Earlier this month, I read Adweek’s list of the top sixteen “Gayest Ads in History,” a celebration of advertising’s best gay-friendly ads over the years. This got me thinking about how homosexuality is displayed in contemporary advertising. Though it remains a hot-button issue for a lot of people throughout the United States, there is plenty of evidence to suggest growing mainstream acceptance of homosexuality. In television, building on the groundwork laid by Will and Grace, Modern Family is consistently one of the most viewed programs in the coveted 18-49 year old demographic. It was such a big success for ABC that other networks developed similar gay-friendly shows to try and compete, such as NBC’s unsuccessful The New Normal. Another ratings juggernaut, Glee, heavily features homosexual themes, storylines, and characters. In movies, both critical and financial success has been found in tackling gay issues, with films like Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and The Kids Are All Right. Even in video games, companies like Bioware have included homosexual storylines amongst their branching story options in game series like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Outside of media, there is lots of data coming in from social networking suggesting that, especially amongst younger users, there is great support for pro-gay causes. So why is it still considered remarkable when advertising features homosexuality?
It gets even more bizarre when you consider that the advertising industry is, by and large, a gay-friendly place. Advertising is one of those industries that straddle the line between business and art, and so it attracts a lot of creative, artistic people. Artistic people, as a whole, are very open people and have a long history of accepting homosexuality. In fact, the arts have long been a refuge for homosexuals themselves, with many famous poets, playwrights, actors, painters, and so on being both closeted and openly homosexual. The same is true for advertising. Agencies have shown themselves to be not only open to, but supportive of, homosexuality. For example, Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners recently decorated their office with a rainbow design for the Supreme Court decision on DOMA. They used colored lights to make each floor of their office, which could be seen out of the windows of their building, a rainbow color from purple on the bottom floor to red on the top floor. They tweeted a picture of the decoration and received a lot of positive feedback from other agencies around the country, not just San Francisco, in the form of retweets and replies. Similarly, homosexuals have certainly made their mark on the advertising industry as individuals. Of the sixteen ads that made up Adweek’s list, three were drawn by J.C. Leyendecker, a “confirmed bachelor” of the 1920s who lived with his male partner Charles Beach for most of his adult life. So this group of gay and gay-friendly artists surely must have made a multitude of homosexually themed ads, from which Adweek gleaned sixteen of the best from throughout history, right?
Well, no, not really. By modern standards very few of the ads they included would be considered gay-friendly. As I mentioned above, J. C. Leyendecker put his mark on advertising during the 1920s and was well known as a both highly successful and influential illustrator. One of his specialties was drawing male-on-male social activities, what some have referred to as homosocial activities, which often contain suggestions of homoeroticism in them. Without going into too much detail, and admitting my own unfamiliarity with why certain things are considered homoerotic, his work on the Adweek list include men bathing together, men doing sweaty work together, and men in the military. In his other work, he uses images of men playing football, groups of young men in bathing costumes, partially nude men drawn as Greek Adonises, amongst others. All of these are examples of images that could be completely innocent… or could be intended to be homosexually suggestive and loaded with what academics have referred to as “coding,” or hiding themes in the ads intended for gay audiences that slip past non-gay viewers. This precedent for using homosocial settings with homoerotic undertones continues for many years, as the Adweek’s list shows.
For the next eighty years of ads, the ads that make the list feature these coded messages and ambiguous, potentially homoerotic images. Groups of men in a military setting, groups of men awaking in the same room, groups of men camping together, and so on. A rare ad in this set goes as far as to use innuendo or doublespeak to imply something more than simply a coded image, like Schlitz’s series of ads that drew parallels between questioning one’s sexuality and questioning one’s choice of beer. Though more explicit, another alcohol brand, Absolut, used coding in an ad in the 1980s by referencing Keith Haring, an artist popular in the gay community but not well known outside of it. As this coding evolved into the 1990s, the ads continued to be ambiguous with their sexuality, a style that came to be called “gay-vague.” Brands like Bridgestone, Bud Light, Abercrombie & Fitch, Southern Comfort, Armani Exchange, Calvin Klein, and many others have used these ads, now with photography instead of illustration, featuring traditionally masculine men showing off their muscles and often chumming it up with other guys. Some speculate that these ads were designed to work equally well with straight males and gay males alike. During this period there was also some coded ads for the lesbian market as well, with Subaru putting oblique references to their popularity amongst that demographic in their advertisements, such as a product shot of an Outback with the vanity plate “XENA LUVR,” a nod to the T.V. show Xena: Warrior Princess’s popularity amongst lesbian viewers. Regardless of their success using this technique to court two markets simultaneously, they are still using coding to disguise whatever gay-friendly themes may be present. In fact, on Adweek’s list of the best gay ads in history, only one ad is actually open about its message: Washington Mutual’s piece showing a couple’s checkbook with two male names.
