Markets

Why Donny Deutsch Is Actually Right About Gays and Super Bowl Ads

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: February 4, 2010 / 9:42 AM EST / MoneyWatch

My feelings about Donny Deutsch are pretty much the same as everyone else's: The erstwhile adman turned CNBC anchor is the kind of generic frat-lunk-millionaire in a striped button-down shirt, no tie, to whom you smile politely before making excuses to leave.

Unfortunately, I am now forced to defend him after AgencySpy described him as "bigoted" and an "asshole" for suggesting that Mancrunch.com's attempt to buy a Super Bowl ad was not an efficient use of money if the audience you're targeting is gay men. Here's Deutsch's exchange with Mancrunch representative Dominick Friesen on CNN's Larry King Live, via AS:

Deutsch: "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?"

Friesen: "Actually it was, and we're not going to buy into your stereotypes either..."

Deutch: "I'm just talking about target audience."

Deutsch is taking an eminently reasonable position: There is no point in making an expensive media buy if only a tiny slice of the audience you're addressing could possibly interested in your product. Here's what AS's Matt Van Hoven said about it:

Deutsch came off bigoted ... 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.

Really? Let's do some guesstimation of our own. The Super Bowl is likely to get an audience of 90 million-plus. Half of them will be men, and 10 percent of those might be gay. That means just 4.5 million viewers -- or 5 percent of the audience -- might be gay.

Is it really worth spending $3 million to reach 4.5 million viewers in a buy with only 5 percent effectiveness? Of course not. (Especially when you don't even have the money to buy the damn thing in the first place.) There are lots of much cheaper ways to reach 4.5 million gay men than the Super Bowl. Web ads, for a start.

(All this is another way of saying that Mancrunch's "banned" ad is actually a cheap PR stunt and not a real attempt to buy a spot.)

Bottom line: Deutsch's argument is not based on "guesstimation." He does actually have a couple of decades experience at running an ad agency (that was famous for being staffed with loads of gays -- no good deed goes unpunished!). Just because he's good at math -- and because he happens to be debating a gay man -- doesn't make him a bigot or an asshole.