It’s not like the advertising industry to ignore a lucrative demographic niche, particularly in the media-saturated UK.
It seems like the Sunday newspapers have a magazine or pull-out section for almost every niche imaginable – from foodies to comicreaders and design addicts. But in the case of the gay community, there appears to be a disconnect between the potential it offers advertisers and its share of media profile.
This is perhaps surprising given the generally well-educated, well-travelled and highspending status of this group – which is estimated to represent somewhere between four and eight per cent of the population. In a recent survey of more than 300 UK gay men, conducted by Out Now Consulting, 40% had a degree, incomes were higher than average – at more than £20,000 per year – most took at least two international flights per year and the average monthly credit card spend was £424.
These statistics are not lost on major advertisers like Lufthansa and Toyota, which have started actively targeting the gay community with special offers and advertising tailored specifically to the gay media.
“We totally recognise that Dinks (double income no kids) have more disposable income and love to travel – the gay and lesbian travel market is worth $2bn a year,” says Theodora Varsamis, head of gay marketing in Lufthansa’s European operations and former head of its US gay marketing operation.
“The US is further ahead in this – we do gay-specific advertising there.” The airline’s next project is a promotion at the Gay Germany 04 event this summer, in conjunction with the German Tourist Office. Lufthansa plans to run quirky typographical ads to promote a new business class product that it believes will appeal to the gay community.
However, there is no such recognition within the mainstream media. Advertising in the gay press is still a fairly new departure for most brands and few gay people believe the UK mainstream media serves them well.
There are, nevertheless, a raft of gay publications – a dozen or so – which is considerably more than in most other countries. But for the most part, they are just doing what it takes to survive. Usage of gay media by advertisers is still minimal, not least because there are currently no ABC audited gay publications. Some 85% of the Periodical Publishers Association’s members won’t advertise in any publication that is not ABC-audited, so it’s perhaps not surprising that UK gay press is largely ignored by media agencies and advertisers.
“Having an ABC is important for titles – it gives us, as agencies, reassurance that they’re doing what they say they’re doing and adds legitimacy to the publishing operation – that’s no more true for gay titles than any others,” said Vanessa Clifford, managing partner in press at MindShare.
This situation will change in June when Bent magazine – formerly known as Now UK – will become the first UK gay publication to get an ABC audit. Bent is a monthly, free-tostreet publication with a circulation of 60,000 copies. Editor Chris Amos hopes this will start a trend for the community it serves to be taken more seriously by media owners and agencies.
“We’re definitely at a real changing point now in terms of how the gay community is perceived, which has a lot to do with TV programming and also political changes like the partnership bill,” says Amos. “It’s only a matter of time before it blows up in the press.”
Advertisers remain loathe, however, to mess with the historical mindshare they have built up through mass market advertising.
Five years ago, there was a brouhaha when Guinness was allegedly poised to go on air with what was to have been the first overtly gay advertisement. Guinness denied all knowledge of the ad and it was never aired.
“The nearest thing to an advertisement aimed at the gay community is the kind of polysexual ads you see from brands like Calvin Klein, which feature two men and a woman,” says Amos.
“A brand has a whole history of communications which creates space in the emotional attachment consumers have to it,” says John Coll, strategy director at Carat. “If you suddenly send out a lot of unrelated signals, it may impact on your existing consumer franchise and it may also be rejected as patronising by the gay community.”
Although advertisers are waking up to the opportunity provided by Dinks, reaching them effectively is still a black art. Some, like American Airlines, have an entire team of people devoted to targeting gays. But most have a long way to go in creating effective gay marketing, according to Ian Johnson, principal consultant at Out Now Consulting. They tend to run the same creative in the gay media as they do in the mainstream media.
“Advertisers now want to become the gay community’s best friend, having ignored it for the last century,” he says. “That’s fine, but advertisers must credentialise their brand to succeed. Focus groups show that where a mainstream advertisement is shown in the gay press, it’s seen as junkmail – it has nothing specific to say to you as a gay consumer – whereas when it’s targeted, it’s like getting a hand-written postcard.”
If Johnson is right and there is a substantial untapped market for the media in addressing the gay community, the former has yet to grab it. But given the investment advertisers have made in building their brands over time, it seems unlikely that anything is going to change quickly.
The gay consumers’ verdict
“There’s a lot of backdoor homophobia in the media,” says Frank Metzstein, managing director of Specsavers’ Tottenham Court Road, London Branch.
“I read an article in The Times last week about the mayor of Paris showing the Queen around, which pointed out that he was homosexual. It was completely irrelevant to his job. If he’d been straight, his sexuality would never have been mentioned. I find that very negative.”
Metzstein says he pretty much avoids the newspapers, apart from a once-a-week glance at the Financial Times and Times. He gets his news from TV, Ceefax and from his mobile phone – mainly because of time constraints.
There is still a big question mark over what gay people want from the media. Linda Royles, chief executive of Bapla, the picture agency trade association, is among those that don’t want to be addressed separately from the media’s mainstream audience.
“I’m a Radio 4 listener and Guardian reader and I buy Diva once every three years,” she said. “Why would I want The Times or any other media to start targeting me on the basis of my sexual preferences? There are loads of other things that interest me more – like the fate of the planet.”
Royles claims the media is naive in the way it represents gay people. “The worst thing is, when someone comes up with a programme idea on something like lesbian parents,” she says. “They always choose the worst stereotypes. If a programme comes on about gay lifestyles, I automatically turn it off.
Once we’d seen Beth Jordache on Brookside do the first gay kiss, it was like okay... whatever.”
Vicky Cooper, a freelance TV producer and director, said she doesn’t need gay media any more, now she’s comfortable with her sexuality. “But I think it’s important for younger people who don’t have role models around them,” she says.
However, Ian Johnson, principal consultant at Out Now Consulting, believes there is a substantial, untapped opportunity for the media to address the gay community.
“People reading G3, Diva, Gay Times and all the other gay publications represent a diverse audience with a huge range of backgrounds and professions, and they’ll consume media as appropriate to their work and other parts of their lives,” says Johnson. “Yet this very diverse group also shares an otherness in their sexuality that represents an opportunity for a dedicated gay subsegment of the general UK media market.”
Case Study: That Gay Show, BBC2
It is pretty easy to identify successful gay TV shows because there are so few of them. Queer As Folkis a shining example among a sea of shows that either flopped after one series or never got off the ground. The show, which ran on Channel 4, has gone on to bigger and better things in the US market, where it is currently in its fifth series.
Queer As Folkwriter Russell T Davies made it clear that the programme set out to do nothing more than serve up a slice of life. What he did not set out to do with the series was make representation TV, which tries to be all things to all people and runs the danger of ending up being nothing to anyone.
The BBC’s first in-house show for gay people, That Gay Show– a weekly magazine programme which started in April 2001 – failed to achieve the same success. The BBC said the programme would be “neither overtly camp nor worthy and political”, but critics rejected the programme for having exactly those qualities. Preachy and self-conscious are just some of the words used to describe the programme, which used an outspoken gay US comic, Scott Capurro, to front a weekly report on the more eccentric aspects of the US gay scene.
That Gay Showset out to appeal to a diverse audience, part of the BBC’s public service remit, but critics say it cast its net too wide and in doing so failed to fit in with gay people’s needs. “It was a sanitised, politically-correct version of gay life,” said Ian Johnson, principal consultant at Out Now Consulting. “In marketing speak, it failed to understand and meet its customers needs.”