Perhaps you, like maybe the staff at Adweek, don’t understand why I don’t count the gay-themed, homoerotic, gay-vague, and heavily coded ads as being gay-friendly. Consider one of the most iconic ads in the gay community: the Calvin Klein ad with Marky Mark in his underwear, grabbing his crotch. It even made the Adweek list at number eleven (chronologically). Reading interviews about the ad, it quickly becomes clear that no one involved thought that they were making something to be gay-friendly. The advertising agency, production team, and the brand managers saw the ad’s success in the gay community as a happy accident. Since those people all stake their reputation on developing creative strategy, such as an ad that works for multiple demographics, I see no reason why they would lie. Knowing Mark Wahlberg’s politics, it is extremely unlikely that he would have signed up for an ad designed for a gay audience as well, providing another nail to the intentional design coffin. So if one of the most iconic gay ads of the modern era was a complete accident, what does that say about all of the other supposed gay ads that use similar coding? And even if the coding is intentional, doesn’t its reliance on stereotypes and unwillingness to be open seem a tad condescending?
Maybe this focus on coded ads is due to the nature of the list, and the selection process behind it, which could have required picking ads from as much of history as possible, including times in which homosexuality was still a majorly taboo subject in the United States. Still, putting the article aside, it’s remarkably hard to find gay-friendly ads even in contemporary advertising. After doing fairly exhaustive research, I was able to find three brands, not on the Adweek list, that have been willing to run unadulterated gay-friendly ads in the United States. Ray Bans ran a series of ads with the copy text “Never Hide,” that included one image of two men holding hands. Gap ran holiday ads with the copy “Love comes in every shade” with two men looking lovingly into each other’s eyes, amongst a handful of others. J.C. Penny ran a picture in their Father’s Day sales catalogue of a two-father gay couple, and recently brought in gay icon Ellen Degeneres to be a spokesperson for the brand. I also should give credit where credit is due to Absolut. Absolut, the previously mentioned vodka brand that made the Adweek list, has long been a supporter of homosexuality. Early in their history they ran coded ads, such as the Haring ad that made the Adweek list, but have been running uncoded ads for gay pride since the 2000s and are long time sponsors of the GLAAD awards.
Advertising ought to be supportive of homosexuality. It has a tolerant and open employee base, who work at predominantly open and tolerant agencies, doing work with a great deal of creative freedom in a media landscape that is increasingly accepting of homosexuality. Despite that, gay-friendly advertising remains something rare and remarkable, with most of its history marred by clandestine, slightly condescending, coded messages in otherwise unremarkable mainstream advertising. But why?
