In June 2020, Fossil launched their second annual Pride campaign, which featured a limited edition watch benefitting two LGBTQ+ youth organizations. 

Pride 2020  took place during one of the most unprecedented years our generation has ever seen; with the world in the midst of fighting a global pandemic in combination with nationwide protests against systemic racism and police brutality, we saw an overwhelming shift in editorial coverage. This shift  created a challenging environment for pitching the Pride campaign to both media and influencers. 

Despite all of the challenges we were up against, we still saw huge success for the Pride campaign, garnering 31 press placements for a grand total of 1,265,142,122 impressions and 20 pieces of social content across 13 influencers, mostly at the unpaid level. 

We began strategizing around Fossil’s 2020 Pride campaign in early May — at that point the nation had been fighting against global pandemic, COVID-19, for 2 months, the news cycle had taken a noticeable shift, straying away from trend coverage and focusing almost exclusively on COVID-19 related topics. Additionally, physical Pride events (which drove much of Fossil’s traditional and social media coverage surrounding Pride in 2019) were all cancelled.

As a result of the above, we developed a strategy to begin pitching much earlier and much more frequently than we would typically to ensure that the campaign was consistently at top-of-mind for all editors. Our influencer outreach strategy was similar. In both cases, we focused extremely heavily on the charitable component of the campaign as philanthropic brands had taken the forefront during COVID-19.

On June 1st the nation and news cycle took another unexpected turn with multiple stories of police brutality and social justice breaking. Out of respect, this forced us to take a week-long pause on all media & influencer outreach surrounding the campaign.

When we resumed pitching, we shifted focus to amplify the voices of our BIPOC influencer partners, featuring them in IGTV videos on Fossil’s page. We also kept philanthropy at the center of our pitching with extra emphasis on the work that HMI, one of our charitable partners, does for the LGBTQ+ BIPOC youth community specifically. We made sure to handle all outreach and correspondence sensitively, letting editors know that we would pause on pitching them if they were not comfortable focusing on topics outside of the events going on throughout the nation at that time and let our influencers know that there was absolutely no pressure to post if they were not comfortable.

Throughout the remainder of the campaign we continuously shifted our media and influencer outreaches and conversations to coincide with the shifts we observed on traditional and social media.