Yas, queen! You can’t avoid drag in today’s culture. It’s infiltrated our TV, social media, makeup, fashion shows and a plethora of ads for disparate companies running the gambit of industries. Drag queens are influencers, YouTubers, streamers, actors and actresses, models and TV hosts.
Just this year, when Season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered, YouTubers created about 1,5000 hours of Drag Race-related content. As of 2024, RuPaul’s Drag Race has won 29 Primetime Emmy Awards. And this newest season? It broke the show’s highest-rated premiere episode among adults in the last six years.
This fandom-based content creation love extends far beyond the clutches of YouTube – or even RuPaul’s pearly whites and signature catchphrases. In fact, 74% of Gen Z alone said in a study that they liked seeing brands engage with their fandoms.
Brand publishing and marketing agencies seem to be paying attention to their audiences’ growing love of drag. It’s not hard to find branded content marketing campaigns centered around collaborations with their core audience’s favorite drag queens, featuring anyone from the “OG” queen herself, RuPaul, to dance queens like Alyssa Edwards and total supermodel stunners like Gottmik.
From luxury clothes brands to budget travel sites, here are 13 brands that have relied on drag queens for their content strategy and advertising campaigns.
Image Credit: Toyota UK.
1. Smirnoff Vodka
Famous Texas drag queen Alyssa Edwards posed for a large billboard campaign for Smirnoff. It’s not uncommon for alcoholic beverages to work with drag queens, given that they’re both highly connected to nightlife and the bar scene. Here, the company embraces the drag queen angle with a pun: You Don’t Need to Be Royalty To Be A Queen.
Image Credit: Smirnoff Vodka.
2. Absolut Vodka
This brand has worked with drag queens for decades, including sponsoring RuPaul’s Drag Race. Absolut Vodka has a rich history with the queer community, so working with drag queens like RuPaul herself was a no-brainer. The company has worked with the LGBT+ community since 1980, including creating the Chosen Families campaign in bar scenes across the country and limited-edition Pride products.
Image Credit: Absolut Vodka.
3. Mac Cosmetics
Before drag queens like Trixie Mattel became makeup moguls in their own right, Mac Cosmetics was way ahead of the drag queen trend. The company chose RuPaul as the first face of MAC Viva Glam in 1994, resulting in the now iconic Viva Glam ad. Mac saw this queen’s rise to fame two years later with her hit song “Supermodel (You Better Work),” and she became a Mac spokesperson, the first drag queen ever to land a cosmetics campaign. RuPaul also helped the company raise money for its MAC AIDS Fund.
Image Credit: Mac Cosmetics.
4. Old Navy
In 2020, Old Navy and RuPaul partnered for both a holiday campaign and a masking PSA. Dressed in Old Navy holiday jammies, RuPaul sang re-released holiday jams while imploring Americans to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Image Credit: Old Navy.
5. Facebook
Facebook reached out to several popular Facebook Groups to advertise its, well, Facebook Groups. Among them was the Drag Queen Beginners Facebook group. The ad may only show the group briefly, but the fact that it was chosen over millions of other groups shows that Facebook knows just how relevant and popular drag is to its audience.
Image Credit: Facebook / YouTube.
6. Christian Siriano
Fashion and drag have always been inseparable, so it’s no surprise that major designers, including Christian Siriano, are reaching out to popular look queens to model their finest. Gottmik, a Drag Race contestant and friend of Siriano, told WWD that he served as “muse and model” for Siriano’s 2025 resort collection.
Image Credit: Credit: Csiriano / Instagram.
7. Anastasia Beverly Hills
What do all queens need? Makeup! So this collaboration between Anastasia Beverly Hills and Drag Race fan favorite Alyssa Edwards was a match made in “werk-room” heaven. The makeup brand worked with Alyssa to incorporate nods to Alyssa’s that only fandom would get, such as Beast and Back Rolls.
Image Credit: Anastasia Beverly Hills.
