Eat24, which bills itself as “the Internet’s favorite food delivery app and website,” was looking for ways to increase its brand footprint when a curious fact was revealed: Some of their most loyal and vocal customers were porn stars. “Like, actual real-life porn stars,” read a post on the company’s blog. “Tera Patrick, Daisy Lynn, Andy San Dimas and Tara Lynn Foxx to name a few. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. They enjoy a life without pants and are constantly working up a huge appetite.”
In light of this apparent synergy, Eat24 decided to double down on the connection with adult entertainment, which, by some estimates, accounts for a staggering 30 percent of all Web traffic. Similar statistics all point to one conclusion: With the total time that Americans spend scanning pornography each day, it ought to be lucrative to advertise alongside it.
Even better, porn’s popularity doesn’t make it expensive as a vector for ads, as one might expect: Eat24 found that the cost per impression (CPM) in buying space on an X-rated site is a meager fraction of what they would pay for exposure on Google, Facebook, or Twitter—and that the high-traffic porn sites would give them more impressions than those three combined.
If you’ve spent any time on a food channel, it’s not hard to identify some overlap between the impulses to eat and pleasure oneself. The challenge was tailoring the brand message to the adult content. On a typical porn website, most of the ad space points you in the direction of male enhancement scams, live naked webchats, and of course, more porn. Eat24’s strategy became to split the difference between culinary and erotic delights for a light-heartedly sensual campaign.
The result? They saved 90 percent of what they might have spent for similar coverage elsewhere, broke open a big market, and pulled in huge numbers of first-time visitors to the site. They were also able to generate some nifty data regarding which U.S. cities are “hongriest,” i.e., horniest and hungriest. They found that Houston natives, on the whole, prefer to order breakfast after a morning, while New Yorkers were getting naughty/hungry around noon, and the Baltimore-to-D.C. area satisfies its various lusts at night.
So, could this be the dawn of a new age for copywriting? It’s common enough for advertisers to fall back on sex appeal already. They may as well go all the way.
Photo by Steven Depolo/Flickr
