Advertisers may be missing key opportunities to reach and cultivate a powerful, diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) market, according to a report released by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s Center for the Study of Media and Society. The study also notes these missed opportunities can result in significant potential loss of revenue and have created a skewed perception of what has been traditionally viewed as a niche market.

In “‘Business, Not Politics’: Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgender People and the Consumer Sphere,” Katherine Sender, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, the University of Pennsylvania, examines how 30 years of unrepresentative statistics and stereotypes have led to the construction of an artificial LGBT market. Sender’s findings are the result of an extensive analysis of gay-targeted marketing and gay images in mainstream advertising, combined with in-depth interviews of 39 marketing professionals who attempt to reach and identify the elusive gay market.

As a result, large segments of the LGBT community—lesbians, people of color, working-class people, bisexuals and transgender people—tend to be rendered invisible, resulting in a huge, untapped market that most advertisers have yet to successfully identify and connect with.

www.glaad.org/org/projects/center/index.html.