The pink pound is more closeted than most gay men or women who spend it would like. Too closeted for some gay activists who, a few years ago, began stamping their notes with the words QUEER MONEY or PINK POUND. Although drawing little attention to gay spending power, it inspired more professional PR and marketing services bent on ‘outing’ the pink pound. David Lewis, a gay PR consultant from The Advertising Company Limited in London, advises corporate businesses that "the gay community have a bigger disposable income than straights. As a market, we spend proportionately more on clothing, entertainment, grooming, financial services, drink, travel, music and cars." He stresses a difference between Britain and America. "We don’t use it politically. In America, when Philip Morris, the company who make Marlboro cigarettes, began funding an anti-gay ultra right-wing group: gays boycotted it, and Marlboro’s sales nose-dived."
In Britain, gay consumer visibility is clearest around Old Compton Street in London where coffee bars, pubs, clubs and shops spill out onto the street, right in the heart of ad land. And with agency people walking right through it every day: it’s a small wonder they want a piece of the action.
The acronym ad men like using for gays is DINKYS: (Double Income: No Kids). After a major bust up, gay men don’t have the usual financial burdens that rock straight marriages. Without family commitments, we can afford businesses greater flexibility in the job market. Advertising manager, Alex Frieson, from the gay men’s lifestyle magazine, Attitude added: "We are dealing with 21-year-olds with 31-year-old wage-packets. They are trendy, young, modern, forward-looking guys with enormous brand loyalty for companies that do something for gays."
More important than any of these, gays are trendsetters. Cultural leaders. That turn on PR men like Levi’s UK Director of Public Relations, Roy Edmunson. When Levi’s used a transvestite in its TV advert to sell its jeans, it not only pleased a proportion of the gay market, it caught the imagination of a younger generation with a message they liked: Be an individual; be who you are; be free. Companies like Levi’s are not just after the pink pound: they are also after the green-backs that follow. Straight men don’t read magazines in the same way as women… or gays. By advertising in gay magazines, Levi’s know straights will see the clothes they are wearing.
Levi’s are in good company. Toyota, Peugeot and Nissan cars; Mercury Communications; Mechelob beer; Hamlet cigars; Nike; Gaultier; Calvin Klein; Absolut and Smirnoff vodkas have all advertised in sections of the gay press. Drinks giant Allied Domecq UK has not only opened a gay bar, Jo Joe’s in Birmingham, but also, Planet Patrol, Britain’s pioneering gay bulletin board service on the Internet. Corporate companies are falling over themselves with sponsorship deals for the massive Gay Pride event, now pulling almost a quarter of a million people to London every year. Virgin Megastores, Levi’s Evian, Breaker lager and Cassell’s Books plc were named sponsors last year with Bass Charrington pitching in with the booze. Scotland’s first LesBiGay Pride in Edinburgh, last year, pulled a crowd of around 4,000. Not bad considering London’s first pride in 1970 pulled only 150 or so. Organisers are expecting this summer’s Gay Pride in Glasgow to be even bigger.
Travel companies are also showing an interest in gay money. An Australian travel survey has revealed gays take 4.2 as many trips by air and have 4.6 times more American Express Gold cards than the national average. That must be good news for American Airlines who have appointed their own marketing manager for the gay sector. I spoke to the UK PR manager for American Airlines, Ian Burns. He told me he is "dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s with a British consultancy firm that will take on board the findings of research they are using which show lesbians and gay men are 17 times more likely to travel to the States." He adds, "gays represent a market worth $5,000 million in the USA."
Zanussi, following research that showed gays changing their ‘white goods’ more frequently than straights placed their ads between programmes they knew gays were watching on Channel 4.
Easily the most hyped ‘lifestyle’ ad - PR men don’t like to call them ‘gay’ ads - was the one destined to promote Guiness. It was so hot: it never happened. When David Smith, editor of Gay Times, planned to use stills from the footage, Guinness Brewing GB read him the riot act. "They quoted the laws of copyright to us over the phone and by fax and said they’d take action if we didn’t promise not to use any of the material we’d been offered." The ad, produced by agency, Ogilvy and Mather, featured - eek! - Two guys kissing. The customary denial followed. Guinness claimed there was no ad, just a bit of footage, which they might have used, last Christmas with the slogan: "Not everything in black and white makes sense." If the ad had ever seen the light of day, David Smith believes we would not have thanked them for it: "Certainly, the story presented by the film footage we saw, doesn’t constitute what any self-respecting gay man would consider a ‘gay’ ad. On the contrary, the content is full of heterosexual concerns. Edwardian suburbia, male slobbery, the little rubber-gloved ‘wife’ clearing up the macho husband’s mess as he’s busy creating more on his helter-skelter progress into his car on the way to work. The fact that that the little ‘wife’ turns out to be a man who gets a peck on the cheek as a reward for his efforts does very little to de-heterosexualise such a clichéd scenario." Who cares? Guinness was sidestepped at Christmas by Teacher’s who had two hunks curled up together on a couch, in front of their fire, being served their favourite tipple by their dog! The ad went out all over Scotland and in selected regions in England: Carlton (London) and Anglia Television. Brand manager for Teacher’s whisky, (part of Allied Domecq), David Turner explains: "We recognise the value of the gay market and this is a positive step towards acknowledging it. This was a ‘lifestyle’ ad showing it is not necessarily just older men who drink Teacher’s."
By March, Peugeot had given the kiss of life to the sound of M People, Virgin Vodka had been filmed in a London gay bar and Saatchi and Saatchi were teasing cinemagoers with lesbians advertising a new magazine.
