How Do Big Companies Treat LGBT People? 15 Cases That Show How Their Stance Has Changed

From keeping their distance, to coming close and then pulling back, to same-sex couples appearing openly on ad posters. Today, being associated with LGBT causes can earn a company a name for being progressive, free, open and inclusive, and win the spending of this community — but it is also a constraint.

Editor's note: This is the third year in a row that QDaily has run a special feature for LGBTQI Pride Month in June. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that same-sex marriage was legal across the country. At the same time, more and more people began investing in the pink economy and betting on this market, and showing off their own political correctness by voicing support for these people... But this June, a gay bar in Orlando was the site of the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. For the LGBTQI community, things are neither as bad nor as good as you might imagine. This year we are trying to take a wider view. We will keep covering this community, but we will also look at gender in the broader sense — which is usually what shapes sexual orientation in the first place, and what allows an LGBTQI community to exist at all. Over the course of Pride Month we will publish five articles. This is the second.

"Yep, I'm Gay"

In 1997, Ellen DeGeneres carried those words onto the cover of Time, dressed head to toe in black.

Six months earlier, word that Ellen Morgan — the character she played in the sitcom Ellen — was about to come out had set off speculation across America about DeGeneres's own sexuality. A week before the "coming-out episode" aired, she sat down with Time. When it aired, 42 million people watched, the highest ratings in the show's run.

But once she publicly acknowledged that she was gay, Ellen got a flood of vicious hate mail, and JC Penney, Chrysler and the fast-food chain Wendy's all pulled their advertising from the show, taking a career on the rise straight to the bottom.

Shortly before she came out, President Bill Clinton had signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage. According to Pew Research Center, only 27% of Americans in 1996 thought gay couples should have equal marriage rights.

Fast forward to June 26, 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal. Ellen posted two words on her Twitter account: "Love Won." She had 60.4 million followers there. Applause had replaced the blame and hostility of before.

That is how society's attitude toward LGBT people has changed over 20 years.

"The effect of coming out was bigger than I expected and bigger than I hoped. It covered up my talent, and who I am, when all I meant to be was honest," Ellen said more than a decade later, looking back on it on Oprah's show. "I almost lost everything. But look at me now."

The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which began in 2003, averages 3.9 million viewers an episode and has won more than 41 Daytime Emmys. Ellen has been named favorite daytime talk-show host at the People's Choice Awards 16 years running.

People have grown kinder to her, and to LGBT people.

When Kim Kardashian's stepfather Caitlyn Jenner had gender-reassignment surgery last year, almost nobody asked whether she was "normal" anymore. Jenner had been an Olympic champion, back when she was still called Bruce Jenner. He won gold in the men's decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and set a world record, became a sensation in the 1970s, was adored across America, and was even called an "American national hero."

After the transition, she became a symbol of a different kind of courage — and quickly became the face of H&M's sportswear line and worked with M.A.C on the "Finally Free" lipstick range. Jenner could not wait to share all of it on Instagram.

JC Penney, which once wanted nothing more to do with Ellen after she came out, hired her again as a spokeswoman in 2012. Chairman Michael Francis told a press conference: "It's important that we share the same fundamental values as Ellen. At JC Penney we can't think of a better partner to help us put some fun back into retail."

You can't really blame JC Penney. Any company, a big one above all, weighs its choices carefully in a marketing campaign, because its commercial interest is at stake. As legal progress pushed attention to LGBT people to its highest point, more and more companies lined up behind them.

From being shunned, to being half-embraced, to same-sex couples appearing openly on ad posters — we picked 15 influential ads and campaigns in which you can see the whole social climate shift behind them.

They Weren't Slogans. They Just Wanted to Sell Something

In 1994, a same-sex couple appeared in an IKEA television commercial for the first time: two men, visibly close, buying a dining table in an IKEA store. It is regarded as the first time marketing paid attention to LGBT people.

But the ad drew furious opposition in America at the time. IKEA even received a bomb threat, and in the end was forced to pull it. That homophobia was both widespread and intense, which is not hard to understand — it was only in 1990 that the World Health Organization took homosexuality off its list of mental illnesses.

IKEA's 1994 ad

But brands also saw how much attention the ad got, and by the late 1990s there were more ads using the same oblique methods to signal interest in LGBT people, a technique later summed up as "gay vague." These were not company or brand slogans; the brands simply hoped the approach would win them customers from this group.

Impulse, Unilever's men's fragrance brand, ran Britain's first ad with LGBT elements in 1998: a twist in the plot, plus rainbow imagery. Subaru, the same year, ran an ad in the United States aimed at lesbians, because it had noticed how many lesbian owners it had. "They are Subaru's best advertisement. Why not talk to them directly?" said John Nash, then chairman of the agency Moon City Productions. Subaru's line was "Get Out and Stay Out," which can be read as "go outdoors and stay there," or as "come out of the closet" — a password of sorts for gay customers.

