Advertising: Toy Story

According to just about all gay media this ad for Smyths, an American toy store, 'helps smash gender stereotypes'.

If you say so.

This line has been so repeated so often, it may have come from a press release.

Probably just gay press laziness though.

Advertising: Tits And Teeth

A Mexican toothpaste ad featuring some gays!!!

This has got many gay journalists from the Easily Pleased School - who always seem so surprised that not all straight people want to kill us - jolly excited.

Heartwarming, adorable etc etc.

PS And here's one for some pissy American beer - set at a gay wedding, because they're just like regular people really.

Advertising: Amazing

The zebra likes home decorating.

The zebra likes things that are 'AMAZING!' and fabulous.

I think the zebra's meant to be gay.

2015: How To Get Ahead In Advertising

It’s often said that if you want to get a feel for the character of a nation, you should study the way it sells cars, soup and mobile phone plans. That’s not to say that glossy ads peopled by implausibly good-looking and cheerful people are an accurate reflection of real life in America; rather, it’s that the ads show an image of people that Americans are willing to tolerate. And this year that image changed fundamentally.

Marketing in America had long been moving towards including more lesbian and gay characters in advertisements, but 2015 will go down as the year that the US Supreme Court legalised gay marriage and that ads reflecting this sea change in the American idea of family went mainstream.

When a steadily rising number of leading American brands start producing ads depicting lesbian and gay couples, it’s fair to say that something significant is going on. This year the likes of Campbell’s Soup, Wells Fargo, General Mills, Chevrolet, Hallmark, Honey Maid, Kohl’s, Tylenol and even Allstate, an insurance group, have come out with LGBT-inclusive commercials and social media campaigns. A spot for Campbell’s Soup’s special-edition Star Wars cans, for example, depicts two fathers feeding their toddler son and taking turns to do their best impressions of Darth Vader’s “I am your father” line.

Of course, not one of these ads is revolutionary. Most are highly conservative and depict gay and lesbian people in the context of traditional family units. The storyline is not about their love for each other, but for their child. It’s almost as if brands are using same-sex relationships as a proxy for being modern... 

Corporate America Has No Option But To Join The March To Equality, The Times business section.

Quite perceptive, though the title says it all.

See also, A Momentous, But Conservative, Win For Gay Rights, Bloomberg on the US Supreme Court's equal marriage ruling.


PS Fagburn thinks all these gay dad ads are AMAZING and ADORABLE etc, obvs.

Update: Advertising Age choose their top 10 LGBT-themed ads of the year; 'Family values, transgender issues set the tone'. No surprises there, then.

Robert Dyas: And We're Gay...

As ever satire is lost on idiots...

PS And the 'gay characters' in this ad aren't some rich gay dads with their annoying kids just for once!

Moschino Barbie: Barbie Boy

God help us if there's a war!

PS An actual Barbie ad, pretty sure it's internet only.

The Guyliner writes...

The advert isn’t quite the watershed moment we’ve all been waiting for – the Barbie doll is a limited-edition in association with fashion house Moschino, and the little boy is styled to look like the brand’s creative director Jeremy Scott, so it’s all very tongue in cheek.

But, honestly, what I wouldn’t have given to see a a boy in an advert playing with a doll when I was that age.

It may come as zero surprise to learn I was a boy who liked to play with dolls. At playgroup, you couldn’t get me out of the Wendy house, apparently, and on the first day at primary school, I marched straight to the dressing up box at play time and put on a skirt. As a child you don’t realise the consequences of your actions or that one day you’ll be embarrassed by what you’ve done – like a really innocent version of being mortifyingly drunk and uninhibited – and nobody has taught you that you have to behave a certain way just because, so you screw it up...

Soup: Souper To See You!

Actually quite funny.

PS One Million Moms on this filth.

Gay Ads: Gay Dads R Us

Campbell's has released an ad for their yummy condensed soup.

And guess what? It's got two gay dads with their kid in!

Imagine! An advert with two gay dads and their kid!!!

It's not like that's the only type of gay men you see in commercials these days.

Thus, arguably, exposing the new homocapitalist-conformity-heteronormativity-consumerism hegemeony like a quick and easy naked lunch.

'Adorable... it will melt your heart!' said all gay media robots.*

Andy Warhol must be boiling over in his grave.

