Honey Maid Graham Crackers featured a gay family in “This is Wholesome”, a moving TV commercial that evoked the parallels among wholesome families and wholesome foods. It aired in March 2014, at the height of the same-sex marriage debate in the US and provoked an outpouring of praise. And, sadly, derision. Rather than crumble in the face of virulent opposition, Honey Maid reaffirmed its values in “Love”, which hit back at critics by showing artists spelling out the word love using printouts of online hate mail and comments the brand received. It won’t improve in the advertising business until there is much closer parity between men and women in technology. And that will bring other benefits. As Shelley Zalis, the woman who did more than anyone to pioneer online market research, and who founded “The Girls’ Lounge”, a kind of pop-up workshop that combines activism with manicure, says, “the social norm just becomes more nurturing, and nurturing companies are likely to be more successful”. Shelley popped up for us at one of our events at Cannes in 2016, and also emphasized that this whole debate is not just about women, it is about gender. It’s about how men are portrayed also. When Guinness ran an ad featuring the Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, who had come out in 2009, it rang a bell with me. Fourteen years earlier, Ogilvy & Mather lost the Guinness account in large part due to the uproar (especially among licensees) caused by the first gay Guinness commercial, in 1995 (certainly it was ahead of its