French car ad shows gay marriage, declares “times have changed”

Via Copyranter, a French ad for the Renault Twingo shows gay marriage as a matter of course.

This proves to the cynic in me that there is no social change so great that it cannot be used to sell you something. At least that is an immutable fact of our society!

Very cute otherwise. It actually made me smile.

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French car ad shows gay marriage, declares “times have changed”
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10 thoughts on “French car ad shows gay marriage, declares “times have changed”

  1. 6

    I suppose I meant that, in the context of the world within the ad itself, nobody thought it was particularly odd that an older man with a daughter was marrying a younger man. You’re right that they presented it as an “edgy” way of saying “times have changed”, Ibis — that message was pretty on the nose.

    I like the idea of presenting gay couples in perfectly ordinary situations in advertisements, and really liked this one SMBC comic where the joke had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it was about two guys on a date, they were just completely incidentally gay. More of that kind of thing and being gay will REALLY be a matter of course, not a novelty.

  2. 7

    Nope. Not “a matter of course”. It’s still unexpected enough to be the “edgy gimmick”. I *did* see a commercial or public service ad (can’t remember which) a couple of years ago, in which a gay couple was just one of a few doing normal household things (changing the windshield wipers on the car or deciding whether to go to the doctor’s office vs. ER or something). I’m not positive, but I think the animated Service Ontario commercial that came out last year had a hetero couple getting married morph into a m/m couple with a kid between them. The picture was pretty small at that point though, and I could be wrong. Anyway, the point is, it will be “a matter of course” when it’s not remarkable.

    Sadly, in commercial-land women still do all the housework and cooking, men are the experts (even when it comes to cleaning and cooking products), multi-racial families are rare, and wholly ethnic minority families are even moreso.* It will be decades before same-sex couples are as common in commercials as even they are in real life. For example we’ve had gay, married politicians for almost a decade. But in ad-land? Not so much.

    Still, cute ad, and a step forward.

    *Kudos go out to the Gov’t of Canada ad promoting career change as an economic stimulus that actually has a woman becoming a construction worker and a guy becoming a nurse.

  3. 8

    Oh, the irony! It’s an ad for a French car, but we still don’t have same-sex marriage in France. (Only a kind of civil union that doesn’t lend itself to big ceremonies.)

    Still, 2012 is an election year here too, and many are hoping that change will come at last and bring to the home of Twingo what already exists in Canada and in many European countries and US states.

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