BlogWorks: Cowboys and their trucks

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January 02, 2006

Cowboys and their trucks

So what kind of truck is that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are leaning against in that publicity photo for Brokeback Mountain? I ask because pretty much every time I see a car or soft drink in a movie, I assume a producer hit up the manufacturer for advertising dollars. Some products are placed more skillfully than others: the retro Chevrolet ad flashing in Times Square while King Kong ran amok was nicely done, but Club Crackers digitally added to the coffee table in the TV series “Yes, Dear” are just tacky.

This truck is so old and beat-up, it’s surely not an advertisement, and it may well be a GMC pickup truck. But wouldn't it be ironic if the gay cowboys drove a Ford? You remember, of course, that Ford was in trouble recently with gay and lesbian groups for dropping Jaguar and Land Rover advertising from GLBT publications under pressure from the arch conservative American Family Association. On Dec. 12, after Ford Group Vice President Joe Laymon met with members of seven gay and human rights advocacy groups about the issue, CEO Bill Ford affirmed the company’s “commitment to inclusion.”
And two days later, Laymon released a letter he wrote to the coalition he had met with, in which he promised that Ford Motor Company will run corporate ads (as opposed to ads promoting specific Jaguar or Land Rover vehicles) in gay and lesbian targeted publications in 2006.

You gotta wonder what Jaguar and Land Rover were thinking by dropping their decision to stop advertising – did they calculate they would gain more sales to conservative families than they would lose to gays? And why did the AFA pick on Ford in particular? It’s not the only automaker to discover that gay people have money to spend and prefer to spend it with companies that market to them. Gaylinkcontent.com has a fascinating survey of automotive advertising in the gay market by HIM Corp., beginning with Subaru ads appealing to lesbians in the early '90s. This summer, Subaru also became one of the first car companies to advertise on the 24-hour gay cable channel LOGO. Jeep, Cadillac and Lexus have advertised recently on Gay.com. See lots more about gay (and anti-gay) advertising on The Commercial Closet. And then there's Gay Wheels.com, a "gay-friendly automotive resource."

Planet Out Inc. tells advertisers that U.S. gay and lesbian consumers are 15 million strong and have $610 billion in buying power. In these days of declining market share, those are numbers no American automaker can afford to ignore.

Posted by Laurie Mayers at January 2, 2006 01:14 PM