Last night Donny Deutsch made an appearance on Larry King Live, where the discussion centered on the banned ManCrunch.com spot. Deutsch came off bigoted, if only because he said to company representative Dominick Friesen:
“It’s hard to argue that it makes sense to reach a very targeted audience of gay males in America by advertising to this mass audience,” opined Deutsch. “So you can’t say with a straight face that that was a smart media buy, can ya?”
Uhh, what? Apparently, Donny missed the beauty of that statement.
With some kind of face, Friesen responded, “Actually it was, and we’re not going to buy into your stereotypes either…”
“I’m just talking about target audience,” Deutsch interjected.
Friesen shot back that they thought the decision was wise since, you know, homosexuals are part of that large audience. Does anyone have metric data on how many homosexual men watch the Super Bowl? The internet told us the best estimate was that 10% of the US population is gay. Quick math tells us that of those 30,000,000 people, 45% are male, and since we don’t know how many gay men will watch the game we’re forced to assume that “some” will (since it’s much less likely that “none” will). Since no public data exists, or was presented during the show, Deutsch’s argument was pure guesstimation and therefore not worth listening to. What it does tell us is that Deutsch assumes gay men don’t watch football, which is a stereotype.
No matter how he phrased the question, Deutsch was destined to sound like the asshole many people already believe him to be. It doesn’t really matter how many gays watch the game. Does anyone seriously believe every campaign that’s in there is going to return investment? Pepsi bowed out and it’s maybe the single brand that should use the game’s mass audience. Clearly, advertising during the Bowl is about exposure, not metrics. Pepsi got theirs just by stepping back.
So what about the claims that ManCrunch never intended to pay for ad space? Friesen claims they had the $2.6 million needed to pay for the spot (see clip below), and that they shared some proof of that with CBS. There’s another guy on the program who thinks no one with a motive should be advertising during the game. It was after this remark that Deutsch had one salient point — who’s to say where the “appropriate” line is? The other guy thinks the SB should be a place where 8 year-olds can not see boobies. Doesn’t he realize the gay babies won’t even notice breasts?
Via AfterElton