Should Brands Show Up for International Men’s Day?

For years, International Women’s Day has held a firm place in the brand marketing calendar, inspiring high-profile campaigns and driving deeper engagement with women and girls.

International Men’s Day, by contrast, exists in a far more ambiguous light. Some might think that every day is already men’s day – yet the realities facing boys and men in 2025 tell a different story. Rising mental health pressures, a growing crisis of belonging and shifting gender expectations paint a more complex picture.

So where does that leave brands? Should they enter the conversation, or risk being accused of performative equality? And if they do show up, what does meaningful, credible representation look like in 2025?

Today, on International Men’s Day, we asked strategists, creatives and brand leaders from across the industry to unpack whether marketers have a role to play on IMD – and what it would take to contribute something genuinely constructive rather than just another date in the content calendar.

Pierre Bellefleur, co-founder at Strike.Paris

Talking about men today means walking a very fine line. We live in an era of extreme binaries, where every statement is instantly framed as for or against, and every nuance is flattened by ideology. Speak about men and you risk being labelled masculinist; avoid it and you’re accused of blindness. It’s a lose-lose territory, which is exactly why it deserves rigour not opportunism.

Most brands don’t dare enter that space, and those who do often reduce it to a seasonal activation, another date on the marketing calendar. But International Men’s Day shouldn’t be a mirror image of International Women’s Day. It shouldn’t be a symmetrical marketing exercise, it should be a moment for social inquiry.

The only way to approach it is with integrity, facts and context. Gender inequalities remain very real – structurally, economically and symbolically. Yet men today face their own crises: of identity, of mental health, of shifting roles in a changing world.

Addressing that is not anti-feminist; it is part of the same collective transformation.
The problem is that most brands struggle to hold complexity. They want to take positions, not start conversations. They jump to slogans instead of reflection. But just being today – morally, politically, culturally – requires subtlety. It requires language that’s not performative, but meaningful.

A brand has no legitimacy talking about men simply because the calendar says to. That legitimacy is earned through long-term commitment to understanding how gender, vulnerability, and social structures evolve.

In 2025, we don’t need more celebration days. We need brands capable of philosophical thinking, capable of speaking to men without re-centring them, and of speaking about feminism without instrumentalising it.

International Men’s Day could, in that sense, be an invitation to go beyond guilt and opposition, and to reimagine masculinity as part of shared human progress. But that requires courage – and courage, unfortunately, is rarely a KPI.

Chris Woodward, executive director at OLIVER

A lot of brands’ involvement in International Women’s Day is performative. So, if the levelling up of International Men’s and Women’s Day just distributes the performative tokenism around more evenly then no, we don’t need brands to do that.

The challenge I’d ask of any brand is to think more deeply and assess what their role could be in driving genuine change for either gender. The obstacles faced are different for men and women – and both are worthy of support. For example, men on average die four years younger and are three times more likely to die by suicide then women each year in the UK, whereas women are disproportionately affected by domestic violence and face significant challenges in the workplace.

Systemic change that caters for the specific needs of either gender 365 days a year is where brands should focus.

Cat Davis, group CMO at Atomic London

There are a lot of “days” cluttering the cultural calendar, and it can feel like brands are just hopping from one social moment to the next in search of relevance, like a kind of ‘cultural speed dating’. Earth Day is a perfect example: what began as a call to action often slides into surface-level sustainability claims. But International Men’s Day isn’t just another date to squeeze into the content pipeline. If a brand shows up here to just tick a box, it will ring hollow. It should be because it has something to say about the very real pressures and often unspoken challenges men face today: loneliness, mental health issues, identity, belonging, role confusion, friendship drought, lack of purpose. If a brand has earned authority or has genuine work underway in these spaces, this day can be a meaningful moment to amplify it.

Not celebration, but care and conversation. Not glossy heroics, but humanity. If a brand can hold space for that with sincerity, depth, and intent, then this day matters. If it can’t, then simply adding another hashtag to the pile contributes nothing, better to stay quiet than add to the echo.

There’s a whole constellation of other days where the intention is meaningful, but the brand behaviour can easily slide into empty performance. For example: World Mental Health Day, which is often reduced to gentle pastel posts and invitations to “check in on a friend,” while some may avoid addressing burnout or overwork within their own walls. For Pride Month, some may switch their logo to a rainbow for 30 days, then quietly disappear when the conversation moves from celebration to rights, safety, and policy.

