The Gay Market is Dead, Long Live the Gay Market: From Identity to Algorithm in Predicting Consumer Behavior

Target marketing to identity-based consumer niches such as gay men and lesbians (occasionally bisexuals, transgender and queer people) has been radically transformed since 2000 by social media, the decline of gay and lesbian print publications, and Big Data. Drawing from 53 articles from the business and advertising trade press, this article argues that marketers no longer use sexuality-based identity markets such as "the gay market" as the primary mechanism to structure their advertising appeals. Instead, marketers collect large amounts of search, locative, and social behavior information to predict consumer behavior. If a modern LGBTQ identity was formed in part by gay and lesbian commercial media and marketing, how must we rethink queer identities in an algorithmic age of target marketing?