The Diana Award

The Diana Award has spent 25 years operating on a premise that's easy to state and hard to execute: young people don't need to be talked at, they need to be handed the tools to lead. That premise has now produced something rarer than another awareness campaign — a multi-year commercial partnership with a global brand that treats youth voice as the creative engine rather than the marketing veneer.

The organization's own framing, that it was founded on the belief young people have the power to change the world, could read as a plaque on a wall. What makes it worth attention from an advertising trade audience is that the belief shows up in production credits, not just mission statements.

In April 2026, The Diana Award announced a five-year partnership with Procter & Gamble's Head & Shoulders brand centered on an anti-bullying campaign film. The film was co-created with young people and produced alongside Giving Back Films, built to surface the hidden signs of bullying that don't announce themselves the way a black eye or a torn backpack would.

A five-year commitment from a P&G brand is not a one-off activation. It signals a brand willing to attach its name to an issue over multiple product cycles and multiple creative iterations, and it signals that The Diana Award's model of co-creation with young people is durable enough to structure a long-term client relationship around. For an organization whose core work is youth empowerment, landing a multi-year brand partner that wants the youth voice embedded in the creative process, not layered on top of it afterward, is a meaningful signal of how the sector is evolving.

Free Agency Media's classification process confirmed The Diana Award as independent, with verification drawn from firecrawl analysis and a deeper manual review. The organization carries no holding company ownership and no agency network affiliation in its structure. That matters for how a brand partner like Head & Shoulders should read the relationship: this is not a charity tucked inside a larger marketing conglomerate's CSR division, and the creative decisions on the anti-bullying film were not filtered through a network's centralized account management. The Diana Award answers to its own mission and its own governance, which is precisely what gives a five-year brand commitment its credibility — the partner is buying into an organization with a quarter-century track record and a straight line of accountability, not a subsidiary whose priorities can be reshuffled by a parent company's quarterly targets.

For brands evaluating who to partner with on issues like bullying, mental health, or youth development, that independence is not a footnote. It's the reason the work carries the weight it does.