Now Live: First National Deal Site For Gay Men

Groupon- and LivingSocial-type, just-in-time daily deal sites are growing like blue plate specials, but, until now, there has been no such Web-shopping service devoted to the most Web-savvy, most affluent, well-travelled and impulse-buying consumers: gay men. A new site, DirectMale.com, hopes to get first-mover advantage.

The Washington, D.C.-based online voucher company, which launched just under a month ago, is selling upscale goods and services featuring local and national offers from bars, clubs, restaurants, spas, salons, travel, hotels, cruises and much more. 

While the Direct Male site is new, the service isn't. The 20-year-old company actually started as a direct-mail business with a 100,000-person opt-in database, where participating households got "card decks" in their mailboxes, with offers from the likes of Jim Beam Brands, the National Gay and Lesbian Travel Association, British Airways and GlaxoSmithKline.

"We are the first national player in this space," says founder and CEO Andrew Isen. "Last summer, when we began to put everything together, we thought we would do it local but the gay male market is so strong that we opted to go nationally out of the bag." He says the niche market, because of the liquidity of its population and its willingness to part with cash for the right products, has become a much-coveted segment in the last two decades. "And because gay men are brand loyal, [marketers] know the value of targeting this segment."  

Isen says that rather than focus on deals-of-the-day the site will have a regular rotation of timed offers. Isen says they are much more affluent than the general market, with the gay male consumer earning nearly double the average household income with 70% more disposable income. The company says that in the U.S. there are about 12.3 million gay men over the age of 18, and 93% of them are active online consumers.

He says among products and services that are popular with gay men -- bespoke clothing that would otherwise be hard to find, skin care, and personalized household products and apparel, for example -- travel is one of the biggest. "We are offering, for example, a trip to a gay-friendly resort in Nicaragua. Travel is one of the biggest items and categories in the gay segment. And it always has been." He points out that roughly 80% of gay men have passports, which is double national average. They travel substantially more than any other niche; the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association has 3,000 members. "Today, every airline and hotel chain has gay-specific services. Winn Las Vegas, for example, has a concierge dedicated to gay clientele."

Per Isen, gay men are, per capita, on the Internet more than any other niche segment. Direct Male is mobile optimized. "The newest studies show that gay male consumers -- over 40% -- will only use mobile smart devices to make web purchases. They will only use smartphones or tablets."

Black Buying Power: Watch Where You Spend Your Money

Most big advertisers don’t respect the African American consumer

By David Alexander, Special to the NNPA from Our Weekly –

How much do most big corporate advertisers respect the African American consumer—25 percent, 15 percent, 5 percent, or one percent?

If you guessed one percent you were wrong. It’s less than that—.68 percent, to be exact.

Of the $263.7 billion spent annually on advertising within the nation, less that one percent is used to target African American consumers, despite the fact that Black buying power is estimated at around $857 billion, according to the 2010 census.

Ken Smikle of Target Market News notes that “the largest single investment corporate America makes is advertising,” but only a trickle is spent targeting African American consumers, a group that has been and continues to be underestimated, underserved, disrespected and misunderstood.

Pepper Miller, co-founder of the Hunter-Miller Group, a multicultural marketing firm, and co-author of the book “What’s Black About It?” explains that one of the most common misperceptions advertisers have is that mainstream publications will reach all possible consumers. Since most African Americans speak English, they generalize, there is no need to market outside of the mainstream publications.

“Marketing is about segmentation, diversity and understanding who your customers are,” counters Miller, who has devoted many years to the field of diverse marketing. But why do advertisers feel that way when these facts are taught in most marketing classes, and when it is known that most African Americans generally distrust the mainstream media?

A 2008 study by Radio One entitled “Understanding Black America” revealed that only 13 percent of African Americans trust the mainstream media, and out of 29 million Blacks, only 2 million can be reached through mainstream publications.

In fact, there is a long history of corporations and organizations using Black newspapers for free press exposure while committing only a paltry amount of their vast advertising budgets to support the same papers that have opened up valuable editorial space to them.

A similar type criticism was lodged against Toyota by the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) earlier this year. The NNPA alleged that when Toyota’s image was hurt by devastating recalls a couple of years earlier, the Japanese car maker sought help from the Black press to restore the brand’s image and to encourage African American loyalty. The NNPA charged that Blacks stood by Toyota to the tune of $2.2 billion. However, in its $1.6 billion 2011 advertising budget, Toyota allocated only $20 million to be shared by all African American media, including newspapers, radio and television. And when Toyota ran ads thanking American consumers for remaining loyal, none of the thank-you ads ran in the African American press.

R.L. Polk & Co., an automotive marketing research firm, says African American consumers represent almost 10 percent of Toyota’s U.S. market share, with 15 out of every 100 automobile purchases by African Americans being a Toyota-made automobile.

Unfortunately, the slighting of African American media is a problem even among Black advertisers. The NAACP, the oldest and largest of civil rights organizations, ignored Black publications in advertising its annual Image Awards extravaganza. When doling out its advertising dollars for the event, the organization chose to utilize only mainstream publications. As a result, NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous was the target of much criticism from the Black press. Jealous claimed it was a “grave” oversight. “I am very sensitive to the need to support Black community newspapers. They are the only way to assure Black readers in a given community that you actually want your ads to reach them directly,” he said in response to the criticism.

This questionable marketing practice is also occurring in the music industry, where there are multitudes of African American performers. Despite this fact, the industry has invested few ad dollars targeting African American consumers.

This is occurring at a time when African American businesses and workers are hardest hit by unemployment and the ever-tightening economy.

Many executives in the movie industry are guilty of a similar myopia. They have operated on the assumption that African Americans will not attend a movie that does not have an African American lead and/or cast. However, a study conducted by BET this year revealed that 81 percent of movies seen by African Americans did not include an African American cast, lead actor or storyline. This same study also showed that the average African American goes to the movies 13.4 times a year in comparison to the general moviegoer who goes 11 times a year.

So the question becomes: why are these advertisers slighting their most reliable consumer?

According to a 2008 report from Packaged Facts, which publishes market intelligence on a wide range of consumer industries, Black buying power is projected to rise to about $1.1 trillion by 2012. There are currently 343,300 African American households within the United States earning $150,000 or more, as well as “819,700 individuals who earn a minimum of $75,000 per year.”

Although a number of companies have profited by marketing directly to the African American consumer, such as McDonalds, Gucci, Lexus, Lincoln, Procter & Gamble, State Farm, Infiniti, Bank of America, Wells Fargo Bank, overall most corporations and organizations have left the African American consumer out when it comes to their ad dollars.

In “Black Is the New Green,” authors Leonard Burnett Jr. and Andrea Hoffman write: “It would be foolish in the extreme not to tap into this rich buying segment, yet this is exactly what the marketing firms of companies (fail to) do all too frequently.”

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