might have seen it, like Disney Cruise Line ad that showed dad, he was straight, obviously, with his kid going to like the deck. And then, you know, he gets older and doesn't want to go on the deck with his dad anymore. And like I actually could cry thinking about it. Every time I see I don't know why it makes me cry, which is so Disney coded. But speaker-0: What does have? speaker-2: It's like they love to make children cry. ⁓ and like it's like, ⁓ mom's dead. ⁓ it's like every single picture. speaker-0: separate discussion about how there's always a dead parent. speaker-2: It's such a thing. But then at as the commercial goes on, that son, who's now older, is taking his son on a Disney cruise line and going on the deck with him. And when he goes back downstairs, he's like, Hey, grandpa, come up too. So like his and that whole I'm like, that's the feeling I want as a dad. And it like is through the dad's lens. Mom is there, but it's dad first. So even having Dad representation, forget about queer, is also very limited in a lot of these commercials and marketing materials. So even seeing that, I'm like, ugh, like I want to be so lucky to have that one day, that feeling and that moment. And like, do I want to go on a Disney cruise line? No, I get nauseous, but I still want that feeling. And I can relate to that feeling and it makes me have some sort of positive affiliation that like they understand families and feelings that families have. And that's enough for me. Now I'm a party of one, you know? And I also look at it from a marketing lens always. So it's hard to really get me. But when they do, I'm like, ⁓ that was good marketing. speaker-0: It was the emotional piece. Like they've got story. Yeah. speaker-2: Yeah. But that's like it's one ⁓ one, right? Like that's what was done before everything was like, what's the cack to LTV? Like growth hack. Like everything was emotional. Everything was massively produced, madman era, like beautiful, creative. It was all creative and now it's all AI slop junk. So yeah, the brands that do that I think are gonna continue to win. speaker-1: begs the question too, how important is it to try to be inclusive is since so many brands are taking that route, right? Like the I think your example, Alan, is actually perfect with the Disney cruise because it unlocked an emotion and and absolutely the brand connected to the consumer in the way that it wanted to. speaker-2: I think you just said it perfectly. I don't know if you call what you said. You say try to be inclusive. If you're trying to be inclusive, that's wrong. That's wrong. It should be like baked into your ethos or not, right? Like and this might be only my perspective as a gay man, but like I assume we're not gonna be included. Right? Like I'm sad. No, but like it is, but it isn't, right? Like it's part of like, you know Like there's just things you as women face that I'll never understand that you assume it's gonna be harder for you in the boardroom. You assume your pennies less. You assume that you need to like protect your bodies when you go out to the club. I don't think about that. I'm a man. I don't have it's just coded into like part of ⁓ the identity of being a woman in America or being a gay man in America. So it just is, whether it's sad or not, is beside the point. It just is. So any brand that like speaker-0: True. speaker-2: Does it to earn their flowers or do it to feel inclusive is so icky. It's like, you know, when a brand is like, hey mama, you're like, ⁓ shut up. You know what I mean? You don't trust it. But that's that's that's the parallel, right? Like where it's like where the queer marketing and the mom marketing, like we both like read bullshit real fast. speaker-0: Yeah. That is so true. Like that that's that's the thing. Immediately know. Do you actually understand how it feels or no? Because that's just it's inherent to watching whatever ad or creative. Like you know immediately if it was created by a twenty year old person, you know, who can't relate to it. speaker-2: That's the thing. Right, like Jeno, you like let's use Bobby as an example, right? Like you or like Frida. You know, moms are like right well, Frida, hold on, I'll table that. Bobby, you know, like women are writing that copy. Frida actually at points felt really controversial, but then there also recently got a lot of backlash because some of the ad creative they had come up with was almost being outlandish for the sake of being outlandish, and you could tell men were writing it. And it was like actually almost sexualized, like really weird things that were like cheeky but felt inappropriate and innuendo-ish. You should look it up. It's crazy. Cause I loved Frida's like ads until I love Frida. And they had to like fire some folks. ⁓ it was a lot of men in the product department and how they like went to market with the boxes and the directions and ⁓ speaker-0: Yeah. It's so intri See, now this is that's a great case study though, right? Because so Frida's a brand I have followed since I had my daughter eight and a half years ago. I had Eyli lived in Fort Lauderdale. Frida a Miami based company. Right. So I had learned a lot about them. I followed their CEO. It it's a female founded company, right? Which I love. They have grown rapidly. And I mean, part of me loves that, right? Like women empowerment, but also the products that they've been able to get out to market are great and they all do feel very intuitive to what you need as a parent. Correct. But you're highlighting a great example of how a company can get a little bit carried away and forget the basics of who they are and take it a little too far. speaker-2: It's almost like shock value, right? When it gets to shock value, it gets yucky. and you just said something also that I also don't think you realized you said, which is so important. You're talking about as a mom, as a woman, what you notice and like in companies, and they're not trying to be. It was a woman-based like CEO. It's a female-led company with female products for moms. So the trust gets built. They don't have to tell you that you see it in your own research. So it's the same thing with queer