Ad Age is marking Pride Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which LGBTQ+ creators revisit some of their favorite projects. (Read the introduction here.) This week, our guest editor Jonathan Mildenhall turns the spotlight to freelance directors Loren Christiansen and Michael DeWeese. Here, Christiansen and DeWeese write about the making of the Postmates “Eat With Pride” campaign.
What started creatively as a stop-motion food collage for a Postmates Pride Month campaign turned into something much, much bolder. Our objective was to address gay consumers in a way that actually speaks to them. We were addressing a gay audience with a gay product in the gayest way possible.
Having collaborated together for over a decade, we’ve spawned a few NSFW anthropomorphic cartoons of our own, but we never thought we would be in a position to crank up the risqué humor in a major marketing campaign. But that is precisely what happened when Postmates partnered with Psyop for the “Eat With Pride” campaign—aka the “Bottom-friendly” campaign—for Pride Month 2022.
The spot depicted a visual list of do’s and don’ts for a bottom to choose from to get a beneficial diet during Pride. (If this gay slang mystifies you ... just ask ChatGPT to explain.) And in one of our most audacious scenes, a food delivery bag, dressed as a seedy dance club, provides the perfect metaphor for a very questionable food order.