Gay imagery in ads reflecting changing U.S.
BY AP Wire Service
Sunday, March 10, 2013
3/10/13 at 5:06 AM
NEW YORK (AP) - A new TV commercial features a good-looking young woman on a beach vacation lounging next to a good-looking young man. He bemoans the glare on his iPad and she fills him in on the Kindle Paperwhite's sun-friendly screen.
He clicks to buy one himself and suggests they celebrate with a drink.
"My husband's bringing me a drink right now," she says.
"So is mine," he smiles as they turn and wave at their male loved ones sitting together at a tiki bar.
Welcome to the latest in gay imagery in mainstream advertising, where LGBT people have been waiting for a larger helping of fairness, or at least something other than punchlines and cliches.
While there are still plenty of those, something has happened in advertising over the last two or three years, nearly two decades after Ikea broke ground in the U.S. with a TV spot featuring a gay couple shopping for a dining room table - a spot that ran only once in New York and Washington, D.C., before being pulled after bomb threats to Ikea stores.
Today, gay and lesbian parents and their kids are featured - along with pitchwoman Ellen DeGeneres - in J.C. Penney ads. Same-sex couples have their own, advertised wedding registries at Macy's and elsewhere and President Barack Obama offered his seal of approval by evolving into a supporter of gay marriage.
Two happy young men sit together eating at a dining table, with wine and romantic candlelight, in a section of a Crate & Barrel catalog marked "Us & Always." And we made it through a Super Bowl without any gay jokes at commercial breaks - like the Snickers ad of several years ago featuring two men freaking out after kissing by accident while eating one of the candy bars.
Traditionally lagging behind TV and film content in terms of LGBT inclusion, advertisers in this country are facing considerably less trouble than they used to when taking on gay themes, observers said. Penney's rebuffed critics and launched a lesbian-focused catalog ad for Mother's Day that the company followed with a two-dads family - a real family - for Father's Day.
LGBT-focused marketers and monitors think the Mad Men and Women of today's Madison Avenue and the companies that employ them might finally be getting it. Now, they hope, a greater degree of diversity in skin tone and ethnicity will follow.
Original Print Headline: Ads reflecting changing U.S.
Associated Images:
This image from a Kindle Paperwhite video commercial depicts a young woman lounging next to a young man, waiting for their husbands, shown in the background at the bar. AMAZON / Associated Press
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