Maurice Riley.
Maurice Riley, Chief Data Officer Publicis Groupe ANZ
Recently, I sat in a room full of corporate leaders at the annual Australian LGBTQ+ Inclusion Awards, watching trophies be handed out for workplace equity. One thought kept circling my mind: these are the brands that know how to ‘secure the bag’.
For the uninitiated, 'securing the bag' is shorthand rooted in hip-hop and amplified by Queer communities. It means locking in something of real value. Not a one-off win. Not a short-term spike. An advantage that compounds.
In today's boardrooms, that 'bag' isn't a Pride Month sales bump. It's customer lifetime value. And you can’t earn lifetime value in June alone; you earn it in the other 11 months of the year.
That's where the disconnect sits. Most organisations still treat Pride as a campaign, while LGBTQ+ communities treat it as a credibility test. The reward for ‘passing’ is access to household spend in categories where loyalty compounds, such as travel, automotive and careers. Brands that only show up in June aren't just missing a cultural point. They're underinvesting in a high-value customer relationship.
Delving deeper, the sharper insight is what brand categories this audience engages with more than the average consumer. That, in turn, reveals the repeat behaviours brands could build if they stopped treating Pride as a one-month exercise.
Looking at signals in Publicis Groupe’s pseudonymised identity graph, we are able to analyse the aggregated and de-identified behaviour of more than 18 million Australians. With this we can understand audience cohorts as multidimensional consumers, providing insights and data-backed commercial cases for more inclusive brand experiences.
The households brands are missing
One of the strongest signals is in how households are being formed, and it’s not where many brands are currently looking.
Parenting behaviours over-index sharply in audiences who are actively engaging with LGBTQ+ related topics or interests. The data reveals this cohort is nearly three times more likely to engage with baby and toddler categories and are meaningfully more active in baby product purchases than the average household. These are indicators of real, long-term family economies forming.
That pattern carries into automotive. Likely rainbow family households are over 40% more likely to be in-market for a people mover and show higher rates of ownership. Yet, family-vehicle marketing still defaults heavily to a narrow, heteronormative version of the household. Parenting, caregiving, pets, chosen family and shared households seem to be the real logistics of life in a Queer home. It’s, therefore, crucial that this reality is being imagined across the full brand experience ecosystem.
Another trip, another country. Repeat.
Travel is where this growth audience’s financial firepower becomes impossible to ignore. Audiences who are actively engaging with LGBTQ+ related topics or interests distinctly over-index against the average consumer on travel. This cohort is nearly four times more likely to visit South America, and over 3.5 times more inclined to take a trip domestically in Australia.
But it's a category built on quiet calculations most travellers never have to make, like checking destination laws, scanning for places where holding hands is safe, weighing hotel chain vs. local stays, and second-guessing whether a double bed request triggers a side-eye at check-in. Booking.com's research confirms the commercial weight: 55% of consumers research a brand's inclusion credentials before booking, and 64% are more likely to book brands that are making a visible effort.
That is not sentiment; it’s a purchase filter. Brands that use Pride investment as an awareness lever, then meet Queer audiences with clear intelligence on their destination, safer booking cues and vetted local partners, do more than win the trip. They create a loyalty loop in one of the highest lifetime value categories in the consumer economy.
The career signal: trust is internal and external
This is where a familiar generalisation, often acknowledged within the Queer community, comes into play. I can attest to it firsthand, but the data reveals what sits beneath it. There is a long-held perception of the ‘overachieving gay’, driven by a distinct brand of professional ambition and upward economic mobility.
The data shows this cohort is investing heavily in their careers. Those actively engaging with LGBTQ+ related topics or interests are nearly three times more likely to seek career advice than the average Australian adult. They are also significantly over-represented in high-influence industries like biotech, medical and health, advertising, financial services and real estate.
This is where the Pride conversation moves beyond marketing. Because these audiences are not just consumers. They are employees, decision-makers, buyers, renters, travellers and investors. The same people experiencing your brand externally are also experiencing it internally.
Microsoft's Pride work is a useful example. Its ‘Pride is Alive’ campaign is built around employee stories, open-sourced for anyone to adapt, and is embedded into everyday tools. That's the point: when inclusion is lived internally and engineered into the product, it shows up externally in a way customers can actually trust.
So, how do you secure ‘the bag’?
The brands recognised at the Inclusion Awards weren’t just competing for talent. More broadly, they were building long-term credibility.
The real question isn’t “Should we spend during Pride Month?” It’s “What would we invest in if we believed this audience could be retained, grown and compounded over years?”
Visibility matters. But if the goal is customer lifetime value, the bag is secured in the other 11 months of the year.
Maurice Riley is also the executive sponsor of Égalité, Publicis Groupe ANZ’s employee action group dedicated to LGBTQ+ professionals and their allies.