In 2011, while launching Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart on Broadway, Leslie Barrett’s team partnered with Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams — a furniture brand whose standing in the LGBTQ+ community had been built over two decades in rural North Carolina, in a D.C. storefront that doubled as a community space, and through Gold’s work founding Faith in America. Her line about why it worked: “If you love a brand and they’re telling you about something, it resonates in a different way than an ad because it’s come from a source you probably know and trust.” Fifteen years later, Broadway partnerships are booming — Hamilton just headlined an NFL halftime show — but most of them run on audience overlap, not earned trust. Both belong in a plan. Only one of them can’t be bought in a quarter.
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Leslie Barrett, Managing Director at Situation, shared something this week that’s worth more attention than it got. The Broadway Briefing ran a piece on the past, present and future of partnership marketing on Broadway, and Barrett used it to point back at a specific moment fifteen years ago that changed how she thinks about the whole category.
The show was The Normal Heart. The year was 2011. And the lesson has almost nothing to do with Broadway.
The 2011 Moment
Larry Kramer’s play opened at the Golden Theatre on April 27, 2011 — twenty-six years after its Off-Broadway premiere — directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe, with Joe Mantello, Ellen Barkin, John Benjamin Hickey, Patrick Breen and Lee Pace. It ran 86 performances, won three Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Play, and remains one of the defining works about the early years of the AIDS crisis.
Barrett was at Serino Coyne then. As she tells it, Sandy Block challenged the team to think about partnerships differently, and that conversation was the turning point. From the Briefing:
“We looked for partners who shared our values and wanted to tell a similar story, but had access to a whole audience that we might not have.”
The partner she names is the one that makes this piece worth writing: Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, the high-end furniture brand.
Why That Partner, Specifically
This is the part that gets flattened when people retell the story, so it’s worth spelling out.
Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams founded their company in 1989 in Taylorsville, North Carolina — a rural town, not an obvious place to build one of the most visible LGBTQ+-led businesses in America. They did it anyway. In 2005, Gold founded Faith in America, an organization built specifically to confront religion-based bigotry directed at LGBTQ+ people. Their Washington, D.C. flagship on 14th Street functioned as a community space as much as a showroom, regularly hosting fundraisers for local and national LGBTQ+ organizations, often with Gold himself hosting.
So when that brand attached itself to a play about the AIDS crisis, nobody had to explain the connection. It wasn’t a media buy that happened to reach gay men. It was a brand the community already knew, standing next to a story the community already carried.
Here’s Barrett’s line, and it’s the one that matters:
“If you love a brand and they’re telling you about something, it resonates in a different way than an ad because it’s come from a source you probably know and trust.”
Two Different Currencies
We’d put that sentence on a wall, because it names the thing most media plans have no column for.
Advertising buys reach — the right number of the right people, in the right places, at a price you can defend in a spreadsheet. That’s a real and necessary thing, and we’re not here to argue against it.
But a recommendation from a source someone already trusts buys something different. Call it the trust premium. It’s the gap between “this message was delivered to me” and “someone I have a relationship with told me about this.” The second one is worth several multiples of the first, and it cannot be purchased at volume — which is exactly why it doesn’t show up cleanly in planning tools that price everything by CPM.
And it’s the entire argument for niche LGBTQ+ media over a general-market buy that happens to include LGBTQ+ people in its footprint. An outlet the community has read for years is not a delivery mechanism. It’s the trusted source in Barrett’s sentence. When a message arrives there, it arrives carrying the outlet’s standing with it.
The same math is why the reverse hurts so much. When a brand shows up only in June, or only when it’s safe, the community reads that too — and that reading also travels.
What Broadway Learned About Itself
There’s a second Barrett quote that we’d argue is the more useful one for anyone running a community media property:
“From that moment on, conversations shifted. I think the partnerships got bigger because we got better at talking about ourselves, what we have to offer and what we mean to the community, which is very important to brands. We have heart, emotion, story, dance, music — things that actually make people feel something.”
Read that as a note to LGBTQ+ media owners, because it lands squarely.
The partnerships got bigger not because Broadway’s audience grew, but because Broadway got better at articulating what it meant to people. It stopped selling seats and started selling the feeling in the room. That’s a repositioning any niche publisher, network or event can make — and most haven’t, because it’s easier to send a rate card than to explain what your audience’s relationship with you is actually worth.
Where the Category Went
Worth noting where Broadway partnerships have landed fifteen years on, because it’s instructive.
The same Briefing covered Hamilton headlining the New York Giants’ NFL halftime show on September 13 — the first time a single Broadway musical has done that — plus Hamilton work with the Yankees and Titaníque and Chicago with Gotham FC. Whitney Britt of Two Dog Circus, who handles Hamilton’s partnerships, described the logic in plainly demographic terms: people who spend more than $100 on a Broadway ticket and people who spend money at New York sporting events go through the same motions — dinner, merch, drinks, a babysitter.
That’s smart, and it works. But notice it’s a different argument entirely. The Gotham FC and NFL deals are audience overlap plays — reach, efficiently matched. The Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams deal was a values play — trust, borrowed from a source that had earned it.
Both belong in a plan. They just aren’t substitutes for each other, and a category that gets good at the first one can quietly forget how to do the second.
One Honest Postscript
We’d be leaving something out if we ended there.
Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams shut down abruptly in August 2023, unable to secure financing, filing Chapter 11 and then converting to Chapter 7 liquidation that October. The brand’s intellectual property was acquired by Surya that November. Gold, who had sold the company to a private equity firm years earlier while staying involved, told the Washington Post he was “heartbroken.”
We mention it for a reason. Community standing is earned slowly and it is not permanent, and it doesn’t automatically survive a change in who owns the company. The trust Barrett was borrowing in 2011 was built over two decades of showing up in a rural North Carolina town, in a D.C. storefront, and in a fight about religion and bigotry that most furniture companies would never have gone near.
That’s the actual price of the trust premium. It’s not a line item. It’s a track record.
Where We Land
For brands, the takeaway is that the partner with genuine standing in a community is worth more than the partner with the bigger list — and worth considerably more than a general-market buy with LGBTQ+ people somewhere inside it.
For LGBTQ+ media and organizations, the takeaway is Barrett’s second quote. The relationship you have with your audience is the product. Most of us are still selling impressions when we should be explaining what we mean to the people who read us.
And for everyone: a message from a source someone trusts lands differently than an ad. That was true in 2011, it’s true now, and it’s the one advantage in this business that can’t be bought in a quarter.
If you’re weighing niche LGBTQ+ media against a broader buy and want to talk through where each actually earns its keep, we’d be glad to get into it. You can find us at PinkMedia.LGBT.
Sources: Leslie Barrett on LinkedIn · Broadway News — Why brand partnerships on Broadway have exploded · Playbill — The Normal Heart · Washington Blade · Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams
