What were the top 5 most read Memos of the year?

For those of us working in DEI and strategy, helping clients engage with different communities, build fairer workplaces, and keep a thumb on the pulse of cultural discourse, it’s no secret that this year came with serious external resistance. Headlines skewed relentlessly negative, and for long stretches it felt like we were collectively holding our breath, waiting for something, anything, that resembled good news.

Midway through the year, we made a conscious shift. Each weekly Memo would include at least one positive story. People doing the work well, innovating thoughtfully, becoming role models, or simply giving us something to hold onto. Not to sugarcoat reality, but to remind ourselves, and our readers, that progress rarely disappears. In a sea of misinformation, social media noise, and moral panic, it often just gets quieter.

As we wrap up the year, we decided to do a round-up of our five most engaged-with stories. The ones that turned the most heads, sparked the most conversation, and drew the most attention.

DEI in Disguise

Coming into 2025 was understandably daunting for anyone working under the DEI acronym. Even in the years before, it felt like a global race to see which letter would be sliced off or rearranged next.

This year, though, brought the most overt challenge yet. With Trump returning to office, a conservative policy agenda followed quickly, focused on immigration, education reform, and removing what he described as “woke” ideology from public institutions. Central to this were several Executive Orders that dismantled federal DEI programmes. Agencies across the US government shut down DEI offices, removed guidance, and placed DEI staff on leave.

The private sector adjusted too. Companies like Meta and Amazon began scaling back or reframing their inclusion work due to political pressure and legal uncertainty. Each week, more names emerged, extending well beyond the US, leaving many people asking the same questions.

Did they ever care about DEI in the first place?

Is this the end of DEI?

At the time, we described what we were seeing as a quiet shift from DEI to inclusion. Diversity had become too hot a word in Trump’s world, almost unspeakable. 

However, what hadn’t changed were the fundamental and recognised business benefits. After the initial scramble and continuing into the rest of the year, we saw organisations continue the work, just dressed differently in fresh lexicon.

This shift also exposed a long-standing challenge for organisations in managing their data regarding inclusion. To help address this, we created the Inclusion Model. An approach to understand inclusion that helps organisations track their inclusive progress over time.

St George’s Flags and the Politics of Pride

Another of our most-read stories brought us closer to home.

Immigration tensions in the UK are at a peak, and summer once again saw an uptick in the display of St George’s flags. For some, this was a harmless expression of national pride. For others, it felt like a warning signal coinciding with rising xenophobia, anti-immigration rhetoric and violence.

We returned repeatedly to the same question: how do we show and talk about national pride without tap-dancing around ongoing and previous context?

“Why can’t you be proud?” was a refrain that often followed any critique of the Union Jack or St George’s flag, and undoubtedly we agreed that being proud of your nation isn’t inherently wrong. However, ignoring the history and the reality that these symbols had long been used as discriminatory tools to define who belongs and who doesn’t is unreasonable. Especially for those who experience the consequences of exclusion both narratively and physically, 

That tension sharpened further in September, when Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League, promoted a central London protest framed as a “festival of free speech,” promising to “unite the kingdom.”

This conversation isn’t going away, and we’ll continue to track it not in isolation, but through the lens of context, consequence, and power.

Cultural Appropriation or Appreciation

Cultural appropriation was one of the most popular topics of this year, in our discussions in the office, during our dine and debates and on the pages of the memo, but two stood out.

We saw brands repeatedly misusing “namaste” in their campaign taglines and covered some festival wardrobe missteps in the lead-up to Glastonbury. The pattern showed a through-line trend of borrowing without understanding, using aesthetics without accountability.

This is why we continue to invite clients to work with us using our proprietary tool, designed to help strategists and creatives understand the spectrum from cultural exploitation to cultural appreciation. Not as a box-ticking exercise, but as a way to build work that resonates with changing demographics while avoiding avoidable harm (that may have been well intentioned).

Are there really too many Black people featured in ads?

Our most-read article of the year came from coverage of Channel 4’s Mirror on the Industry report and its rapid, predictable entanglement in the culture wars.

Much of the reaction focused on a single statistic. The proportion of adverts featuring Black people rose from 37 percent in 2020 to 51 percent in 2022 and has remained stable since. This sits alongside census data showing Black people make up around 4 percent of the population of England and Wales.

Outrage followed quickly. The Daily Mail and others ran headlines accusing the industry of “overrepresentation,” framing the data as evidence that advertising had gone too far.

That was never the report’s intention. Its purpose was not to provoke a numbers debate, but to assess how representation shows up, and whether it is thoughtful or surface-level.

The instinct to chase outrage over insight has become familiar, particularly in increasingly divided times. It shows no sign of slowing next year either. We remain ready to call out bad-faith criticism, test the validity of complaints and resist slipping into the same sensationalism we critique.

The Memo: Looking ahead

As we discussed during our Dine and Debate series, next year will likely be different, rather than better or worse.

We are looking ahead with curiosity. Let’s see what the next year brings.