* Little parlour game: Google "Campbells gay" and "adorable" or "heartwarming" and then tell me one gay media that didn't use these sentimental virtual cliches. Huffpost Gay Voices went for the triple whammy, ending with the barftastic; 'If nothing else, they've succeeded giving us all the feels'. Sake.

Advertisement: Habitat Voyeur

I make no apologies for posting this, but Fagburn has become strangely (predictably?) obsessed.

Something of a classic in the ever bulging homoerotic ad genre.

Men of advertising: If you want to brainwash me into buying something, show me more hot dudes dancing in their pants, and not more sappy gaymarried rich couples cooing over their icky baby.

PS For some reason this is even more alluring when it appears as a pop-up ad with the sound off. Try it.

Advertisement: Pot Noodle

Adorable.

Calvin Klein: How To Get A Heck Load Of Advertising Without Even Paying

1. Make up - mock-up? - an ad with two hot dudes in.

2. Send a press release to the gay media.

3. Fin.

PS Be interesting to see how much - if any - space Calvin Klein actually book for this ad.

NB You can't actually see these nooky-enabling jeans in the ad.

-[Ferdinand requested your private pics] -[denied] -Aw c'mon! -OK, here -Oops! Underwear's not expensive enough. Bye! #mycalvins

— Gayer Than Thou (@Gayer_Than_Thou) July 31, 2015

Rupert Everett: How The Fallen Have Fallen!

Not owning a tellybox, Fagburn was blissfully unaware that Rupert Everett had made a series of ads for Young's Seafood where he voices a green-eyed hungry cat.
Apparently they've been running since January - here is the latest instalment.
Mind you I asked some TV owners and they had at best but vague recollections.
Anyway, enjoy!

PS Read about them in the new Private Eye, which alleges the concept is a bit of a rip-off.

Classic Advertising: Tabac

Via Flashbak.com

Advertising: Barf-Fest At Tiffany's

It's almost a cliché at this point—that a little girl dreams of opening a Tiffany blue box from her beau when he finally pops the question. But what about the boys who dream of being proposed to by their beaus? 

For the first time, Tiffany & Co. is featuring a gay couple in its latest engagement campaign. (Fun fact: the pair are not models—which, really?!!—but an unnamed, real-life NYC couple.)

"Nowadays, the road to marriage is no longer linear, and true love can happen more than once with love stories coming in a variety of forms," said Linda Buckley, Tiffany & Co. VP of North American PR, in a statement to ELLE.com. "The Tiffany engagement ring is the first sentence of the story that a couple will write together as they create a life that is deeply intimate and exceptional, which is the message we hope to convey through this campaign."

Elle.com. 

The copy in the ad reads; ''Will you promise to never stop completing my sentences or singing off-key, which I’m afraid you do often? And will you let today be the first sentence of one long story that never, ever ends?'

Part of a campaign featuring seven couples - let me know if you see this ad appearing in a non gay mag. 

Or, indeed, anywhere.

Adverts: I Saw It In The Adverts

The history of gay people in advertising isn't that long. Rich Ferraro, vice president of communications at GLAAD (an LGBT organization that watches the media), says back in the '80s brands like Bud Light and Absolut Vodka were among the first to include the LGBT community in their advertising.

It was "mainly spirit brands marketing directly to gay men at the time," Ferraro says. "You saw images running in gay magazines or at gay events that featured a lot of shirtless white guys on beaches, or drag queens, and played up on stereotypes of the community." ...

Then in the 1990s, as society changed, brands started testing the waters with coded ads.

Robert Klara, a staff writer for Adweek, compares it to a two-way mirror: The ads contained messages that straight audiences would miss, but gay audiences would pick up on...

The push to get the LGBT consumer is example of how competitive the marketplace is now, says Adweek's Klara: "If you're not appealing to every minority community, be that racial or in terms of sexual orientation, you're missing out on market share."

Klara says it's tempting to think this is about social progress — but actually, he says, it's free market capitalism.

npr.org

The problem with gay TV commercials is they rarely go beyond three themes; son comes out to parent/s, woman discovers hot dude she fancies is gay, and monied gay couple being boring and bourgeois (ideally with a kid or two). 

