Chris Dunne has handed over “the rainbow reins” at Outvertising, the UK ad industry’s LGBTQIA+ advocacy body, and his four-year retrospective became the most-engaged industry post of the week. The tally: a national LGBTQIA+ consumer census with YouGov, the first real inclusion playbook the UK sector has had, 600 people through four years of Outvertising Live, 100+ free mentoring pairs, 30+ conferences — all of it, as he put it, achieved “around demanding day jobs, without being paid a penny for it.” The role passes to Tash Beecher, the organisation’s first creative leader, who says she’ll make it the champion of creative intersectionality with a specific focus on Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ inclusion. The organizations that kept showing up through the pullback are the ones holding the industry’s attention now.
Chris Dunne has handed over what he called “the rainbow reins” at Outvertising, the UK advertising industry’s LGBTQIA+ advocacy organization, and the retrospective he posted on LinkedIn became the most-engaged LGBTQ+ industry post we saw all week — 236 reactions and 55 comments, with a working room’s worth of British adland turning up in the replies to say thank you.
It’s worth asking why a goodbye post did that. We think the answer is in the numbers he listed — and in one line near the end.
The Receipts
Dunne’s own tally from four years with the organization:
- The Outvertising Consumer Report — a national census of the UK LGBTQIA+ community, built with YouGov
- The Advocacy Playbook — the first comprehensive LGBTQIA+ advocacy resource for the UK advertising sector
- 600 people across four years of Outvertising Live, the industry’s dedicated LGBTQIA+ conference — an event that, in his words, “independently finances itself and helps support our wider work”
- 100+ mentor and mentee pairs connected through a free mentoring program
- Marches at Prides, dozens of socials, 30+ industry conferences and events, and a running presence in the trade press
Then the line that reframes all of it:
“What they manage to achieve around demanding day jobs, without being paid a penny for it, is extraordinary.”
Outvertising is entirely volunteer-run. No staff. A management board of working industry professionals across advocacy, commercial, communications, creative, events, finance, intelligence and learning & development, doing this in the hours around their actual jobs. Dunne himself is Head of Marketing at Thinkbox. When Outvertising advertised his replacement, the CEO role was described plainly as voluntary, roughly one day a week, on a two-year appointment.
That’s the whole story in one line: the body that produced the UK’s most useful LGBTQIA+ advertising research and its only real inclusion playbook did it on donated evenings, during the years when funded brands were backing away from the subject entirely.
The Quote That Explains the Era
Dunne said something in mid-2025 that we’ve thought about more than once since:
“It was a very quiet Pride Month in terms of visible support, and where five years ago we would’ve been quite hot on brands rainbow-washing, I’d take a few rainbow logos right now.”
He added: “Depressingly, it’s something of a radical thing to do in 2025.”
That’s the shift in a sentence, and it lands the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. The industry spent years having a genuinely useful argument about the difference between real commitment and a recolored logo. Then a lot of companies solved the rainbow-washing problem by removing the rainbow, and it turned out the argument had been the healthier state of affairs.
Dunne named the mechanism plainly too: “The newer challenge we have now is the fear of backlash from public support of the LGBTQIA+ community.” Not opposition. Not a change of values on paper. Fear — which is a much harder thing to argue a brand out of, and a much easier thing for a brand to keep calling caution.
What Actually Got Built
Here’s why the record matters more than the sentiment.
The Consumer Report is a real evidence base. Built with YouGov, it produced the kind of numbers that survive a finance meeting. UK LGBTQIA+ consumers are more likely to reject a brand misaligned with their values (64% vs. 50%), more likely to want brands to take a position on social issues (60% vs. 41%), more likely to recommend a product they’ve seen advertised (67% vs. 49%), more likely to be persuaded to purchase by advertising (40% vs. 31%), and dramatically more likely to engage with brands on social media (43% vs. 23%).
That last figure is the one we’d put in front of a client, because it’s the entire argument for content-led LGBTQ+ marketing in a single comparison. This is an audience that engages rather than scrolls past — which is exactly why we’ve built what we’ve built around conversation rather than impressions.
The Advocacy Playbook is the part almost nobody else does. Launched in February 2025 with the Conscious Advertising Network, it isn’t a manifesto — it’s an operating document. Organizational-level guidance on policy, hiring, retention and culture; individual-level guidance for everyone from account planners to CEOs on how to actually push queer-inclusive work through an organization that may be nervous about it. Then co-director Cassius Naylor framed the intent as making LGBTQIA+ inclusion “a systemic part” of how the industry runs rather than a buzzword.
Advocacy bodies produce statements constantly. Very few produce something a mid-level marketer can open on a Tuesday and use.
The mentoring and the conference circuit are the unglamorous half. A hundred-plus mentor pairs and thirty-plus conference appearances don’t generate headlines. They’re how a small organization stays in the room during years when the topic is falling off other people’s agendas — and staying in the room is most of the job.
