Gay subaru commercial
Critical Media Project
This Subaru car commercial depicts an animated Subaru driving through various neighborhoods and landscapes. Throughout the advertisement, written questions scroll on the bottom of the screen, asking big questions about the innateness of life. “How do you spot yourself?”, “What undertake you see yourself doing?”, “Where accomplish you see yourself going?”, “How will you get there?” At the terminate of the ad, we the automobile stops by a lake, and two men get out of the vehicle, walking together.
discussion
Did you have any expectations about the genders of the drivers of the car? What shaped these expectations? Were you surprised that two men were revealed to be in the car? Why or why not?
Consider the target audience for this ad. What is their age? Gender? Sexual orientation? Socio-Economic status?. What clues from within the advertisement help determine this target audience? Examine both audio and visual cues, including the text at the bottom of the screen and the various environments that the animated car drives through.
critique
Subaru has long been been known as a champion for lesbian and queer rights, and was a sponsor of the le
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How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Love with Subaru
Subaru’s marketing strategy had just died in a fit of irony.
It was the mid 1990s, and sales of Subaru cars were in decline. To opposite the company’s fortunes, Subaru of America had created its first luxury car—even though the tiny automaker was famous for plain but dependable cars—and hired a trendy advertising agency to present it to the public.
The new approach had fallen level when the ad men took irony too far: One ad touted the new sports car’s top speed of 140 MPH, then asked, “How vital is that, with extended urban gridlock, gas at $1.38 a gallon and highways full of patrolmen?”
After firing the hip ad agency, Subaru of America changed its approach. Rather than strive directly with Ford, Toyota, and other carmakers that dwarfed Subaru in size, executives decided to return to its old focus on marketing Subaru cars to niche groups—like outdoorsy types who liked that Subaru cars could control dirt roads.
This seek for niche groups led Subaru to the 3rd rail of marketing: They discovered that lesbians loved their cars. Lesbians liked their dependability and size, and even the n
Case study: Subaru
Introducing: Martina Navratilova
International tennis legend Navratilova was embraced by Subaru of America after the company began courting the lesbian market in 1996. A TV campaign features Martina among other female athletes in the "What Do I Know?" theme. The spot includes golfers Juli Inkster, Meg Mallon and Olympic skier Diann Roffe-Steinrotter. Each asks, "What do I know" about performance, control, grip, etc. Martina gets the last word in, asking "What do we know? We're just girls."
Tim Bennett wanted to dispel a few notions. "Everyone assumes it's a woman loving woman campaign because it's her and they thought those other women were too. But Martina doesn't want to be positioned as a lesbian. She just wants automakers to speak to women in an intelligent way, something else few others do even today."
Having said that, it is remarkable how Subaru moved to the lesbian drivers more and more, with puns and wordplay that could only be construed as "targeting the L."
Subaru also realized that if they just put gay terms in their ads, people would see through their intentions in the blink of an eye as pinkwashing. They had to show that they really cared a
Case study: Subaru
The beginning
How act you advertise a vehicle that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”? That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. When the company’s marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel commute, they identified four core groups who were responsible for half of the company’s American sales: teachers and educators, health-care professionals, IT professionals, and outdoorsy types. Then they discovered a fifth: lesbians. “When we did the analyze, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person - and often a woman,” says Tim Bennett, who was the company’s director of advertising at the time. When marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.
In the ‘90s, gay-friendly advertising was largely limited to the fashion and alcohol industries. Pop culture had also yet to embrace the LGBT cause. Mainstream movies and TV shows with gay characters - enjoy Will & Grace - were still a couple of years away, and few celebrities were openly gay.