The shared thread through all of these examples is that the day isn’t the work. The day should spotlight the work already in motion. It should be a checkpoint – what’s changed since the year before, both inside the organisation, and in the way in which it shows up outside? If the answers are real and measurable, then celebrating makes sense. If not, there’s a danger that we drift into the same territory as other days, like International Women’s Day. It might look like progress from the outside, but have the underlying systems, procedures, measures etc actually changed? Because true progress isn’t measured in posts or pledges, but in the changes that happen when no one’s watching.

Ultimately, allyship isn’t about taking the microphone, but listening, learning and using our voices to amplify.

Dave Jones, head of strategy at True

International Men’s Day is a reputational tightrope. It’s easy for brands to get caught in a culture-war crossfire, or imply that men face the same structural inequality so successfully highlighted by IWD.

But the context is changing. Concern around men’s mental health, and the lack of positive male role models, has become mainstream: look at the reception received by ‘Adolescence’ or Gareth Southgate’s David Dimbelby lecture.

This is creating a space for brands who have a legitimate voice in the conversation – those with appropriate products and audiences – to turn IMD into something genuinely positive and meaningful.

Those brands should use the day to champion men and boys who do brilliant things to improve life for everyone, regardless of gender. And back up communications with real action, invest in initiatives where impact lasts beyond the day itself.

Handled with warmth and inclusivity, this could lift IMD out of the culture-war quagmire and turn it into a moment that compliments, rather than detracts, from IWD.

Joe Conrad, founder and CEO at Cactus (creators of Man Therapy)

In 2025, there is probably no issue more important than the current crisis facing men in the US, particularly young men who are struggling and the statistics are alarming:

• Women now earn almost two college degrees for every one earned by men
  
• Seven in ten high school valedictorians are girls
  
• Nearly one in five men in their 30s still live with their parents
  
• One in seven men report having no friends
  
• Men are four times more likely to die by suicide than women
  

It begs the question, is it time for corporate America, and especially brands that are mostly supported by men, to use their platforms to advocate for men? The answer is a resounding yes and I’m looking directly at you National Football League.

The NFL has done an incredible job in lending its powerful brand to raise awareness about breast cancer with its pink ribbon campaign. Imagine if the NFL put the same level of energy into raising awareness about men’s mental health. The residual, positive the NFL could have on men, their families and communities is enormous.

On November 5, Marshawn Kneeland, a 24-year-old line-backer with the Dallas Cowboys took his own life, and that weekend every NFL team honoured him with a moment of silence. It is now time for the NFL to fill the silence with a very vocal commitment to improving the lives of young men.

Jordan Brady, founder at True Gent

International Men’s Day doesn’t need to mirror the scale or purpose of International Women’s Day; it should be the pickle you get with your deli sandwich. If brands need a thoughtful reason to exploit International Men’s Day, there is an opportunity: Why not spotlight the men who are evolving beyond the old model? Brands might highlight the men who support women and non-men, who model emotional openness, and who actively pursue equity rather than simply benefiting from it. Men who are great dads and show up.

A chance to show that modern manhood includes sensitivity, accountability, and allyship. If brands choose to participate, the value isn’t in celebrating men broadly, it’s in amplifying the growing number of men who are helping shift the culture forward. Remember, love sees no otherness.

Lynne Deason, leading creative excellence at Kantar

When brands champion International Women’s Day but ignore International Men’s Day, the silence speaks volumes. It tells boys and men they matter less. That’s dangerous when men’s mental health is in crisis and boys are struggling to find their place. As a mum of two teenage boys I'm living this. Advertising doesn’t just drive commercial success, it shapes culture. It sets expectations of who we are and who we can be.

Brands have the power to lead, not follow. International Men’s Day is a chance to celebrate the brilliance and diversity of men and to show there are many ways to live a happy, fulfilling and successful life. This isn’t about one day. If brands want to connect meaningfully, they must be bold enough to shape the conversation, not shy away from it. Kantar data shows this isn’t only the right thing for society, it’s the right thing for business too. Ads that portray men positively are more effective in both the short- and long-term.

Kevin Chesters, CSO

As long as clients or agencies could use the opportunity to highlight or approach some real and pressing issues to do with men’s health – mental or physical – then I think it could be a useful and fertile window for helping to solve some urgent challenges in the world.

We all know what those challenges are. And they’re not getting any less urgent: from depression to prostate cancer to male attitudes to domestic violence or the worst aspects of bro culture. If brands want to use one specific highlighted day to apply some of their commercial muscle to addressing those things, then I’m all for it.

If it’s just another tedious commercial platform to flog some gym equipment or to crack a few crap gags, then it can all jog on.

I suspect too many brands will end up in the second space. But I hope not.

Photo by Nabil Naidu on Unsplash​