Bud Light Was Right to Embrace Dylan Mulvaney Because LGBTQ+ People Are Practically Invisible in Mainstream Advertising
To hear detractors of brands like Bud Light and Target tell it, American marketers have gone full-on woke. That is a direct contradiction of the fact that LGBTQ+ people are virtually invisible in mainstream advertising, according to the latest research.
The first Advertising Visibility Index, which GLAAD released this week as the global ad community descended on Cannes for its annual, self-aggrandizing bacchanal, found that a mere 3% of national TV ads from the top 10 advertisers were inclusive of LGBTQ+ people, while all advertising had what the group deemed “insufficient” representation.
What’s more, over 70% of the ads that did happen to be inclusive featured LGBTQ+ celebrities — even though the general public considers them the least effective for telling the stories of the LGBTQ+ community, according to the study. More than half of those polled by Kantar for GLAAD indicated that they value seeing LGBTQ+ people in “realistic stories,” while some 8 in 10 non-LGBTQ+ consumers think brands should strive for “multidimensional and human representation” in campaigns featuring LGBTQ+ people.
What’s so interesting about all this is that not just the right-wing media but the mainstream press has painted an image of advertising as practically saturated in LGBTQ+ content. Back in 2019, CNN reported that gay couples in commercials had become “a mainstream phenomenon.”
Hardly.
Considering the sometimes-violent backlash that greeted certain marketers and retailers embracing Pride Month this year — coupled with bruising business losses they have suffered because of it — it’s little wonder brands are skittish. They shouldn’t be. It’s pretty easy for anybody paying close attention to see that a handful of extremely vocal conservative special-interest groups—with the help of their extremely vocal, ever-loyal messengers at right-wing media outlets, most prominently Fox News — are really what’s behind all the uproar.
That’s not new. Going back to 1994, the Christian activist group American Family Association was calling for a boycott against IKEA for running a prime-time commercial featuring two gay men, according to CNN. A few years later, AFA’s subsidiary group, One Million Moms, urged consumers to stay away from JCPenney for hiring Ellen DeGeneres as its pitchwoman.
I asked a longtime brand marketing consultant this morning what she would advise her clients about inclusiveness in light of the recent controversies.
She told me they need to be willing to stand their ground. When employees are endangered, hire security — don’t go back on your commitment to doing what’s right.
“You can’t just push everything back just because of a few people,” as she put it. “It’s like letting these people win.”
Marketing that tells the stories of LGBTQ+ people are stories that need to be told. They are your sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and cousins, your colleagues, your neighbors, your friends.
More to the point for brands, they are consumers who have a lot of money to spend — and have extremely low tolerance for the fair-weather support of wishy-washy corporations.
As the cliche goes, with friends like these…
