Advertising Snickers - Super Bowl Gay PR Mistake

TOPICS: PR. Mainstream media. PR strategy. Grey's Anatomy. Super Bowl. Mars Inc. gets their corporate PR and Snickers brand PR strategy badly wrong. Gay market reaction against Snickers advertisement that seems to rely on homophobia, discrimination and even violence against gay men.

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It always amazes me just how wrong some brands can get it. All media publicity is not always good PR for a corporate PR strategy, and humour in advertising is not always perceived by everyone as being funny - especially when it is gay and lesbian people that are the subject of the joke.

I would have thought that in the current mainstream media environment prevailing in the US following the "faggot" abuse between actors on the Grey's Anatomy set, mainstream American TV, and especially advertising and PR agencies, would be finely attuned and very sensitive to the immense downside PR risks associated with mocking gay people in the media.

The latest gay market advertising PR mistake is by Mars Inc. and featured two men locking lips in a kiss on a very expensive Super Bowl advertisement.

In the world's most expensive advertising time an advertisment for the Snickers brand candy bar last weekend during that Superbowl broadcast showed two men kissing on US mainstream market television.

Then the two featured men express disgust with themselves, and insist that they must each do something "manly" because they kissed each other.

I could suggest to their PR agency that they could have just watched this Soccer Practice video clip if they really wanted to see gay men and "manly things" in sports mixed together.

Advertising creative on the strategy is apparently by TBWA Chiat/Day New York (owned by the Omnicom Group).

The existence of an Omnicom owned in-house 'speciality' gay market PR "Practice Group" unfortunately proved to be not a great deal of benefit to the Omnicom client Masterfoods, was certainly of no Superbowl benefit to them nor to their brand Mars Inc., nor to its products bundled under the Snickers label, and the existence of which appears to have been of no practical use to the lesbian and gay consumers of America in relation to this Snickers anti-gay advertisement.

Omnicom's Snickers Super Bowl advertising is not really likely to increase the Mars Inc. brand's gay market share at all. The catalyzing reaction of the characters in the broadcast advertisement was bad enough for negative PR to start almost immediately in the gay market against the Snickers brand.

Then, to further compound their PR mistakes, the Snickers advertising went on to offer viewers the 'opportunity' to choose to vote online for one of several 'preferred' alternate endings for the advertisement. As a result of the negative PR repercussions of their ill-conceived advertising strategy the Omnicom developed campaign online website afterthekiss.com was quickly removed, and now just links through to the Snickers corporate website.

Each of the alternate endings offered up by Mars Inc. was easily perceived as anti-gay, and one even featured one of the men slamming the hood of a car onto the other man's head - because of the gay kiss. Great PR strategy for the brand? Not at all.

There has been fairly well substantiated outrage about the advertising pretext from within and outside of the lesbian and gay communities.

Out Now research has revealed that lesbian and gay men often experience violence and harassment at work and elsewhere that is far above average.

Using homophobia as good PR marketing strategy is just dumb for the Snickers brand and the brand values communicated to consumers. Omnicom ought to know a lot better than this. If their specialty "Practice Group" means anything this ought never to have happened at all.

Maybe this is a case of a large agency wanting to cash-in where they think there's a dollar. Certainly gay staff working in a large ad agency are likely to jump at the chance to do something more aligned with their personal views. Clients should be aware of this fact. Any gay market PR conflict between the agency's mainstream branch and the gay "Practice Group" is of zero benefit to the client.

Compounding the monumental marketing and PR mistake that this Snickers Superbowl advertisement represents for the brand to its target sports fans audience, and to the broader American community, is that as more lesbians and gay men come out as gay to their family, their friends and their work colleagues - including in sports - there exists far greater support and defence for lesbian and gay Americans than ever before.

Of course not even all gay viewers react against the advertising, as various online comments attest, and many will see it as funny and nothing more - but generating a negative brand response from so many different quarters is rarely the PR objective of an advertising campaign.

In our opinion, the gay violence ending in the Snickers campaign was so incredibly poorly informed from a PR standpoint we just cannot imagine their agency pitching the concept to the client and, even worse, the client, and all the client line managers, approving the advertisement.

But, personally, the ending I disliked most featured players from the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears watching the advertising expressing their disgust and jeering towards the two men that kiss in the advertisment. I just cannot help failing to see how that is any different than if the players were expressing disgust at being shown a black man kissing a white woman. None of those players would have agreed to participate in the advertisement if that had been the scenario but it seems some brands and their PR, advertising and media agencies just don't get it - gay bashing and gay hate is not a good corporate PR value.

It does not sell to align corporate brand values with discrimination - as Mars Inc. and its Snickers brand are now discovering to their chagrin.
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