Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S5E18 - Strange Bedfellows: Advertising & Porn, Part I

Episode Date: May 6, 2016

In this show, we explore the increasingly blurry line between advertising and porn. There has always been a line advertisers wouldn’t cross to promote their wares - but now some marketers have tiptoed over that line to advertise on porn sites. From food companies to fashion brands to Hollywood movies, marketers have breached the final frontier in their search for bigger, more affordable audiences. And on the other side of the tracks, porn sites are beginning to advertise in mainstream media. It’s a big risk for these strange bedfellows. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 5, 2016. You're so king in it. Scores of it in an instant. Your teeth look whiter than noon, noon, noon.

You're not you when you're hungry. You're in good hands with all things. You're under the influence with terry o'reilly When the U.S. presidential campaigning began, attack ads came fast and furious. Donald Trump attacking Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton attacking Bernie Sanders, Ben Carson attacking Hillary Clinton. But there was one attack ad in particular that got everybody's attention.

It was from Ted Cruz. The title was Conservatives Anonymous. The commercial was set in a group therapy session. Men and women sit in a circle while a therapist gets them to express their inner turmoil about voting for the wrong candidate in the past. Has anyone else here struggled with being lied to? Well, I voted for a guy who was a Tea Party hero on the campaign trail. And then he went to D.C. and played patty cake with Chuck Schumer and cut a deal on amnesty.

Does that make you angry? Angry? Makes me feel dumb for trusting him. Then a woman in the group says... Maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty face next time. The commercial ends with another person walking in asking if he could join the support group. He's wearing a Marco Rubio campaign shirt. I'm Ted Cruz, and I approve this

message. By attack standards, it was pretty tame, but that wasn't why it generated so much controversy. The reason was this. It was discovered the actress in the commercial had been a porn star. Ted Cruz immediately pulled the commercial. It turns out the actress, Amy Lindsay, had responded to an open casting call, passed the audition, and was hired. Nobody in the Cruz campaign office had any idea about her past,

and they blamed the production company for not vetting her properly. Even though Lindsay had performed in softcore films in the past, she had also acted in mainstream entertainment, including a role in Star Trek Voyager. She told the press she does not do hardcore porn, and was, in fact, a conservative Christian. But just the whiff of porn in a mainstream commercial was enough to get it pulled immediately. But what happens when a mainstream marketer advertises on a porn site? The adult film industry has been disrupted

by the unlimited availability of free online porn. Meanwhile, the advertising industry is struggling to stretch limited marketing budgets. The porn industry needs to find new revenue streams. The advertising industry needs to find bigger and bigger audiences. The porn world offers huge viewership. Marketers need to reach big audiences at the lowest media costs possible. Porn sites offer dirt cheap ad rates.

Advertising, meet the porn world. You're under the influence. Once upon a time, pornography cost money. You had to buy a magazine or a video or a ticket to an X-rated movie. Then porn moved online. Early sites would tease with a thumbnail photo or an 8-second clip, and the link would send you to a pay site. Then, YouTube happened in 2005. It didn't take the porn world long to follow suit.

Three big tube sites launched the next year. They were flooded with free content. Much of that free content was pirated from pay sites. Viewers not only had access to free porn, they could upload their own amateur videos to the sites. It all led to a perfect storm in the porn industry in 2009. Wide-scale piracy, plus the increase in amateur porn, plus the unlimited availability of free porn, met the Great Recession. Since then, traffic to pay sites has plummeted.

DVD sales have practically disappeared. Porn producers reported revenue drops of 50%, with some experiencing drops of 80%. Production of porn films is reportedly down 75%. Work for porn actors dried up. Gigabytes of videos are being uploaded and streamed without any money changing hands. The cost of porn has now reached zero. As a result, selling porn has never been harder. With all that bad news for the porn world, the irony is that online porn viewership has never been greater.

