Media Week - Advertising PR Agencies

TOPICS: Mainstream media news. UK gay media market. Mainstream news reporting on gay media, gay marketing and gay PR issues. Out Now. media Week magazine. Gay market feature in UK Media Week news reporting. Media Week gay market supplement Part 2. Out Now quoted in the UK Media Week gay market advertising, marketing and PR supplement - UK market April 2007. Media news.

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Last week we brought you our first extract of the Media Week gay market supplement, which quoted Out Now on issues related to the state of play of gay marketing, advertising and gay PR in the UK, US and further afield.

Today, in this second part we discuss how mainstream advertising and PR agencies like to tell clients they are great when it comes to gay marketing, but that the reality is often far different.

Of course we are always strongly in favour of brands choosing Out Now Consulting being the acknowledged global experts in gay marketing, advertising, market research and PR services - Out Now has 15 years specialized expertise in understanding and reaching gay consumers.

Media Week seems to take a similar line in this article where they discuss the propensity for mainstream advertising and PR agencies to profess to having gay market expertise where little real track record of this actually exists.

In a crowded advertising and PR marketplace some agencies will say anything just to get their hands on a little more of their client's budget.

As we make the point in the Media Week article, clients and brand managers bear some responsibility themselves for allowing their mainstream agency to present advertising suggestions - mainstream or gay targeted - without really bothering to get expert specialist insight into what a gay market audience might think of a proposed PR strategy, advertising or marketing campaign in question where that campaign relies on gay themes.

Media Week points to the Omnicom produced Snickers Super Bowl campaign as a case-in-point.

We hope you enjoy reading the Media Week gay market report on advertising and PR agencies, and present an extract for you below.

Gay Supplement - Why the agencies need to wise up
by Adam Woods Media Week 17-Apr-07

Even in our politically correct society, sexual diversity is under-represented in media. Adam Woods looks at how advertisers can portray GLBT positively.

The media industry must be accustomed to accusations that it does not represent the full spectrum of its target audience. How can a largely white industry claim to have its finger on the pulse of an increasingly multicultural population? Most agency figures take the point and many are doing what they can to address the industry's rather thin ethnic mix.

But sexual orientation is another thing again. Do agencies employ a representative proportion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender staff? Who knows? What is a representative proportion of gays and lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals? Either way, does sexual orientation have any real bearing on a person's media choices? And if so, does it take one to know one, so to speak?

Ask those who specialise in GLBT media whether the mainstream industry does its clients proud in this sector and the response is usually pretty crushing. With isolated exceptions, they suggest, account teams are unlikely to pitch gay and lesbian media to advertisers unless the client demands it, in which case agencies tend to claim expertise they don't actually have.

Ian Johnson, founder of OutNow Consulting, a media, marketing, PR and research company specialising in GLBT markets, believes this is one area where large agencies usually demonstrate that they cannot be all things to all men - though that doesn't stop them trying.

"A large client will have an existing relationship with a creative or media agency, so they will talk to their account director and say: 'We were thinking we might want to do something in the gay market. Can you do that for us?' And there are very few mainstream agencies where the suits will turn around and say: 'No, we are not especially good at that'," says Johnson.

Not that it would be accurate to suggest that GLBT groups are not represented in the agency world at all - far from it. But estimates of the UK gay population top around 10% and it would take an optimistic person to suggest that the agency community was even close to representative.

The abiding attitude among GLBT consumers towards specialist advertising produced by the mainstream advertising community is a feeling of being patronised and generally underestimated.

More often than not, the guilty party is a creative agency resorting to stereotypes, cracking the wrong joke or generally betraying a badly hidden heterosexuality, but media agencies are occasionally implicated in the cluelessness.

Commercial Closet, a US organisation dedicated to presenting and evaluating attitudes to the GLBT community in advertising, demonstrates that US advertisers are far more likely than their British counterparts to attempt to engage the gay market on its own terms, though the market is also the scene of many of the major howlers.

"There is a taboo that still exists in the US, when you consider the strength of conservatives here, and particularly religious
conservatives," says Michael Wilke, its founder. "I understand that applies less in the UK, though the hold-over of the taboo is still meaningful, and one of the effects of that is a lack of information about the market."

The issue is not just one of poor communication with the GLBT market, but of negative stereotypes in the mainstream. A Snickers ad, aired during this year's Super Bowl, managed to outrage both the family audience and large sections of the gay and lesbian community, depicting an accidental kiss between two straight men and then lingering on their
mutual horror for comic effect.

Such cultural miscalculations reflect badly on all concerned, according to OutNow's Johnson. "Ultimately, the client has to bear some of the responsibility," he says. "The agency may put forward creative, but the client is still signing off on it."

In terms of targeted GLBT advertising from mainstream creative and media agencies, Johnson believes the picture is rarely much more encouraging.

"I really don't believe there is a single stand-out mainstream agency you could point to, either in the UK or at a global level."

The fact is, this is unfamiliar territory for the media world. And while mainstream brands in Britain may occasionally be guilty of inadvertent homophobia in their advertising, they tend to be cautious when tailoring ads specifically to GLBT audiences.

In fact, none of the agencies Media Week approached felt able to comment on this issue.

(Using mainstream communications in gay media) might appear to be the safer option, but while using non-sexualised creative in gay media is unlikely to cause offence, it may also have very little effect of any kind.

"The gay consumer sees mainstream creative as the equivalent of receiving junk mail or spam - it is something they didn't need to see in that space," says Johnson. "At best, it is almost neutral - the standard car advertising with the standard creative."

But worse by some margin is the creative that depicts straight images in specialist media, as if, perhaps, trying to promote a more wholesome way of life. "You still find instances where a mainstream agency has put a heterosexually charged image into a lesbian or gay media space," says Johnson.

"You could not do a worse job, in terms of wasting the client's money."

Some in the mainstream agency world have historically headed off the issue of how best to target GLBT audiences by professing outrage at the suggestion that gay and lesbian consumers are best targeted according to their sexual preference, rather than their age, their income or their general interests.

GLBT culture encompasses numerous communities of similar tastes and interests, and progressive brands do evidently see numerous advantages in building their credibility within such markets.

To get it right for your brand marketing strategy to reach gay customers, rely on Out Now.
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