Pride organizations are adjusting to operating without some longtime sponsors after again struggling to secure big brands’ support for their annual events celebrating LGBTQ rights, The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Patrick Coffee reports.

Major names like Marriott, L’Oréal and Red Bull continue to serve as top-level backers, and some Pride organizers say they are still in negotiations with potential sponsors ahead of June programming. But other marketers have reduced their commitments or opted out entirely. And most brands that withdrew funding in 2025 haven’t come back at the same level, if at all.

“We’re not going to return to 2019, where we had much bigger levels of sponsorship prepandemic,” said Patti Hearn, executive director of Seattle Pride. Starbucks’ Pride Network employee group this year curtailed its investment, for example, though its float will still appear in the parade. Accenture isn’t returning after years of support.

Sponsors “are just a little bit reluctant,” Hearn said.

I asked Patrick for more on brands’ place in this moment.

What are marketing leaders thinking about Pride this year?

Patrick: Many brands feel backed into a corner on the Pride issue. Corp comms leaders in a recent survey by risk management firm Gravity Research said they think lower engagement is the new normal for Pride, because they get criticism from all sides no matter what they do.

The percentage who said they will sponsor local Pride parades is significantly higher than the share who said they’ll post a story on social media or change their logo for Pride.

Have Pride organizers given up on top-tier sponsorship support from major brands?

Patrick: We have over the past 10 years or so gotten very used to Pride events and brand logos being kind of inseparable, to the point that some people found it too much, accusing some sponsors of “pinkwashing.”

But organizers for so long couldn’t convince anyone to be sponsors.

“We were begging for corporate support for the first 25 years,” the head of NYC Pride, Im Lynde, told me. It wasn’t until the ’90s that a few companies started realizing that they did in fact have gay employees, and decided they wanted to show support for them publicly.

Clearly there are lots of brands that will continue to sponsor Pride events today, depending perhaps on how important that association is for them, but some organizers are definitely expecting a lower level of corporate sponsorship for the immediate future.

That’s not ideal from their perspective, of course. Every Pride organizer I spoke with said it’s become necessary for the organizations to have a certain number of corporate sponsors in order for them to hold events at a large scale that are also free to the public.

And although people like myself who aren’t part of the community tend to forget it, the organizations behind Pride don’t just disappear after June.

Ryan Bos, head of D.C.’s Capital Pride Alliance, said, “Even though there may be a desire to kind of move away from some of the larger names, they're still very important for overall funding.” That’s the key point to me.

Veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley was fired by CBS News a day after taking aim at Editor in Chief Bari Weiss’s leadership, the latest turmoil at one of America’s most storied news shows, Isabella Simonetti writes.

Pelley interrupted new executive producer Nick Bilton during introductory remarks at a “60 Minutes” staff meeting Monday, accusing Weiss of “murdering” the show and questioning Bilton’s qualifications for his role.

Bilton wrote to the correspondent on Tuesday night to say that he was being terminated for cause, effective immediately, according to a copy of the letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Pelley, who has spent 37 years at the network, said late Tuesday that CBS News’s new management had eroded the program’s standards for political reasons.

“The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well,” he wrote in a statement.

Ulta Beauty credited marketing, new products and improvements to its customer experience as it reported higher sales across all of its channels and major categories.

The cosmetics and fragrances retailer said its stores benefited from a number of promotions in the quarter, as well as in-store marketing events to highlight new products from brands such as Coach and Beyoncé’s haircare brand Cécred, Kelly Cloonan reports.

Ulta also pointed to momentum in its e-commerce channel, helped by efforts to offer a more convenient shopping experience like an option to buy online and pickup in store.

Same-store sales rose 5.3%, compared with analysts’ forecast for growth of 4.7%. The increase was driven by a higher average ticket and an uptick in transactions, Ulta said.

The NBA Finals pitting the underdog Knicks against Victor Wembanyama’s Spurs don’t tip off until 8:30 tonight, but there’s plenty of adjacent business news to tide fans over during the workday.

• JPMorgan Chase is cashing in on its long-term partnership with Madison Square Garden and its teams, including the long-suffering Knicks, Sportico reports. Under its everything-but-actual-naming-rights deal, for example, the Chase logo will be at center court for home games in the series, next to logos for the Finals and the Knicks. The bank is running Finals-themed events around New York City like a “hoops and scoops” set-up with a Chase-supported small business, Salt & Straw. It’s bringing some fans to San Antonio to cheer for the Knicks. And it will illuminate its new headquarters at 270 Park Ave. with team blue and orange after Knicks wins.
• Speaking of that Knicks logo, the team’s emblem has barely changed since being unveiled in 1992. Fast Company interviewed Michael Doret about designing the iconic logo and provides a look at some of the original alternative approaches that Doret later fleshed out for a 2024 collaboration with the fashion house Kith. 
• The NBA is introducing new music by “Succession” composer Nicholas Britell and the rapper Nas, The New York Times writes this morning: “If successful, it will all lead to a new musical identity for the league, whose broadcasts are now spread across multiple platforms. It could benefit from consistent branding, whether a two-second tag or a minute-long promo.”
• And the once-unstoppable Warriors didn’t make it past the Play-In Tournament this year, but Steph Curry isn’t hung up on the past. The former Under Armour athlete announced a new sneaker deal this week with China’s Li-Ning that’s worth well over $300 million across 10 years. It’s both Curry’s shot at building “the kind of standalone empire Michael Jordan built at Nike” and Li-Ning’s attempt to take “a place among the world’s biggest sportswear brands,” Front Office Sports reports.

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