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.

We took it to what we thought was the limit. It was supported and encouraged all the way by our client. Nobody could have foreseen how effective it would be. The attention as it went viral exceeded our wildest dreams. We reached our intended audience and then some, to put it mildly. The gay subject and the gay style hit a nerve deep inside the ongoing culture wars. 

What some found offensive, others saw as a breakthrough. A lot of viewers may have felt uncomfortable about the gay sex references in our commercial, which was reflected in online comments, condemnations, YouTube reaction videos and some media commentaries. But local news and late-night show hosts generally laughed along with us, and the vast majority of the people who it was intended for really loved it. We heard this firsthand and secondhand, online and through the grapevine. The spot even managed to gain the attention of Elon Musk, who tweeted a meme about the ad. And all the media attention generated more than 500 million impressions within a couple of weeks—without a single paid advertisement, according to our client.

“When audacious humor is called for, it’s either you go all in or you don’t go at all,” is one of our guiding rules. In the end, however, we don’t think it was just the raunchy humor that connected with people. We believe it was the authenticity of the story and the characters.

Each scene came from a real place in our experiences with the LGBTQ+ community, combined with our sumptuous relationships with food. People crave authenticity, and we passionately gave it everything we had to deliver on that.

Though we both identify as gay, we wanted to be inclusive to all shades of the LGBTQ+ rainbow. We don’t fit so well into our own gay checkboxes, so we really wanted to make sure our cast featured an assortment of personality types and traits that even go beyond LGBTQ+ categorization.

A great example is the Boozy Milkshake character, who doesn’t heed her fellow drag queens’ advice to hold back on the alcohol and dairy, then overdoes it and ends up almost ruining the parade by causing a major food backup. (Our costume designer got really excited dressing Boozy Milkshake in fishnet stockings, indicating that she “knows exactly who this girl is.”) Gay or straight, everyone’s been there or has that friend who doesn’t know their limits.

Though the spot indulges in its share of hedonism, we wanted to bring some depth to the Gay Pride story that doesn’t just involve hooking up (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). The characters in the spot are looking for all kinds of things. Even a friendly, real connection. That’s why we ended with a romantic moment. We believe everyone can relate to people looking for a sense of belonging—like the lesbian cucumber in the parade scene, who can’t contain her joy at being beside her peers and starts bouncing wildly. To us, a sense of belonging is what Gay Pride is actually about.

Again, not everyone had a positive reaction to the ad. But since we didn’t take anything too seriously, choosing to laugh along with but not at our community, even some of those who were offended or disagreed with the material could chuckle.

You might not be able to align with everybody, but if you can make them laugh, you’ve secretly won ’em over. Even if they don’t realize it. Who can’t use more laughs in their day?