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My favorite dog whistle (that went over my head, because I was not the audience for it) was the Subaru "Come out and play" commercial.
If I remember it correctly, the ad was mostly footage of Subaru SUVs driving over rocks and through streams while a voice over talks about the cars' off-road capabilities. The ads would always end with the narrator saying "Subaru invites you to come out and play.”
As a straight man, I always assumed that the commercial was about how much fun it is to drive a Subaru up a mountain. Apparently, I was missing the point. The nature footage was all a distraction to pacify the straights. The real commercial was just the sentence fragment "Subaru invites you to come out". It was meant to say that Subaru supports queer people. It was a resounding success in promoting the 'Subaru driving lesbian' stereotype.
Are you certain it's not a reference to that one scene from the 1979 movie 'the Warriors'?
I can hear those clacking bottles clearly
There was a whole campaign in the 90’s. The license plates were mostly lesbian coded, they included the Wizard of Oz cast or a certain lesbian tennis player, I think another tag line was “let’s go camping”. It was fun finding out about that because I had a lot of the National Geographic magazines that they had add pages in.
That seems like a big stretch of interpretation, no?
It's fully not, the head of marketing at the time actually has done multiple interviews about it.
"Subaru Lesbian" had become a meme in the queer community, and someone internal to Subaru found out that on self-reporting surveys of Subaru owners, Lesbians made up a surprising amount of the respondents
So Subaru decided to embrace it, with thinly-veiled advertising targeting lesbians
People saying that in response to learning about a dog whistle is how you know it's a good dog whistle.
In one of them the license plate said Xena. It's a whole campaign originating from market research saying that lesbians were disproportionately likely to buy their cars
Yes and no. Subaru has a strong reputation in the queer community (or at least used to) because they were one of if not the first conpany to publically sponsor a queer sports player (female tennis player if memory serves correct but im sure somebody will correct me if im wrong). So even if not their intent, it's easy to see how it could be interpreted as such. They didn't earn the name "lesbaru" for nothing, they actually intentionally advertised to the queer community going back to the 90s if I'm not mistaken !
I thought this was more well-known. So much so that on the Karate Kid sequel series Cobra Kai, Johnny Lawrence is offered a Subaru and he quickly dismisses it because he's not a lesbian.
Now hold on, I don't care about sports or cars but I like lesbians, and the Subaru ad and the female tennis player were all part of a fiction television show, about lesbians called, "The L word."
I don't think these things happened in real life.
I'm too young, but it was real. It was such a thing within the lesbian community that shows like the L word were referencing it.
Well u made me look it up. They did a huge ad campaign with Martina Navratilova in the early 2000's. Never heard of the L word show, but I suppose they had to be inspired by real life events seeing as how it was filmed after these ad campaigns took place!
Whoa
The more you know.
Still seems like a stretch but it hurts nobody to believe it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
NPR did a podcast episode on it. Subaru basically realized that their car specifically resonated with lesbians due to various usability niches and so they decided to lean heavily into it. But it was the 90s, so they needed to be sublte at times.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/14/497958151/episode-729-when-subaru-came-out
It does not matter what it seems like.
It is fact.