Welcome to 180 Thinking. Our new podcast series that will take the opportunity to look differently at brands, culture and marketing. 

Each episode will tackle some of the ideas that shape our lives, our culture and our industry. It aims to explore the why behind the why; where we will ask guests tough questions that prompt debates and discussions that confront and question conventional wisdom and confront the taboos. 

Each episode is not designed to get everyone’s agreement. But it is designed to get everyone to think. 

Episode 1 looks at marketing to the LGBT+ community. Amsterdam will play host to the Canal Boat Pride Parade this Saturday, making it the perfect time to consider the debate around the exploitation of the gay consumer, the power of labels in marketing and the ways brands can better communicate to this community. Our first podcast guest, Alfred Verhoeven, a Dutch lawyer who wrote Marketing the Rainbow provides his thoughts and insights into this issue and how this eagerness for inclusion has become a confronting, controversial and, sometimes, a downright insulting topic. 

The podcast is hosted by Christiana Courtright, who works within our strategy team here at 180 Kingsday. As a member of the LGBT+ community herself and a female in advertising she has made our industry’s focus – polite word for obsession - with female empowerment and gay inclusion, a matter of both personal, as well as professional, pride.