The first big reason why explicitly gay-friendly advertising doesn’t get made is a simple numbers game. The first thing to remember is that ads want to reach as many people as possible. Any brand with broad potential appeal, i.e. not a niche market brand, knows that the more people they are able to get their advertising in front of, the more potential there is to influence people’s purchasing habits. Reaching people isn’t enough, however, as the marketplace becomes crowded with messages and only the best advertising has any kind of impact. Once you reach people, you also have to touch them, through humor or pathos or whatever. Now advertising itself is split into two categories: business-to-business and business-to-consumer. Business-to-business isn’t likely to make gay-friendly advertising because it isn’t a space in which sexuality plays any role; it simply doesn’t come up organically. Business-to-consumer advertising, on the other hand, does have room to be gay-friendly, since it is advertising for everyday services: beer, banks, detergents, and so on. But to understand why it doesn’t, we have to examine some of the “best practices” that make business-to-consumer advertising work. In order to sell these household products, advertisers develop a connection between the ad and the people being advertised to using either empathy or sympathy. The definition of empathy is the ability to understand someone’s emotions because you have also experienced them yourself. By contrast, the definition of sympathy is the ability to understand someone’s emotions because you can imagine experiencing them yourself. Both can be very powerful tools, but, in general, empathy is the more powerful in advertising because it plays on people’s inherent self-interest. To demonstrate with a very simplistic example: if you have problems with greasy dishes and you watch an ad for dish soap that shows how quickly it cuts through grease, you immediately understand the value that dish soap provides you because you see yourself as the person in the ad. Of course, it doesn’t always have to be that explicit, and making that connection between the viewer and the character in the ad can be helped in subtle ways. For example, it is no accident that most ads for cleaning supplies feature a woman doing the cleaning. Whether or not women do the majority of the cleaning, they do buy the majority of the cleaning supplies, so it behooves the advertiser to assist her in empathizing with the ad. This has a major impact on the presence of gay-friendly advertising. Any time the homosexuality present in the ad has the potential to affect the empathy a viewer is feeling, it is potentially hurting the effectiveness of the ad. If you show a gay couple at home bickering over cleaning supplies, in the same way an ad might show a straight couple, a potential straight buyer no longer sees themselves as part of the couple, they see themselves as like the couple; a switch from empathy to sympathy, weakening the ad message. This is especially risky when there are so many competing messages, because even if this would be a non-issue in a vacuum, in reality those now absent subtle empathetic triggers could mean the difference between an ad working and not working for that straight person. So how big is the divide between straight and gay audiences? A number I hear commonly referenced is that homosexuals make up roughly 10% of the population of the United States. This means that any ad built to elicit empathy by playing to a traditional male-female dynamic will hit 90% of the population most effectively and 10% less effectively. With math like that, it’s basically a no brainer.
Another problem with developing gay friendly advertising is the complexities of the global marketplace. While society may be growing more accepting of homosexuality in the United States, as suggested by pop culture trends, there are still plenty of places abroad that aren’t so open or progressive. In the old days, advertisers could tailor ads to fit the regions they would be displayed in and not give it another thought, but now that the Internet aggregates most everything, it is easy to imagine how homophobic shoppers abroad could, by clicking around on YouTube, come across a gay-friendly ad that aired on United States television, and how that could quickly translate into outrage and ultimately loss of sales. The truth is that any international brand has to be aware of their image everywhere in the world, and how each piece of promotional material will affect that. Steven Soderbergh recently spoke at the San Francisco International Film Festival about a similar trend in filmmaking. Basically, one of his key points was that the desire, sometimes even the need, to court foreign markets makes studios worry about how well aspects of the creative direction of a film will translate overseas. This, he argued, makes studios risk averse and ultimately makes movies bland and uninteresting because broad and simplistic translate better from culture to culture than complex and nuanced. This same risk aversion, now bent to a different industry, makes brands apprehensive about backing riskier ads that might harm their international markets if they were ever seen outside of the United States, a category into which gay-friendly ads certainly fall.
A final obstacle for gay friendly advertising is the complications of trying to reach and appeal to a counterculture. While being homosexual isn’t technically a counterculture per se, there is a very visible counterculture way of life that is associated with homosexuality. The image that comes from events like the gay pride parade, the flamboyancy, the flaunted sexuality, the desire to shock, plays a large part in how this association arises. Since being gay isn’t an outward thing, people don’t necessarily know how many people they deal with day-to-day are gay, unless those people are very open and public about their sexuality. As a result, people who haven’t had the opportunity to know many open homosexuals only have these public displays, such as pride events, to generate an opinion of what it means to be gay, regardless of whether this counterculture image is reflective of the group as a whole. There is also a set of behaviors that historically have been linked to the gay community, often through sensationalist news stories. For example, in the 70s stories about the San Francisco bathhouses cemented a reputation for promiscuity amongst gay males. While the level of promiscuity in the gay community has fallen off since the 80s, and simultaneously has been on the rise amongst straights, that reputation still brands the gay community as well. As long as the gay community struggles to be seen as people who just happen to be gay, as opposed to Gay People, advertising to them will be difficult. For better or worse, that image that separates them from the mainstream reinforces an us and them dichotomy that hinders advertising’s ability to feature homosexual people without losing some amount of the sympathetic, let alone empathetic, connection that helps sell products.
