Amidst the noisy advertising battle of the soft drink titans, PepsiCo quietly joined the growing list of corporations marching into Gay Pride events. It is the first effort to reach gay Americans by any soft drink in the $63.8 billion annual U.S. cola market.
Floats promoting 80 gay businesses, nonprofits and major corporations lined the side streets of Fifth Avenue. A cacophony of competing dance songs blared from each one while muscle boys and drag queens, the dominant float 'decorations,' patiently waited their turn to enter the fray of the massive, 35th annual New York City Pride Parade.
At the more sedate float promoting Pepsi, festooned with bubble machines, a DJ spun records from the float's top tier, but the only one in drag was an enormous blow-up Pepsi bottle with a blonde wig. Pepsi employees, decked out in corporate gray or black Diet Pepsi T-shirts and hats, jogged down the parade route accompanied by members of the Big Apple gay softball league. They handed out 8,000 cans of new Pepsi Edge soda (half the carbohydrates and sugar of regular, but not quite diet) and 78,000 blue Mardis Gras bead necklaces to hundreds of thousands of eager attendees.
The presence of Purchase, NY-based PepsiCo was largely inspired by its new gay employee group, EQUAL, formed in December 2003. Such groups have become a force in motivating their companies to look at gay marketing.
A greater presence for Diet Pepsi in gay media is anticipated later this year, though no details are confirmed. Intriguingly, gay themes have already crept into the company's general ads. Up in Canada, a flamboyant man broke the 'news' of his bisexuality in a Pepsi commercial. Also there, Pepsi was recently a sponsor of PrideVision gay TV network. Arch-enemy Coca-Cola has not yet made U.S. gay marketing efforts, aside from sponsorship of Gay Pride in Atlanta, its home city, and Montreal.
Attendance Tricky, but Pride Events Offer Image, Sampling Opportunity
For many advertisers, Pride parade and festival sponsorships are a key component of gay presence. This year, Bud Light, Delta Airlines, Showtime, Smirnoff, Starbucks and Washington Mutual were among the largest corporate brands strutting their stuff at multiple Pride events.
As corporations increasingly capitalize on the notion of gays as 'early adopters,' 'trend setters' and 'thought leaders' by introducing new products to them in gay magazines, Pride events can be a way to introduce new products into the hands, literally, of the gay marketplace.
Most Pride parades reported attendance boosts this year, though some call the numbers inflated and actual statistics are untracked. Reporting comes from organizers (who want to emphasize size) instead of police (who avoid being accused of undercounting) or third-party sources.
Thus, New York City parade organizers say attendance this year was 1.5 million, the largest in the country. San Francisco's parade claimed a million this year, compared to last year's 750,000 by police count. Toronto also regularly asserts 750,000, Chicago estimated 400,000, Los Angeles-West Hollywood and Boston each 250,000-300,000, Washington, D.C., about 200,000, and numbers for smaller cities like Minneapolis fall at or under 100,000. Atlanta Pride officials said event attendance fell from last year's 300,000 to 100,000 people because of rain.
But parade organizers don't concentrate much on attendance to sell sponsorships, something they say advertisers are not concerned with. 'Corporations look at whether it's a significant media market more so than attendance,' notes Aandre Davis, operations director for Boston Pride.
'Attendance is not as important as sampling,' echoes Scott Seitz, founder of SPI Marketing in New York, and a former eight-year Pepsi employee. Seitz organized Pepsi's parade presence, and over the last eight years has also done so for clients including Johnson & Johnson's K-Y lubricants, SmithKline Beecham's Havrix, Philip Morris' Benson & Hedges, and Absolut vodka—which had a presence at 15 Pride events simultaneously.
Who's On the Corporate Float, How to Carry Everything?
Logistics can be a challenge at Prides. Since Seitz was doing massive sampling across the 3-mile-long NYC parade route, he needed to drag along thousands of cans of soda, ice, and bead necklaces, all which didn't fit on the float. So he rented an additional truck that needed decorating too.
And not all companies use employees on the floats, especially in cities where they have no offices. Seitz sometimes hires models, other times he'll give a donation to a local gay athletic team to have them help, further supporting the community.
Still, more companies focus on print advertising, which is simpler than participating in parades. 'Pride is not a place for everybody,' explains Seitz.
But consumption in the overall carbonated soft drink market is flat, so the time may be right for soft drink marketers to take a gulp of the gay market. And munch on this: PepsiCo's beverage and salty snacks businesses are major untapped ad categories, with brands including Frito-Lay, Tropicana, Quaker, Gatorade, Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, SunChips, Mountain Dew, Sierra Mist, Slice, Aquafina, Lipton, and SoBe.
Will Pepsi and its brands become the choice of a New Gay Generation?
Commercial Closet column covers gay issues in advertising, marketing and media. It is part of the non-profit project tracking 85 years of gay images in advertising worldwide. Its 1700+ image archive is at CommercialCloset.org .