8. Louis Gabriel Nouchi
This fashion brand worked with Sutan Amrull, known better as the drag persona Raja, for Paris Fashion Week 2024. It was the drag legend’s first time walking in a fashion show, and it earned both the queen and the brand high praise on Instagram.
Image Credit: sutanamrull / Instagram.
9. Versace
Look Queen Gottmik again pulled out the stops for Versace’s 2022 holiday campaign, including a campaign video in which the queen appears as a director. The campaign gave an updated look at Gianni Versace’s Versace Teatro books, originally published in the 1980s and 1990s.
Image Credit: Versace / YouTube.
10. Nine West
Beating many of the companies on this list to the drag trend, Nine West started working with Manila Luzon 10 years ago with its What Would You Do For Shoe? campaign. In a series of YouTube episodes, Manila goes around New York asking people to play the game What Would You Do For Shoe, in which they guess what random items are to get free Nine West shoes.
Image Credit: Nine West / YouTube.
11. Orbitz Travel
Ah, few companies have deeper roots in the drag community than Orbitz. You can find YouTube videos of this travel company’s drag ads dating back from 1981, which featured legendary queen Miss Richfield. And in the age of Drag Race, Orbitz has not only been a sponsor of the show but worked with iconic fan favorites for the show, including this ad that features Manila Luzon, Latrice Royale, Raven and Tammie Brown. Orbitz even created a special link for the queer community, gayorbitz.com, which redirects to LGBTQ-welcoming hotels.
Image Credit: Manila Luzon / YouTube.
12. Toyota
In 2018, Toyota UK launched the Go Your Own Way campaign. The company worked with queens Stella Meltdown, Le Fil, Alfie Ordinary and Liquorice Black, each of whom could design their own photoshoot with an award-winning photographer. Toyota said it chose these queens for their “commitment to self-expression and living their lives entirely their own.”
Image Credit: Toyota UK.
13. Queerty & Gilead Sciences
Last but certainly not least, we have the That’s Our Sally series. Queerty and Gilead Sciences created this series of nine videos featuring iconic Drag Race All-Stars winner Trixie Mattel. The videos aimed to raise awareness of PrEP to prevent HIV. This series of comedic skits not only had an important PSA, but they also helped make the world more aware of the brands behind the videos – Queerty and Gilead Sciences – and their important missions.
Image Credit: Queerty / YouTube.
Cover Girl, Put Some Culture in Your Content Marketing
OK, so it’s not as catchy as RuPaul’s original lyrics, but you get the jist, right? Drag is mainstream now, and that isn’t changing any time soon. Don’t believe me? Tell that to the 23 shows listed on Drag Race’s IMDb franchise page (and that doesn’t even include its live or touring shows). And if your target audience also loves drag, it may be a smart move to embrace drag culture. That may mean considering some content collaborations with drag queens, be they local or bigger stars. Doing so shows your audience you’re paying attention to their interests and that you’re keeping up with the times.
It doesn’t hurt that you could score some SEO and SERP points, too. Drag-related keywords can rank pretty high. So, having these keywords associated with your content could help your SERP rankings. It’s a win-win-win: You gain some SERP rankings, hit some key audience development goals, and produce high-quality content.
Afraid of potential backlash from working with queens? Keep in mind who your core audience is. Are they younger? More liberal? Are they engaged in social media? Or is this an audience you’re trying to reach but haven’t been able to crack the code to get their attention? If either (or both!) of these apply to you, then it’s likely worth the risk. Remember: So much of the data shows that Americans are watching and following queens more than ever before.
And if some older, more conservative folk do respond negatively to your drag campaigns? Ask yourself if these individuals were even in your target audience, and determine for yourself if those who are giving the negative feedback are even the ones bringing in money for your company. (It’s very likely that they aren’t.). And if this is the case? Take some sage advice from RuPaul (paraphrased, of course): Unless they pay your bills, pay them no mind.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.us.
Image Credit: IMDB.
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