First gay pair act on Impulse TV advert

Impulse, the body spray that's supposed to send men chasing down streets clutching flowers, is not the sort of brand you might expect to make television history. But next Monday the spray will do just that when its new advert featuring a gay couple goes on air.

The advert follows the familiar Impulse formula. A beautiful young woman is walking down the street carrying a paper bag full of groceries. She bumps into two handsome young men, the groceries scatter on the ground and one of the men bends down to help her pick them up. He reaches for an apple and their eyes glance knowingly over her pack of condoms which has fallen on the ground. Their hands touch, she bites her lip flirtatiously and it is at this point in previous ads that Mr Right would have gotten a whiff of her body spray and ran off to the florists. Not this time.

The twist is that in the new advert called "Chance Encounter", the other man taps Mr Right on the shoulder and both men, now clearly identified as lovers, stroll off arm in arm. She smiles wryly, he looks back and smiles good naturedly. Cut to the woman in her bathroom spraying on Impulse and the familiar tag line, which now takes on an ironic twist: "Men just can't help acting on Impulse."

Putting a gay couple in a mainstream television advert has never been done before in Britain or Ireland. In the US, a television commercial for furniture giants Ikea featuring a gay couple earned the company a great deal of positive media and consumer response, but other companies have been slow to follow.

In Britain a proposed Guinness television commercial with two gay characters in a bar bit the dust four years ago when publicans reacted so negatively to the idea that they threatened to stop stocking the brand. A commercial for Virgin Vodka showing two men kissing did make it on air briefly on cable television.

The new advert which was made by British agency, Ogilvy & Mather, will air on all major channels including Channel 4 and UTV from Monday next and be on RTE and Network 2 from the following week. The campaign runs until August.

A spokesperson for the brand in Ireland expects no adverse reaction stressing how well the commercial has fared in research.