“Will They Ever Hook Up?” appears in full in the Summer 2015 issue of Marketing. The story is now available online to subscribers. The following free précis appears courtesy of MarketingMag.ca.
They say sex sells. Advertisers say sex sells. Simulated sex on TV and on film sells. Implied sex in music videos sells. If this is true, why does advertising around real sex remain taboo? Why is mixing ads with porn still a wall most advertisers won’t scale, no matter how attractive, engaged or unashamed the audience?
There are, of course, some very straight-forward answers to that question. The porn industry is typically defined by its worst elements: STIs, troubling links to human trafficking and the horrifying emergence of “revenge porn” among them. And even without these elements, most marketers steer clear because the public has marginalized pornography. It’s something everybody watches, but no one admits to, right?
However, much of that is changing. Grassroots content creators are building a niche making ethical porn. Millennials are far more open to watching and discussing it, and slowly, mainstream advertisers are testing this vast, data-rich and engaged online audience.
As an exercise, Marketing asked Sarah Barmak to explore online pornography’s ad ecosystem to see if a case could be made for advertisers to consider sites like PornHub.com as possible media venues. Unsurprisingly, her research showed that porn’s audience reach is enormous (estimates say as much as 30% of all internet traffic is porn-related) and set to grow more as it cleans up its act and goes more mainstream. PornHub alone reports it gets about 5,800 visits per second.
Her article “Will They Ever Hook Up?” outlines data showing strong potential returns on ad units that are currently fetching 20-50% the price of a “legitimate” ad. And make no mistake, the audience is sexy from a range of marketing perspectives. Young men dominate (no surprise), but more and more women are visiting porn sites too (surprised?). As with most digital platforms, there is a strong ability for advertisers to reach their target audience segments with precision, and analytics provide valuable insights on what can be sold and when (think ads for pizza, not pickup trucks).
PornHub’s audience data capabilities informed its owners that in the days following Fifty Shades of Grey‘s theatrical release, site searches for its naughty subject matter — “submission” — went up by 219% among female visitors. Site managers knew the moment the 2014 World Cup final ended too, because traffic from Germany and Argentina, which had declined by 60% during the match, returned to and exceeded normal levels simultaneously. Celebrations for one country, consolation for the other.
If advertisers see an opportunity here, porn’s media owners are ready and willing to receive them. Traffic for porn’s major tube sites are channelled almost exclusively through a single company: Montreal’s Traffic Junky, which serves three billion web and mobile ad impressions to 141 million visitors every day.
“I have conversations about where I work,” says Sébastien Galina, its senior sales director. “Whether they’re male or female, people say ‘Oh, PornHub is one of my favourite sites.’”
Among adult sites, PornHub stands out in its eagerness to become a part of North American mass-market culture. Last fall, the site debuted its very own house record label, PornHub Records; its first single “Take it to the Hub” by Coolio drew attention with an x-rated video. The label later held a song search contest judged by rapper T-Pain, hip hop producer Scott Storch and Vice music editor Dan Ozzi, further blurring media boundaries. In October, PornHub pulled off its most audacious bid for mainstream attention yet — a very real, non-explicit, physical billboard in Times Square. The ad only showed two hands making the shape of a heart, the site’s logo and the tagline, “All you need is hand,” but that was unsurprisingly still enough to get the ad taken down within a few hours after the hotel in the building it was mounted upon complained. Still, the stunt won it widespread press, tweets and another creeping step toward normalcy.
Who are the advertisers dipping their toes into pornography’s untested waters? What are the obstacles – both perceptual and ethical – keeping pornography from earning the respect of marketers and media buyers? And just what is ethical porn?
Read “Will They Ever Hook Up” in the Summer issue of Marketing. Subscribe now.