Unilever's Impulse, 1998

After that, rainbows moved from advertising into the products themselves. The most emblematic is Absolut Vodka's rainbow bottle of 2008, made with Gilbert Baker, who designed the rainbow flag; Absolut said it marked the flag's 30th anniversary.

As society slowly opened up, companies and brands stopped treating this group as unmentionable, and rainbow marketing spread. Doritos made rainbow chips, Chobani stacked yogurt cups into a rainbow for a poster, Nike and Adidas released rainbow shoes...

Companies and Brands Include This Group Rather Than Exclude It — But Usually in a Supporting Part

More and more mass-market brand campaigns take in LGBT people, but few are actually made for them. Usually they are a supporting presence inside a bigger campaign.

In February 2014, LGBT people appeared in a Super Bowl ad for the first time, in a one-minute Coca-Cola spot: in a portrait gallery of Americans of every description, the shot of two gay fathers with their daughter ran for five seconds. After it aired, Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, an American alliance of LGBT media professionals, said it showed that more Americans had come to accept the LGBT friends, colleagues and neighbors around them.

Before that, showing a same-sex couple in mainstream media could easily anger consumers, and advertisers had to split their buys. In 2007, if you turned on MTV LOGO, then a channel aimed at LGBT viewers, you saw a different Levi's 501 ad than on other channels. Same setting: Levi's put the "boy-girl" version on mainstream media and the "boy-boy" version on MTV LOGO.

Robert Cameron, Levi's marketing director at the time, admitted they wanted to reach gay customers directly but did not have the budget to shoot a separate ad. So they added one extra set of shots to what they already had.

Levi's 501, "boy-girl" version

Levi's 501, "boy-boy" version

That earliest IKEA ad, in fact, was one of a series IKEA ran that year aimed at minority groups; the others featured empty-nest parents, single mothers and so on.

But when McDonald's ran an ad on the theme of coming out in Taiwan this March, it meant something entirely different — even though it too was one entry in the "Warmer Conversations" series about the feelings between people, family, romantic and otherwise. It looked perfectly ordinary. The series drew more than 2.3 million views on YouTube in total, and the coming-out film was not the strongest performer. Perhaps that result is worth being glad about.

McDonald's Taiwan ad, 2016

Occasionally There Is Marketing Aimed Squarely at LGBT People — and It Usually Isn't Very Friendly

Sometimes too much is worse than too little.

During Australia's 2014 gay pride parade, ANZ Bank redid its ATMs in 10 styles it thought represented LGBT people: rainbows, unicorns, pink leopard print, all sorts of baroque patterns.

It took the Grand Prix in the Outdoor category at Cannes Lions, and yet this campaign, made specifically for LGBT people, was not friendly at all. It looked like another form of "segregation" rather than real inclusion.

Last February, a GAYtm in Auckland, New Zealand, was smashed up by Queers Against Injustice, an LGBT group, which accused ANZ of doing surface work and prettifying itself.

ANZ Bank's GAYTM campaign, 2014

Hyundai's "Boy Toy" ad, shown in Europe in 2001, arguably looks worse still: it put a gay man inside a plot about cheating.

Yet few people at the time saw it as an insult to LGBT people. It drew attention for its sexual suggestion instead. In a 2001 vote held by the gay dating site Gay.com and the outlet PlanetOut, the ad won "Gayest Commercial."

Hyundai's "Boy Toy" ad, 2001

Society Keeps Opening Up, and Sometimes It All Arrives at Once

Over the long fight for LGBT equality, legal progress has always raised the temperature of public attention. The legalization of same-sex marriage in Britain in 2014 and in the United States in 2015 pushed that attention to its peak.

The Proud Whopper that Burger King sold in its stores in July 2014 was no different from an ordinary Whopper, until the customer opened the wrapper and saw the rainbow stripes inside, and then flattened it out to read "WE ARE ALL THE SAME INSIDE."

The video was played more than 7 million times on YouTube and, after coverage by media around the world, reached an audience of 1.1 billion.

Burger King's rainbow-wrapper campaign, 2014

An engagement-ring poster starring a same-sex couple, which Tiffany put on its website this January, drew just as much attention. It was the first time in Tiffany's 178 years that a same-sex couple led one of its posters — and they were a real couple living in New York.

For Pride Month last year Absolut Vodka released a film documenting a real proposal between two women; Clean & Clear, owned by Johnson & Johnson, turned its attention to transgender people; and the Star Wars-themed soup ad Campbell's ran last October starred a same-sex couple and their child...

