Commercial Gains
In stark contrast, the commercial cup floweth over. Whether focusing on targeted product advertising, mass entertainment films and television, or corporate competition for employees, LesBiGays have become the newest darlings of the commercial milieu.35 LesBiGays have been dubbed "an untapped goldmine,"36 a "Dream Market,"37 "completely underserved,"38 and "the best workers."39 Commercial consciousness has woken up to the LesBiGay market. Now, as advertising editor Rogier Van Bakel puts it, "[C]ompanies are jumping on the bandwagon."40
In the advertising arena, the bandwagon appears to be filling up rapidly.41 Absolut Vodka, the first national marketer to advertise in the LesBiGay press in 1979,42 found itself in better and better company in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Seagram, Hiram Walker, Miller, Calvin Klein, Benetton, Philip Morris, Columbia Records, Saab, Saturn, and Subaru coming on board.43 As for the more mainstream media, IKEA's tentative overture to LesBiGay furniture shoppers in its 1994 television commercial44 has given way to a cutting-edge crescendo of "gay-vague" advertising--that tantalizing, hip, and trendy same-sex innuendo used by many retailers to deliver an ambiguous lure to straights and a direct sales pitch to LesBiGays.45 Over the six years from 1993 to 1999, the national marketers' budget for LesBiGay-oriented advertising tripled; in one year alone, from 1998 to 1999, it rose 29% ($120.4 million to $155.3 million).46 Logic dictates that spending for gay-vague advertising vastly exceeded these numbers.47