Dunne’s summary of the four years is the sentence we’d underline:
“We’ve built a stable, thriving organisation that has kept LGBTQIA+ inclusion firmly on the advertising industry’s agenda, at a time when doing so has become harder, not easier.”
Who Picks It Up
The reins go to Tash Beecher (she/her), announced as Outvertising’s new CEO on September 7. She’s been the organization’s Creative Co-Director for the past two years, and by day she’s global and EMEA creative director at Syneos Health Communications, previously executive creative director at Pocc. She’s a WACL member with award-winning work behind her and judging credits at D&AD, Cannes Lions, the Effies and Clio Health.
Two things about the appointment are worth flagging.
First, her own framing: “I am honoured to have been selected to take up the position of CEO — and I’m particularly proud to be the first creative leader to take on this challenge.” An advocacy body that has spent four years building the evidence case is now handing the wheel to someone whose background is making the work, not measuring it. That’s a deliberate pivot, and a sensible one at this point in the arc — the research exists now; the question is what gets made with it.
Second, and more pointed: Beecher says she intends to make Outvertising “the champion of pure creative intersectionality, with a specific focus on Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ inclusion.”
We’d call that the most important sentence in the whole handover. QTIPOC underrepresentation is the gap inside the gap — the thing that persists even in campaigns that clear the basic LGBTQ+ representation bar — and it usually gets a panel rather than a mandate. Naming it as the organization’s central focus, in the appointment announcement, is a real commitment to be held to.
Non-executive chair Mark Runacus MBE said he was “thrilled to welcome a leader of Tash’s creative calibre to steer our next chapter.” She takes over an organization that has also seen joint CEO Marty Davies step down and four new directors come aboard this year — a lot of turnover for a volunteer body, and the reason the handover is worth watching rather than just noting.
The Pink Media Read
We’ve been making a version of this argument in the US for a while, so seeing the UK analogue play out with this much documentation is useful.
The organizations that kept showing up are the ones now holding the industry’s attention. That’s not a moral observation, it’s an observable one — and the reaction to a handover post is the evidence. Attention accrued to Outvertising over four years precisely because it didn’t have a quiet period. Brands that went dark in 2023 and 2024 are discovering that the audience, the trade press and the talent pipeline all noticed, and that credibility doesn’t come back on the same timeline it left.
Continuity is the actual asset. This is the point we come back to constantly. A brand that runs one campaign a year has to re-earn attention every time. An organization present at thirty-plus conferences, running an annual conference that pays for itself, matching mentors year-round and publishing research nobody else is publishing has a standing relationship — and standing relationships are what survive a bad news cycle. Showing up 24/7, 365 isn’t a slogan; it’s the only version of this that compounds.
The volunteer model is impressive and also an indictment. We want to be honest about both halves. It’s remarkable what this group built without pay. It is also strange that an industry measured in billions relies on unpaid evenings for its LGBTQIA+ research and inclusion infrastructure, and asks its lead advocate to run the organization in one day a week around a full-time job. Runacus put the conditions plainly when the search opened: brands and employers are becoming more cautious about visible support — which is exactly the environment in which volunteer capacity gets stretched thinnest. If your agency or brand has used the Consumer Report or the Playbook, that resource was donated to you.
Handover moments are the real test. Plenty of advocacy work is one committed person’s energy, and it evaporates when they leave. Outvertising is passing the role on with published research, a playbook, a self-financing event franchise, a mentoring program and a board structure already in place. Dunne’s word for it was that the reins are “in very safe hands indeed.” Whether that holds through the transition will say more about the organization than any single campaign did.
Where We Land
Dunne has also said he’d like to see a Rainbow Lion at Cannes one day. We’d take that as a decent measure of where the industry actually is — not whether brands post in June, but whether the work gets judged, credited and rewarded as work. Handing the organization to a creative leader who wants to be measured on Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ inclusion is a step toward exactly that conversation.
In the meantime, the lesson from four years of an unpaid volunteer organization out-publishing the funded parts of its own industry is a simple one, and it’s the same on both sides of the Atlantic: presence is the strategy. The brands and organizations that stayed in the conversation through the quiet years are the ones being listened to now.
To Chris — that’s a genuinely strong record to hand over. And to Tash: the LGBTQ+ marketing world on this side of the pond is paying attention.
If you’re working out what consistent LGBTQ+ presence looks like for your brand rather than a once-a-year appearance, that’s a conversation we’d welcome. You can always find us at PinkMedia.LGBT.
Authentic LGBTQ+ engagement, 24/7, 365 days a year — that’s what Pink Media is built for.
Sources: Chris Dunne on LinkedIn · Outvertising · LBB — Outvertising Appoints Tash Beecher as CEO · LBB — Outvertising Searches for Next CEO · The Advocacy Playbook · Outvertising Consumer Report · New Digital Age — Media Pride: Chris Dunne · Marketing Beat · Conscious Advertising Network