Perhaps my view of advertising is being too narrow. Plenty of advertising is done that relies on making a bold statement or pushing the social envelope to make the ad memorable and the brand stand out, even if it offends some people. Element Skateboards doesn’t need to worry about pissing off the mainstream middle-aged market because the brand is built on the rebellious spirit and its target market is older teens and younger twenty-somethings that are in a phase in their life where they want nothing more than to piss off those mainstream middle-aged people. But even considering that certain brands can get away with a bold statement, advertising to a counterculture still carries a lot of risk, especially for a non-endemic brand. People who belong to a counterculture can be very sensitive about how they are portrayed, and may react with extreme negativity when they feel they are being cheated, pandered to, or misrepresented. Continuing the skateboarding analogy, Element can sell the counterculture image for the counterculture of skateboarding because it belongs in that space. Its presence, through sponsorship and other branding, is organic, authentic, and minor missteps can be excused because the target market consumers believe Element are there to serve the greater good of the counterculture lifestyle and so gives them the benefit of the doubt. If Gogurt comes in and tries to sell their yogurt using cool kids skateboarding while eating their product, it reads as false and upsets the skateboarding community by appropriating their lifestyle for the crass commercial purpose of selling yogurt. When you then add a touchy political and social agenda to this counterculture, the issue becomes even more of a livewire. Make an ad that is intended to be gay-friendly, but misstep in some way that raises the ire of vocal critics, and you are potentially facing a PR disaster. If you are traditionally very gay-friendly, or even a brand that caters directly to the gay community, you might, might, get a pass because they know you have their best interests at heart even if you flubbed a little. If you are a massive, mainstream brand like Pepsi, you are going to spend the next three to six months trying to put out fires of online outrage with press releases, Twitter apologies, and community outreach efforts… all to reach 10% of the population more effectively. Is the risk really worth the reward?
So there are tons of reasons that gay-friendly advertising, advertising that includes homosexuals as an unremarkable thing, is still considered remarkable, but there are also obviously chinks in that armor. The last decade or so has seen more of these gay friendly ads in the United States than ever before. So what might the future hold?
The more the market moves towards targeted ads, the more room there will be for gay-friendly ads. I haven’t spent much time with gay focused media myself, but I imagine that endemic brands are already targeting the homosexual community through their niche-specific outlets; TV channels like Here! TV and Logo, magazines like Out Magazine, and so on. Now with the Internet’s ability to laser target ads, non-endemic brands that want to reach the gay market can do so with gay-friendly ads that are made specifically for that community. These ads, or others like them, can also be targeted at heterosexuals who want to associate with gay-friendly brands for their own political reasons. While this may be only slightly less condescending than coding advertisements, I think it is a step in the right direction. Advertising wants to get the right brand stories in front of the right eyes, and tailoring advertising to someone’s sexuality, especially if they consider that an important part of their identity, is just another piece of that puzzle. It also circumvents some of the reasons I’ve laid out for why brands and agencies don’t want to produce gay friendly ads: targeted ads don’t play the same numbers game as untargeted ads, and targeted ads are less likely to provoke outrage since they should only be seen by receptive audiences.
On the topic of coded advertisements, I think that the future will see a replacement of coded ads with more explicitly gay friendly ads. But I also think that it will never become a very broadly implemented phenomenon. Even if homosexuality becomes more accepted by society, even if homosexuality sheds some of its counterculture identity, and even if homosexuals have less reason to be critical of the political and social messages behind their portrayal in advertising, as long as high reach and low targeting exists as a staple of advertising the numbers just don’t make sense. Even with the shift towards online media consumption, and the strong targeting that this can provide, multiple ads for a single product or brand may never become a reality. Producing those multiple variations of an ad, each catered to a specific niche, will always be more expensive than creating a single ad with broad mainstream appeal, so the extra production costs will have to be worth the extra impact the tailored empathy represents. Still, progress is being made, and who can truly predict the future?