Every so often a piece of research comes along that does something more useful than confirm what you already believed. It gives you a number you can put in front of a client. GLAAD and Procter & Gamble’s Visibility Project has produced a run of those numbers over the past few years, and taken together they make an argument we’ve been making for three decades — except now it comes with a measurement attached.
Here’s the short version. Roughly 9% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+, according to Gallup’s most recent tracking. Among Gen Z, it’s about 23% — nearly one in four. And in the advertising work the industry itself holds up as its best, LGBTQ+ people account for about 1.5% of prominent characters.
That’s not a values disagreement. That’s a gap you can measure.
Where the Numbers Come From
The 1.5% figure comes from the Geena Davis Institute’s Power of Portrayal study, published in June 2024, which examined Cannes Lions shortlisted and winning film work. Worth noting is the trend line underneath it: LGBTQ+ characters were 1.9% of prominent characters in 2018, rose to 2.8% in 2022, then fell to 1.5% in 2023. Representation in award-winning advertising didn’t plateau. It went backwards.
GLAAD’s own measurement work, built with Kantar as the Advertising Visibility Index, found something similar from a different angle. Analyzing 436 ads from the ten largest national TV advertisers, LGBTQ+ people received 1.42% of screen time and appeared in roughly 3% of mainstream ads. And no LGBTQ+-inclusive ad from a top-spending brand scored above “Insufficient” on the Index’s quality scale — meaning the small amount of representation that exists often isn’t landing well either.
Then there’s the Super Bowl, which is as close as advertising gets to an annual physical exam. GLAAD’s Visibility Project counted 9 ads featuring LGBTQ+ people during Super Bowl LIX in February 2025 — down from 10 the year before, with zero transgender representation for the second consecutive year. Most of what did appear leaned on out celebrities rather than any actual LGBTQ+ storytelling.
The Finding That Should Change Your Pitch
Now here’s the part that reframes everything, and it’s from GLAAD’s Visibility Perceptions in Advertising report, published November 2024.
90% of advertising executives say including LGBTQ+ people in advertising is very important. 69% have funds specifically allocated for reaching LGBTQ+ communities — up 17% from 2021. The intent is there. The budget is, increasingly, there.
But 55% more of the industry than in 2021 now says it lacks the expertise to execute LGBTQ+ representation correctly. And when GLAAD asked industry leaders what would most strengthen their efforts, the top answer was partnering with organizations that actually know this community.
Read those three findings next to each other. The industry wants to do this. It has money set aside to do this. And by its own account, it doesn’t know how. That is not a persuasion problem — nobody needs to be convinced. It’s a capability problem, and capability problems get solved by bringing in people who have the capability.
What the Visibility Project Actually Is
Worth being precise about the structure here, because it’s the model more of this work should follow. P&G committed over $1 million across three years to launch the Visibility Project with GLAAD, and the design isn’t a campaign — it’s infrastructure. Fortune 100 advertisers are paired with the GLAAD Media Institute for consulting that reaches into script review, casting, and content development. The work happens on the inside, before anything reaches a consumer.
That sequencing is the whole point. Most inclusion failures in advertising aren’t failures of intent at the creative stage — they’re the predictable output of rooms where nobody had the context to catch the problem three months earlier. Fixing the internal practice first is slower and far less photogenic than a Pride campaign. It also works.
One More Number, Because It Cuts Against the Narrative
We spend a lot of time around here on brands pulling back, and the retreat is real. But GLAAD’s 2024 research turned up something that complicates the story in a useful direction: companies that have actually experienced backlash over LGBTQ+ inclusion are 1.6 times more likely to increase their commitment than companies that haven’t.
Sit with that. The brands that got hit are more likely to lean in, not less. Which suggests a fair amount of the caution in this industry is anticipatory — teams bracing for a storm they haven’t been through, making decisions based on what they imagine would happen rather than what happens. The companies with actual experience came out the other side and decided it was worth it.
Meanwhile, 66% of Americans say advertisers have a responsibility to give visibility to LGBTQ+ individuals, couples, and families. And when consumers were asked what they want that representation to look like, realistic storytelling and empathy won at 54% each — well ahead of celebrity representation at 31%. People are asking for the harder, better version.
Where Pink Media Lands
The reason we keep coming back to this research is that it moves the conversation onto ground where it can actually be settled. For years, the case for LGBTQ+ media buying has been made in the language of values, and values arguments in 2026 tend to end with someone deciding it’s not worth the trouble.
A gap is different. Nine percent of the country, twenty-three percent of the next generation of consumers, and one and a half percent of the characters — that’s an efficiency argument. A brand closing that gap isn’t taking a position. It’s reaching an audience it has been systematically under-reaching, in a category where nearly every competitor is under-reaching it too. The under-representation is the opportunity.
And the expertise gap is where a partner earns their keep. Ninety percent want to do this well. Most say they don’t know how. That distance is the entire job.
If you’re working through what closing that gap looks like for your brand — not as a June campaign, but as something built into how you reach people all year — we’d welcome the conversation. You can always find us at PinkMedia.LGBT.
Authentic LGBTQ+ engagement, 24/7, 365 days a year — that’s what Pink Media is built for.
