Bison Brand Vodka, Spin the Bottle

Three women and a man sit in the grass of a park at night, playing Spin the (empty vodka) Bottle. The women have long hair and are wearing more makeup than clothing. Two of the gals are staring passionately into each others' eyes, about to lip lock, as the skinny guy watches and the other gal covers her naked breasts. The tagline is: "A little grass, a little vodka. Nothing wrong with that."

Century-old Bison is imported from Poland and has a blade of buffalo grass in it, purported to have aphrodisiac qualities. The ad ran in a number of hipster magazines, including Nylon, Paper, Detour, Flaunt, Surface and Ocean Drive.

Michael Glowacki, creative director at Eyecandy Advertising, calls his work for Bison "kind of a ballsy ad." Yet when asked what the implied sexuality of the subjects are, he says, "It is a mistake to read too much out of it. I don't want to imply that they got drunk to do it. I don't want to imply anything."

Ironically, Glowacki himself is gay and he tested the ad with lesbian and gay friends. He said their reaction was "they laughed. Ninety percent said they thought it was cool that we're running it in Flaunt" magazine.

Glowacki is also part owner in Brooklyn-based Adamba Imports, which brings Bison to the U.S., and helped start Eyecandy a year ago. He has worked at notable New York ad agencies Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/Euro RSCG and Deutsch, which created the groundbreaking Ikea TV campaign that included a gay couple, but says he was not open when he worked at them.

Alcohol is by far the most crowded category in gay marketing, with over 40 brands jostling for attention. Perhaps the most consistent presence has been Seagram's Absolut vodka for over 17 years, but Miller Brewing Co. has also had a mixed presence in gay media since the mid-1970s. Somewhat impervious to early fears of criticism from religious conservatives that other marketers worried about, so-called "sin products" such as alcohol also had something no other marketers did before the 1990s – an easily quantifiable marketplace: gay bars. They didn't need to do research to find out how much gays purchased their products, they just looked at their sales.