One Toyota, an Oakland, California-based dealership quietly began running a new television ad in the San Francisco Bay area that features, for the first time in the United States, a same-sex couple exclusively for a car commercial. The spot shows a middle-class woman sitting in her driveway speaking to someone else about her new purchase, presumably her spouse. “Honey, I know I told you to meet me at the dealership,” she says. “But I bought the car!” She cleverly adds: “I didn’t even have to tell them I was married to an attorney.” So far, your standard car ad fare. But then the woman goes on to ask, “Do you want to see it? Come on out.” The front door of the house opens and her spouse comes out. Except she’s another woman.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, David Pippenger, whose Oregon-based Handcrafted Media created the ad, says he thinks it’s a first. “As far as I know, and I specialize in automotive advertising, no one has ever seen a local advertisement that has a same-sex couple in it.”
Rich Ferraro of GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), says his group tracks national advertisements. He mentioned a national Chevrolet ad that aired in February during the Winter Olympics. But that spot was a series of short vignettes representing all types of American families, including a gay couple, not an ad that featured only a same-sex relationship.
According to One Toyota general manager Brad Barnett, who issued a statement to KTVU which serves Oakland and the greater Bay area, “We believe whether you are a same-sex couple, married couple from here, from there, all those people buy cars and want to be treated with respect. And we want them to know there is a safe place they can come in and do business,” said Barnett.
The ad has so far received generally favorable reviews, although one YouTube user posted a comment to the effect that “kids watch TV and don’t need to see this crap.”
The last time a commercial used a same-sex couple exclusively in the U.S. was 20 years ago this year when IKEA ran an ad featuring a male same-sex couple shopping for a dining room table. The ad was quickly pulled after the threat of a store bombing in New York convinced IKEA that progress was not worth the potential lives lost had someone actually carried out the threat.
Internal company studies show that 55 percent of Toyota purchases are made by women and almost 85 percent of those purchases are influenced by women, although Barrett did not elaborate on how and in what ways women influence those decisions.
For its part, the Toyota Corporation completely supports the ad, even though it will only run in the greater San Francisco market for now. But now is enough, according to Denise Young, an Oakland area resident and one-half of a same-sex couple. “It was sort of like it’s no big deal. Except that it is still a big deal … to me.”