Advertising: I Saw It In The Adverts

With same-sex marriages legal in the England and Wales as well as certain parts of the US, the issue of how to represent alternative families in marketing campaigns is creeping up the agenda for many big brands.

Brands including Honey Maid and Coca-Cola have already made steps to representing a diverse family, but for Saatchi & Saatchi director of strategy, Richard Huntington, the marketing community still has a long way to go.

Speaking at Mumsnet's Mumstock event in London today, Hunnington said: “The vast majority of the marketing community is petrified of that sort of diversity and it’s a real shame. It’s a battle we’ve been fighting for decades yet our ads still feature white women in kitchens”

“I think it is really upsetting and inappropriate to keep representing a society that doesn’t exist.”

Coca-Cola previously came under fire after featuring a gay wedding scene in its 'Reasons to Believe campaign, Coca-Cola removed them from for an Irish version of the ad...

The Drum.

This Coke ad above is quite pukey.

How do two m-c gay dads show diversity?

PS Mumstock?

Russia: Pants!

Björn Borg, a Swedish fashion company, is doing its part to stand up against 'anti-propaganda' laws in Russia.
In a spare, yet powerful, ad in Moscow Times there is a stack of underwear. Each one color of the rainbow [sic]. Above the skivvies is the following phrase:
'Björn Borg says da.'

...GSN loves Björn Borg and you should go buy some of its products.

Gay Star News et al.

Can you believe that last line?
Cause nothing says you support the struggle for gay liberation in Russia more than paying £30 for a pair of Swedish over-priced underpants...

Moscow Times is a small-circulation free English language newspaper read mainly by English-speaking ex-pats in Moscow.
Fagburn wouldn't imagine this - rather oblique - ad would have cost BB Inc much [Edit: £15,000 for a full page].
But the amount of free publicity the company got out of all this guff in the more gullible gay media internationally must be priceless.
Though only a terrible old cynic would think that was the ad's real audience and aim.

Barilla Pasta Outrage: First They Came For The Lasagna...

The chairman of Barilla Group says his company will not feature gay families in advertisements for his products because he likes the "traditional" family. If someone disagrees, well, they can go "eat another brand of pasta."

Guido Barilla made the anti-gay comments during an interview with La Zanzara on Radio24 Wednesday. The radio host asked him why his company does not have ads with gay families.
"We have a slightly different culture," Barilla said, per a Huffington Post translation of the interview. "For us, the 'sacral family' remains one of the company’s core values. Our family is a traditional family. If gays like our pasta and our advertisings, they will eat our pasta; if they don’t like that, they will eat someone else’s pasta. You can’t always please everyone not to displease anyone. I would not do a commercial with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect toward homosexuals – who have the right to do whatever they want without disturbing others – but because I don’t agree with them*, and I think we want to talk to traditional families. The women are crucial in this." 

Activists are now demanding a boycott against Barilla, which is the world's largest pasta producer, according to Italy's Gazzetta del Sud. The protest became a trending topic on Twitter shortly after Barilla's remarks aired, with the hashtag #boicottabarilla. 

From Huffpost Gay Voices - the online home of boring bourgeois gay hysteria.

SHOCKING!
Naturally the united gay simpletons of Twitter have set it ablaze today.
Fuck knows how anyone who can get angry about something like this would cope if something really bad happened.
So a silly old man has said the sort of silly thing some silly old men sometimes say!
THIS IS EXACTLY HOW MUSSOLINI STARTED!!!
Is there an e-petition yet?
Has Dan Savage ordered us to boycott French red wine in protest?
Can someone knock up a poster of Il Duce Barilla with a Hitler moustache drawn on?
Should we be visiting our delightful Tuscan holiday homes in the near future?
Later this evening Fagburn will be protesting by pouring a tin of spaghetti hoops down the drain and then sending a photo of him doing it to the world's gay media.
Silence anyone you disagree with!
If you don't like what Guido has said buy another brand of pasta, that'll learn him, even though he said that's what he thinks you should do.
In fact, don't buy anything unless you've seen a gay dude in one of their adverts.
It's time to make a stand against these fascists who aren't very keen on having gayers in one of their crappy TV ads.
The revolutionary spirit of the Stonewall riots lives on.
¡No pastarán!

