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It is difficult to imagine that any advice given out on this website would be more explicit than what a teen could find on any drug store's magazine rack, and the fact that the Sunsilk team was unable to point to any specific “mature” content raises questions about whether it was simply fears over reactions to gay-themed material that caused them to include the warning.

Wesley Combs, president and co-founder of Witeck-Combs, a public relations and marketing firm that specializes in the LGBT market, sees Sunsilk's use of gay imagery as good business, creating an edge that separates it from the pack. “It has to do with word of mouth and buzz factor around a product,” Combs explains. “I thought [the Hairapy Guys] was quite an innovative approach to a very competitive and crowded market segment. How many times can you show a woman flipping her hair back and forth? … And female celebrities are only so effective because they're all saying the same thing for different products.”

Howard Buford, president and founder of Prime Access, a firm that specializes in advertising involving the LGBT community, believes that if Sunsilk had concerns about using gay images to market to the mainstream, those concerns would be unfounded.

“Certainly there are extreme right-wing organizations that have made threats in the past, but most marketers, especially now, are not being misled by those organizations,” Buford says. “They're understanding that their marketing programs can't be held hostage by … a relatively small group of people. [These organizations] tend to make a lot of noise, but tend to have almost no impact on the actual sales of a product.”

Buford uses the example of the Disney boycott, instigated by the Southern Baptist Convention, which objected to Ellen (aired on ABC, a Disney-owned network), annual Gay Days celebrations at Disney theme parks, and Disney's domestic partnership benefits. Buford says that after the boycott had gone on for almost 10 years, “It was pronounced a success and then called off. But [in fact] it just didn't do anything.”

Combs concurs. “No boycott around gay issues has proven to have any measurable impact where you can demonstrate that it resulted in a reduction in sales.” He adds that “those that typically … threaten or boycott a company are people or organizations that typically don't use the products.”

Combs assumed from early press on the Hairapy Guys that they would be included in commercials, and he suggests that Unilever try out some ads featuring the Hairapy Guys. “They should be tested to see how ads compare that include them,” Combs says.

When told about the mature subject matter advisory on the Hairapy Guys website, both Combs and Buford are stunned. “I'm actually a little bit taken aback by that,” Buford admits.

Combs logged onto the site to see for himself and says, “I think that … you're basically raising the specter of concern on an issue that doesn't have it when you're selling shampoo. You're not selling lingerie.”

Though Buford and Combs both stress that they would not assume that Unilever had been cowed by an anti-gay group, Buford offers, “Oftentimes regardless of whether they've been contacted by an [anti-gay] organization or not, they start to second-guess themselves, or they have people in their organization who start to second-guess using the [gay] imagery.”

Combs says: “A lot of these decisions often get muddied by executives. Often where these campaigns get derailed is when you have too many people who are evaluating what they think will happen in the marketplace.”

Of course, the Sunsilk marketing team does claim that the Hairapy Guys are still evolving. And even if the limited amount of exposure that the Hairapy Guys have had so far is all they ever will have, they will still be pioneers in their own small way.

But one hopes that the Sunsilk marketing team, which was savvy enough to create the Hairapy Guys in the first place, will also be savvy enough to make full use of their creation, rather than hiding them behind a mature content warning online.

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