TV Ads Make a Pitch to the Disabled : Consumers: Actors in wheelchairs are opening the door to new markets. There are 43 million physically handicapped people in the country.

Colleen Stewart doesn’t seem to be anyone special in Kmart’s folksy TV ads showing Americans at their shopping best.

That’s the point.

Stewart, who uses a wheelchair, is one of two disabled actors among a recurring cast of characters in the company’s ads in the aisles of a Kmart store in New Jersey.

Kmart is one of dozens of companies using disabled people in their advertising. They are trying to appeal to the buying power of the estimated 43 million physically handicapped people in America.

Peter Hirsch, executive creative director of Calet, Hirsch and Spector Inc., the New York advertising agency that created the spots, wasn’t thinking of using disabled actors when the ads were conceived, but paraplegics Stewart and James Gerraghty fit in well with the theme.

“When we started to cast this campaign, we were looking to represent the Kmart shopping universe,” Hirsch said. “We didn’t do it to seek publicity. We did it to create a reality, a truth with the consumer.”

That truth had long been ignored in the advertising business, said Sandra Gordon, a senior vice president for the National Easter Seals Society.

“It was the mid-70s when I first started trying to get companies interested in using someone disabled,” Gordon said. “I went and talked with them and you would have thought I had suggested they put a dog in there.”

Little changed until Du Pont’s 1987 ad featuring Bill Demby, a Vietnam veteran who lost both his legs in the war. With artificial legs partly created by Du Pont, Demby was able to play full-contact basketball.

The commercial told his inspiring story and broke a barrier against using disabled people in advertising.

The ad won an “EDI” (Equality, Dignity, Independence) award for Du Pont from Easter Seals. It also prompted Du Pont to hire Demby to give motivational speeches inside and outside the company.

Dayton-Hudson and Nordstrom department stores, McDonald’s, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble and IBM now spotlight physically disabled people in their print and television ads. A recent Citibank ad featured a deaf customer who depends on a telecommunications device for the deaf, or TDD, to use the telephone.

An ad for Budweiser beer debunks another myth about the physically disabled--their sexuality. The fast-paced commercial opens in a gym, where a man is training for a race.

“C’mon Jack, one more,” yells his girlfriend, spotting him on free weights.

Until you see Jack leave the gym in a wheelchair, you don’t know he’s disabled.

After the race, a victorious Jack and his girlfriend enjoy a beer with friends at a local bar. His girlfriend asks what’s next.

“Tomorrow, we’re sleeping in,” he says.

Such ads have altruistic value, but they also help the bottom line, said Howard Liszt, president of Minneapolis-based Campbell-Mithun-Esty Advertising. His agency handles the Easter Seals media campaigns.

“I think what we see is a lot of companies realizing they may have begun using the disabled in their advertising for reasons of social responsibility,” Liszt said. “Now they realize it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s good business.”

Just in case, the government is requiring that U.S. businesses consider the needs of the disabled. The 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act required hotels, airlines and bus companies to provide access to the disabled starting Jan. 26. Public phone companies must make telephone relay services available to TDD-dependent people by July 26.

“I think it’s probably the best new market there is out there,” Gordon said. “It’s a great way to attract new customers in what is really a slow market. They all have families, they all have friends, they brush their teeth, they squeeze the Charmin, they stay at the Hyatt.”

And they shop at Kmart.