• Commercial Coset - an online compendium of LGBT-themed commercials from around the world. 
* NB This doesn't make sense. No idea if it's him or the translation.

Update: Actual - and non-ironic - Gay Star News' headline; 'Gay Hate Spaghetti'...

Update2: At last someone talking some sense, Barilla Chairman Doesn't Like Gay People: So What? J Bryan Lowder on Slate (though GB didn't actually say he didn't like gay people).
Good on the gay "movement"'s fetishisation of consumer boycotts (and corporate endorsements).

Readers' comments on gay sites are hilariously hysterical, predictably.

My favourite from The Advocate; "I had a few boxes in my pantry this morning. No longer."

Take that, pasta Nazis!

PS Some more brilliant reader comments by les enragés at The Advocate...

Breaking!: Bigot Bollocks Bus Ban Upheld!

A ban on a Christian group's proposed bus advert suggesting gay people could be helped to change their sexuality has been ruled as not unlawful.

The High Court ruled Transport for London's process in introducing the ban "was procedurally unfair".
But it ruled TfL was right to ban the Core Issues Trust's advert because it would "cause grave offence" to those who were gay.
The ad posters read: "Not Gay! Ex-Gay, Post-Gay and Proud. Get over it!"
A judge ruled Boris Johnson did not abuse his position as chairman of TfL when he imposed the ban.
'Widespread offence' Mrs Justice Lang, sitting at London's High Court, ruled TfL's process in introducing the ban "was procedurally unfair, in breach of its own procedures and demonstrated a failure to consider the relevant issues".
But that was outweighed by factors against allowing the ad, including that it would "cause grave offence" to those who were gay and was perceived as homophobic, "thus increasing the risk of prejudice and homophobic attacks", said the judge...

BBC News. 

Hahaha!
The Core Issues Trust "denied that it was attempting to offer a 'gay cure'", but judging from their website they don't seem to advocate or work on anything else. 
I haven't seen the full ruling by the judge yet, but surely the real reason these ads shouldn't have been allowed is because they promote junk science and voodoo "cures"?
Next stop a ban on all commercial advertising in public spaces?

PS And don't forget, despite it making a false claim, the ever hopeless Advertising Standards Authority okayed this campaign. Astonishing.

Gay Ads: Business Or Propaganda?

Until recently, using gay themes in advertising was considered taboo, and a call for a boycott from one hate group or another usually followed. Remember Bill O’Reilly and the other FOX News goons going up in arms over the gay McDonalds France ad way back in 2010? This was pure liberal propaganda!
But was it? In 2012 alone, using gays and lesbians in advertising has taken off. Gap, Amazon, JC Penny, Doritos, Amtrak and Ray-Ban, among others, all produced ads featuring LGBT themes. We in the community would love to believe it’s simply because people are becoming much more accepting of gays; and partially, it is. As in most cases, though, the issue is being driven by money.
An annual report by Witeck Communications that tracks the spending power of different minority groups shows that the LGBT community is a large and growing market that companies are eager to tap.
Corporations pay big money for these types of studies, and reading over the statistics explains why they would. The 2012 report found that 47 percent of LGBT adults are more likely to purchase a company’s product or service when an advertisement has been tailored specifically to the LGBT community. Also important to note is that 23 percent of gays have switched products or services in the last year because another company was supportive of the LGBT community.
How much money are we talking about here? Witeck’s study projected the LGBT community’s buying power to be $790 billion, and growing...

A syndicated American article by Matt Watson.
Are we really supposed to take a survey by a company that came up with this ridiculous $790 billion figure seriously?
Also Watson doesn't consider how these ads are often not widely-distributed campaigns, but effectively just PR stunts aimed at the gay media.
How many poster sites was the US Gap ad above put on, for example, and in what magazines, if any, was it published?
For more on the myth of the pink pound and junk research go to this excellent blog, Gay Money.
For Fagburn on how Witeck's - a gay marketing company, incidentally - figures don't really work out go here.
Not that I'm suggesting a gay marketing company might have a vested interest in over-inflating the size of the gay market - no sirree!
Oh, and I love how you're working that sweatshop t-shirt, boys...

PS The title to this is the title to the article.

Update: Another article on this from Associated Press. Are gay ads the media's new gay dads - ie the new boring?