folks. Like a queer company that's getting it right is like, if there was a gay dad company, are gay dads running the company, are they understanding our challenges? How do they speak to us organically? Not just like, look, it's pride. That's where trust gets built. It's like completely rooted in their ethos without trying to be. It just is. speaker-0: You need to start a company. speaker-2: One day, baby. speaker-0: We're running low on time. So hot takes. And this is a special section we have added just for you because it's you. I'm gonna run through these really quick. Tell me, agree, disagree, tell me your thoughts really fast. Is marketing to moms harder or easier than marketing to gay men? speaker-2: Complicated. ⁓ it moms is harder, gay men is more dangerous. ⁓ but I think the hot take. The h the hardest audience is the overlap, queer parents, because we get ignored by the mom marketers and the pride marketers. speaker-0: Marketing to working moms needs to be different than marketing to stay at home moms. speaker-2: ⁓ complicated. You need to it's the execution. You need to watch the execution. ⁓ it's how you speak to each and you have to be careful not to silo each of them into feeling they're less than or not enough. So it really is about what you're actually selling and what you're trying to say to them and why that even matters. speaker-0: Can I also just correct myself there? Because that question in the way I asked it was all about moms. And I actually have plenty of friends where the dads are stay-at-home dads. speaker-2: But but also it like even the framing of it, it's almost like you're pitting moms against each other too. Like the working moms are stay-at-home moms. Like, do you see what society is even getting you to think about? This is what I mean. Like I inherently feel left out. You just did it without even trying to. And I didn't even fuck it. I didn't even think about it until you just said that. speaker-0: That's what I mean. Like I did it unintentionally and then I like, Wow, I just did that like speaker-2: And I didn't even realize it until I'm not an envelope. ⁓ yeah. But I that's what I mean. It's just like so there that you how can you not? speaker-0: See, this is the these are the conversations that need to happen anyway. speaker-2: That's why the PR girlies, right? Like exist. See, I just did it myself, the PR girlies, right? But like you exist to be that in the room and not another clot or chat GPT telling you how to handle the crisis comms, which so many companies do because they think PR doesn't matter. Like companies that are also investing in PR are also winning because they, the egos in the boardroom and are so large and so short-sighted sometimes beyond their lens of the world. Because they're in the boardroom, that the PR strategy is so important on how to handle when you do mess up, because you will mess up. Yeah. ⁓ so I mean, I'm sure you've come across this. You came across it when you've worked with me, people pushing back and you claiming you're not the smartest in the room, you can't get this right and that like we have to go with our instincts. And that's a really hard thing to do as a PR executive. speaker-0: Yeah, and I think you don't need to be the smartest in the room. You need to have thought out all of the angles. That's really a big part of our job is what are the potential responses gonna be to this and in eighteen different ways that others are not thinking of so that you don't step in it unintentionally and you you go knowing, Okay, here are the risks and I'm still gonna go with it, but here are the risks where I could get it wrong and here's where I could get it right and you know, one thing outweighs the other. speaker-2: Could you argue then that PR is marketing? Like, right? Because that's what a marketer does every day. Every single day. I'm like, how is a user going to respond to this? How are they going to actually understand this product or this service in a way that is positive? Like, will this have an adverse reaction? Will it hurt their flow? Will it get them to engage more? Will they spend more? That's all in a way, like getting into the mental psyche of the consumer and their response, which is PR too. speaker-0: So PR and marketing are of the same origin, let's say. When it comes down to it, you can segment them in different ways, but they all need to work together. If you have a communications team not working with a marketing team, that is a massive fail. Communications is essentially a function of marketing. They all need to work together. And if they don't, you're it's a huge fail. speaker-2: Yeah, of course. speaker-1: to be integrated, I would absolutely say yes, that PR is part of marketing. I've always thought that my my whole life. For one team, we're telling stories to stakeholders internal and external together. And it has to be the same playbook. We are running out of time a lot. So we're gonna ask one more question. and it is the impact question. We ask this to all of our guests ⁓ and each other weekly. What is your impact this week? It could be personal, professional, big or small. speaker-2: Honestly, it's doing this, right? Like a gay dad sitting in a comms leadership seat talking candidly, right? Like that's representation for the next person who didn't think the seat was theirs. speaker-0: I love that so much. Getting getting these different opinions out there and having open conversations that then people can go and think about, dissect, agree with, disagree with, but at least it potentially causes some additional thought amongst others. speaker-2: I've always wanted to be in leadership and marketing to bring that gay voice to the table because so many times it isn't there and it's not seen in executive functions, actually. So having it, I think just brings such it's my unique, it's my special sauce. speaker-0: Well, thank you so much for being here with us today. I love this conversation. We could talk for another two hours. We'll do a V two of this at some point. speaker-2: No, we could. Happy too. speaker-0: But thank you. I appreciate you coming on. speaker-2: Thank you for having me both. Thank you.