New York (CNN Business)The Hallmark Channel last week decided to pull a Zola commercial off the air that featured a lesbian couple kissing during their wedding ceremony.
Initially, that seemed like an all-too familiar slap in the face for gay Americans, perhaps even a step back for their collective social standing. But then an overwhelming backlash against Hallmark on social media and elsewhere compelled the network to reverse course -- a moment that is now being hailed as yet another cultural milestone for LGBTQ Americans in advertising.
Television ads aren't as important in the digital marketing age as they were a generation ago, but in some ways they represent a final frontier of mainstream cultural acceptance for gay equality, according to several marketing experts who specialize in helping major corporations sell products to the gay community.
"It's not about gay people as much as it is contemporary consumers," Bob Witeck, president of the LGBTQ marketing and communications consulting firm Witeck Communications, told CNN Business. "One of the ways to be contemporary is to be inclusive of LGBTQ individuals. It's less fraught, I think, even than race. ... Gay and LGBTQ consumers, Gen Z and Millennials, their attitudes are so different about the ordinariness of same sex marriage today."
AFA and its subsidiary, One Million Moms, have been constant foes to gay and lesbian tolerance in American culture. OMM is the group that took The Hallmark Channel to task for airing its most recent Zola ads showcasing same-sex weddings. In 2012, OMM publicly opposed JC Penney for hiring lesbian comedian-turned talk show host Ellen DeGeneres as a company spokesperson.
Seven years later, Ellen was one of the leading voices online calling for The Hallmark Channel to put Zola's ads back on the air in a tweet over the weekend.
After Hallmark buckled, OMM went after the network a second time, calling for a boycott of the station after starting a petition to get it to change its mind once more. "So many people feel betrayed because this is one of the very last channels that families could go to and not be bombarded with politically correct commercials and LGBTQ agenda," OMM wrote on its website. "Family entertainment is not the outlet in which to be politically correct by forcing tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality -- a sinful lifestyle that Scripture clearly deems as wrong." Read more via CNN