AdRespect Mission

 AdRespect promotes advertising that respects LGBTQ+ diversity, gender identity/expression, and sexual orientation for a more accepting society and better business results.

Led by business journalist and Commercial Closet Association founder, Michael Wilke, AdRespect began in 1996 in NYC as a journalistic endeavor, and later became a nonprofit educational project, first known as Commercial Closet and now AdRespect. The archive contains over 6,000 LGBTQ+ themed ads from around the world going back to 1917, exploring the range of representations of gender and sexuality in print and TV advertising. The material represents the best and worst of Madison Avenue's commercial messages, and everything in between.

The average American household watches over 8 hours of television daily, including roughly 200 commercials per day. With $427 billion spent in advertising worldwide annually ($70 billion on U.S. commercials), many ads each year still use LGBTQ+ stereotypes, homophobia and transphobia for humor. Such misled efforts harm not only the LGBTQ+ community but increasingly damage the corporate bottom line as society worldwide increasingly incorporates LGBTQ+ individuals.