NEW YORK — The fashion, beauty and retail sectors accounted for seven of 89 companies considered appropriate and respectful advertisers to gay men and lesbians in 2003, and one of them — Nike — also ranked among 21 major U.S. corporations whose consumer practices and workplace policies were deemed most friendly to those groups.
So found the second annual HRC Corporate Equality Index, based on eight criteria researched by the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit project that fosters equal rights for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender, or GLBT, community.
By comparison, five of 50 advertisers cited in HRC’s 2002 index for effectively targeting gay men and lesbians stemmed from the fashion, beauty and retail industries.
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Nike and Levi Strauss were the only two apparel players to rank among the 21 major U.S. corporations that received a perfect score of 100 percent in HRC’s 2003 index. It’s the first time Levi was awarded a perfect score of 100 percent and a repeat performance by Nike. Unlike Nike, however, Levi was not cited for advertising to the GLBT community. The venerable denim brand still achieved a perfect score because of its financial support of GLBT or AIDS-related organizations or events.
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Those two apparel marketers and 19 other top-ranked firms from the banking, technology and insurance sectors, among others, were drawn from 250 of the Fortune 500 and Forbes 200 largest privately held firms — those from which HRC could obtain data to evaluate them.
Additional apparel, beauty and retail players named by HRC for appropriate and respectful advertising to gay men and lesbians were Abercrombie & Fitch, Donna Karan, Estée Lauder Cos. and Reebok International, all of which were named in both the 2003 and 2002 indexes. Federated Department Stores and Sears, Roebuck also made the grade for 2003.
“We are seeing a lot more respectful and targeted advertising — in the use of targeted gay media and gay-specific ads,” said Kim Mills, HRC’s education director who oversees HRC WorkNet, the group’s workplace project.
It’s more than a coincidence this is happening, Mills noted, as corporate America continues to bring its policies in line with its increasingly diverse workplace. That’s because first-time gay marketing efforts are often spurred by individual champions within various businesses that have established gay-friendly policies in their workplace, policies that raise a company’s consciousness and subsequently spark gay-targeted marketing, whether a gay-specific campaign or general market ads placed in gay media.
The 89 companies credited for appropriate and respectful advertising represent 36 percent of the 250 rated in the 2003 Corporate Equality Index. That marks a significant improvement over the 50 firms, or 21 percent, so rated among 238 companies evaluated in the 2002 CEI, but still falls far short of other performance yardsticks of the HRC index. For example, almost all the companies rated — 238, or 95 percent, included sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies. In contrast, the fewest firms rated — 23, or 9 percent — protected gender identity and expression in those policies.
One weakness in the equality index’s advertising criterion, said Michael Wilke, executive director of The Commercial Closet, is that it credits a company for having done any kind of gay marketing at any time — it is not tied to the performance year the index is measuring or being gay-specific; it could be a general market ad placed in gay media. “We’ve done some work with HRC on this [criterion] and they’re amending it,” noted Wilke, who also is founder of The Commercial Closet, a non-profit educational project devoted to better representation and inclusion of GLBT consumers in marketing and the media.
For example, Wilke said, “Nike has placed some general market ads in Out magazine over the years, but it has done just one gay-specific ad.” That was a “Just Do It” Nike TV spot that ran in 1995 — the first and only one yet to focus on HIV — by following real-life, openly gay, HIV-positive athlete Ric Muñoz of Los Angeles as he ran in a park.
“Gay-specific ads are still a bit of an edgy approach, though they are starting to gain favor,” Wilke added. “It’s a classic marketing question: Do you create ads for a particular group or go with a general market ad in targeted media?”
The 2004 index is expected to evaluate advertising efforts by asking firms to cite the last three gay campaigns they’ve done, whether they were gay specific and what media were used, Wilke said.
The 21 companies scoring 100 percent overall in HRC’s 2003 Corporate Equality Index were nearly double the 11 that achieved the top rating a year earlier. Joining Levi Strauss, with scores of 100 for the first time, were Bank One, Capital One Financial, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lehman Bros. Holdings, MetLife, PG&E, Prudential Financial and S.C. Johnson.
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