For LGBT people, 2015 was a landmark year. And LGBT elements, much like emoji, became one of the most popular marketing themes and motifs of the year.

Around Pride Month There Is Always Something Different

On June 28, 1969, New York police raided a bar called the Stonewall Inn and clashed violently with the gay people inside — an event regarded as the trigger for the modern American fight for gay rights. Every June since, LGBT communities around the world have taken to the streets to call for equal rights during Pride Month. More and more companies spend the end of June promoting the idea of including LGBT people, of being "proud with you."

On June 21 this year, Starbucks raised the rainbow flag over its headquarters building in Seattle; the photo, posted on Starbucks's Instagram, got more than 270,000 likes. Back in 2012, when Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz publicly backed the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States, the company was still being picketed by the National Organization for Marriage, an American anti-same-sex-marriage group — protests that later turned into demonstrations of support for Starbucks around the world.

Social networks lowered the cost of joining in. On June 25, 2012, Oreo posted a photo of a rainbow Oreo on its Facebook page. It is probably the earliest and simplest example of Pride Month marketing. Users were let down, though, by the disclaimer: "This is not an actual Oreo product."

Working a rainbow into the product itself tends to look more sincere. Doritos once made a rainbow version: donate $10 to a nonprofit, get a bag. It cost several times the usual price and still sold out in a day. Every year since 2012, Nike has updated its "Be True" line around Pride Month as a salute to LGBT people; Adidas has put out rainbow Stan Smiths and Superstars, jackets and T-shirts the past two years; and Levi's and Converse have started making rainbow products for Pride Month too.

By now more and more companies step forward to say they support LGBT people. Last June, Uber marked every car in its system with rainbow colors. There is a rainbow heart to the right of the YouTube logo at the top of the page. Making a Pride Month campaign that actually breaks new ground, and showing care for LGBT people without falling into cliché, looks as though it will only get harder.

The Companies That Do Nothing but This Business Are Becoming Known Too

Several marketing firms serving LGBT people appeared around the world in the 1990s, among them Out Now Consulting in the Netherlands (founded 1992) and SPI Marketing (1996) and the Karpel Group (1997) in the United States. But because they do not deal with individuals directly, not many people know them.

Gay community platforms are more representative. Grindr, the world's largest gay dating app, was founded in 2009 and ran independently for seven years on advertising and ad-free membership fees. Early this year it took a $93 million investment from the Chinese investor Kunlun Tech, which pushed it into the media spotlight.

Blued (Danlan.org) and Zank (Feizan.com), similar gay platforms in China, have also become known to more non-gay people in the past few years. Last year Danlan.org worked with Alibaba to fly seven Chinese same-sex couples to Los Angeles for a wedding, which drew plenty of press.

Investors have taken notice of both. On June 1, Blued announced it had closed Series C and C+ rounds worth several hundred million yuan; Zank announced a 10-million-yuan Series B in late May.

All of these companies have surfaced, and several forces working on each other lie behind it: the LGBT equality movement, the shedding of stigma, and a public that understands and accepts LGBT people more than it used to.

Beyond Ads and Products, Big Companies Do Other Things for LGBT People

In 1984, IBM wrote sexual orientation into its equal employment policy — the first time in history that LGBT people were guaranteed equal treatment at work in writing. In 1996 IBM went on to offer benefits to same-sex partners. It is regarded as the multinational friendliest to LGBT people; IBM's Employee Alliance for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Empowerment (EAGLE) is the world's largest employee network for people of different sexual orientations. Goldman Sachs and IKEA were among the other big companies that took an early interest in LGBT rights at work.

Workplace culture shows a company's values better than an ad campaign does. The open letter Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote when he came out in 2014 moved a great many people, and it may be hard for you to question that company's diversity and inclusiveness afterward. The same held in June 2013, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg marched in the San Francisco Pride parade with 700 Facebook employees.

Apple, Tesla, Uber and Airbnb all joined the big parties at last year's San Francisco Pride, and every company's slogan had something to do with pride. At this year's LGBT Mardi Gras parade in Sydney, Google, Airbnb, Facebook and Twitter were sponsors. They throw themselves into these parades because there is no better place to communicate what a company stands for.

From keeping their distance from LGBT people to more and more big companies waving the flag for them, whether for business or for the public good, what lies behind it is a more open society.

Companies are keen to be associated with LGBT causes now because it brings them a name for being progressive, free, open and inclusive — and brands friendly to LGBT people have been shown to win this group's spending.

But from a company's point of view it is also a constraint: it has to avoid the risk of being called hypocritical later (in LGBT circles this is called pinkwashing). So, one last reminder: whatever you do, don't do anything that comes back to slap you in the face.

Cover image from Business Insider, WordPress and company websites, among others.