We The Culture program and social community launched in the Spring 2021 by Facebook to elevate, amplify and champion Black creators, culture and conversations relevant to the community. Celebrating Black culture is non-stop for We The Culture. The Black community isn’t a monolith and we lean into cultural moments — Black History Month, Juneteenth, etc., and its intersection — Mental Health Awareness, Pride Month, etc. to connect with the community.
One one of the many ways this is highlighted is through bridging Pride Month and Juneteenth moments. In 2021, we honored the moment through the lens of ‘Black Luxury’ and pushed the meaning of what is luxury.
For Pride Month and Junteenth 2022, our goal was to honor the work and contributions of those that came before us in the Black community today without overt branding, diluting and distracting from the core of its meaning to Black young adults (Millennials and Gen-Z).
We approached it through the extreme, radical forms of movement through our social campaign — ‘But We Move’. We magnified how simple actions can move mountains and how movement is not just in the physical space but celebrating joy, love, freedom, rest and creativity within Black culture.
To be less brand forward, we approached content strategy through the lens of co-creation and UGC content to feel connected with the Black creator community and its intersections.
Digging deeper into the co-creation we handed the mic over to creators to hear their story and see the world through their eyes. We launched two hero pieces: ’But We Move’ UGC 60 second video for Juneteenth of various Black creators expressing movement over narration, and ‘Move Towards Love’ Zine for Pride Month that sits an intersection between raw diary entries, and a scrapbook built to be a medium for personal expression, education, and protest — all led by marginalized voices. In supplement to the campaign, we had curated music playlists to Story Takeover showing the Pride Parade in New York.
The connection through the various content produced was in visual cohesiveness— blurs, blending, and bending our perceptions to evoke the physics of how we view things in motion in the real world.
Through the ‘But We Move’ campaign, we connected with people in an authentic, meaningful way to celebrate Pride and Juneteenth. Without creating a bespoke hashtag for the campaign, we were able to be less brand-invasive and rested on the visual connection outside of the branded hashtag. This approach allowed a seamless integration for creators to be seen and heard first while honoring two important cultural moments within the Black community.
Across eight assets, the campaign resulted in an average of 20M Impressions, 7M+ video views with 5,000 comments (62% positive/neutral sentiment) across Facebook and Instagram.
