General Electric Co., So What's Cooking in the Kitchen? (Hamptons)

A real male couple who are home furnishing designers, John Dransfield and Geoffrey Ross (along with their black and white Harlequin Great Dane, Cooper), are featured in a print ad series with their summer home.

The first page has them next to the pool and hot tub in their back yard with the headline, "Hamptons beach house. American abstract expressionist art. French and Italian antiques. So what's cooking in the kitchen?" The next two pages, a spread, show the happy pair preparing a stir-fry and shortbread with balsamic zabaglione dessert -- surrounded by a Monogram stainless steel stove, refrigerator and dishwasher in their country-modern kitchen. (Cooper was elsewhere.)

The 3-page ads are running in September issues of Wine Spectator, Bon Appetit, Saveur, Gourmet, Architectural Digest, Metropolitan Home, and other top shelf home magazines, However, since gays aren't specifically the target, no gay media is planned.

The reality-based campaign is three years old and follows the format of featuring various couples in outstanding homes around the country -- this is the first time a same-sex couple was used, and the first ever from a GE-branded product.

"We didn't go out to do this" with gay men, explains Paul Klein, GE's general manager for brand and advertising, consumer and industrial, based in Louisville, Kentucky. "It was a very organic process and it just made sense."

Previous ads in the campaign have featured a widow with her three granddaughters, and another included Donald Trump, before his successful ride with "The Apprentice."

"We wanted to communicate that Monogram is the choice for people who can choose anything," says Klein. The brand is targeted at mostly female homeowners that are "extremely upscale, affluent people in the top 2% to 5% of the marketplace." Indeed, the line includes $1,000 food warming drawers and $30,000 walk-in wine vaults.

Geoffrey Ross, featured in the ad, happened to be friends with an executive at the ad agency, who at dinner in April spontaneously asked him and his partner John Dransfield to consider being featured. After all, the pair run a 14-year-old home furnishings design company, Dransfield & Ross, and their homes have been featured in magazines. "They thought John and I would be perfect for the GE campaign," says Ross, "and we were already customers."

After submitting photographs of their kitchen for review, which already coincidentally included Monogram appliances, the agency decided to include them on one condition -- they had to switch out their non-Monogram dishwasher with a GE one.

Wondering if GE was actually going to feature them in its advertising, Ross says, "I posed the question to the ad agency -- is GE cool with us being a gay couple? He looked at me with a blank stare. It was a non-issue."

The couple and another house they had previously was featured in a magazine article prior to the ad, but doing the ad for GE was more special. "Being photographed as a gay couple for House Beautiful was nice, but being included in an ad for one of the largest corporations in the world felt empowering," Ross says.