Creators and Marketers on Ditching Skin-Deep Allyship

For brands, connecting with diverse audiences in resonant ways requires sustained community building. More than ever, that starts with giving more power to the people in those communities.  That’s what experts at Social Media Week 2026 said onstage Thursday. 

“Brands can’t own culture—even if they want to, they can’t. People own [culture], and actually, people own brands, because at the end of the day, we are buying, we are consuming, we are the audience, so we make the decisions at the end of the day,” said Alejandra Salazar, founder and CEO of the women-led creative agency Croing. “So when a brand really wants to be part of the community and participate in the culture, what they need to try to do is get themselves immersed into that culture.”

And the fast track for brands to become part of a specific culture or community, Salazar said, is to lean on the experts: the creative people and leaders shaping that space. “But [marketing decision-makers] need to care enough to then listen to you and understand what you’re saying.”

One of the voices shaping culture within the deaf community—and far beyond it—is Jackie Gonzalez, a deaf content creator with 1.9 million Instagram followers, known for her viral lip-reading videos of celebrities. She echoed Salazar’s emphasis on leaning into and trusting key voices within specific communities. “Take a step back and just let the culture be, let whoever you’re bringing on be one voice for that culture, allow them to have input.” 

Gonzales believes brands need to partner with their creators. In her experience, Gonzalez said, it can be difficult to navigate brand partnerships when brands are overly prescriptive, whether by trying to dictate to her how to behave as a deaf person or demanding a specific number of brand mentions within a video. In those kinds of negotiations, she said, “the best I can do is say, ‘okay, well, in my experience, that may come off like this,’ and then, it’s up to the brand to take that and decide what they want to do next.”

Brands should feel empowered to embrace specific cultures, but in a way that is well-meaning and authentic to their own ethos, said Joy Ogunneye, global innovation and brand comms lead at Aveeno Face, Sun and Hair. 

“We can smell when [a brand] is trying to create culture, and so it’s important for brands to ensure that it’s in line with who they are as a brand,” she said, adding that “it’s a fine line” between investing in a culture to appropriate or extract from it and investing out of a genuine commitment to “make a difference.”