As a matter of fact, porn has been cited by some as the reason for the rapid growth of the Internet. According to tech site Gizmodo, the world's top porn sites, Xvideos, LiveJasmine, YouPorn, and Pornhub, are on par with Google and Facebook for web traffic. Xvideos alone averages 4.4 billion page views per month, triple what CNN gets. According to technology blog extreme tech websites the size of you porn account for almost 2% of the Internet's

total traffic and there are dozens of porn sites on the same scale which means it's not unrealistic to say up to 30% of the traffic on the Internet is porn related over 50% of that porn is now viewed on smartphones. Pornhub says the U.S. ranks number one for page views, followed by the U.K., India, then Canada. I once sat beside a porn producer on an airplane. He told me that each U.S. state and every Canadian province has very specific tastes when it comes to porn.

For example, there is an East Coast province that prefers porn where people are smoking in the videos above all other searches. There is an area of the country out west that searches for porn that involves tickling, and they search for that more frequently than all other search terms. This kind of knowledge isn't anecdotal, and it isn't guesswork. This research comes from the fact big porn sites have in-depth data analytics

and highly refined algorithms. They know the average time spent on their sites is 10 minutes. They know the average time spent on non-porn websites is less than 30 seconds. Therefore, they understand the length of time spent on non porn websites is less than 30 seconds therefore they understand the length of time spent on their sites can produce massive profits from ad revenue the reason they know this is because today's pornographers are software engineers much of the world of porn is controlled by one network.

It's called MindGeek, and it's owned by a group of friends who met at Concordia University in Montreal in 2007. It appears MindGeek controls eight of the top ten busiest porn sites in the world. It is similar to Amazon in book publishing. It's the dominant force. According to MindGeek, three of its top websites attract close to 100 million visitors

and over 488 million page views a day. Last year, Pornhub alone said it had over 21 billion visits. And close to 5 billion of those viewers were women. 87 billion videos were viewed. Now, tuck all those stats in your back pocket for a moment. There is no doubt pornography is inching into the mainstream. Sex tapes used to destroy careers. Now they create them.

Think of Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, and Kim Kardashian. As a matter of fact, Kardashian's video has been watched over 147 million times on Pornhub, making it the most viewed video in the history of the website. The Parents Television Council in the U.S. reported a 407% increase in the incidence of full nudity on TV compared to the previous year. There is a clothing line called Porn Star. Many of the top porn stars have over 1 million Twitter followers. Erotic film actress Sasha Gray has crossed over

and acted in Entourage and had a starring role in the mainstream film Open Windows. Porn star Ron Jeremy appears semi-regularly on ESPN, had a walk-on in Ghostbusters, and is the subject of a full-length documentary. And porn superstar Jenna Jameson has voiced a version of herself on The Family Guy, has voiced a character in a Grand Theft Auto game,

her autobiography How to Make Love Like a Porn Star spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, she is the first porn actress to have a wax model at Madame Tussauds, she was interviewed in an Abercrombie & Fitch fashion magazine, and Jameson was even hired by Adidas to star in a video for its sneakers. The reality TV show titled Family Business, which ran from 2003 to 2006, followed adult film star and video director Seymour Butts around as he ran his porn empire. It was Mr. Butts' I Sappyside on that plane, by the way.

And recently, there was a reality show called The Right Hand, which followed a small-town Canadian film student as he landed his first job as an assistant in the porn industry. And if you want to continue connecting the dots when it comes to the subtle ways porn has been normalized, there is the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition that brought softcore magazines out from under the mattress onto the coffee table. And the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

is now a major broadcast event. Then there's the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, with stores like Target carrying Fifty Shades of Grey themed products. Even eBay has an adult category loaded with X-rated material. With porn inching further and further into everyday life, another interesting migration is happening. Madison Avenue is inching towards pornography. When pornography tilted towards free, it meant porn sites had to alter their business models. They could no longer rely on monthly subscriptions. Therefore, the industry looked to advertising.

MindGeek, for example, is largely an ad network now. Yes, there are some monthly subscription options, but by and large, the site serves up free video supported by advertising. It's the Google business model. Give away a ton of free content, generate a huge audience, sell that audience to advertisers. MindGeek owns a company called Traffic Junkie in Montreal. Traffic Junkie places ads across its network of porn sites, serving up 3 billion web and mobile ad impressions to 141 million porn visitors every day.

Until recently, most of those ads were for dating sites, male enhancement pills and casinos. But that's slowly changing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks... The one thing advertisers are always in search of is an audience. And because times are tough, they have to stretch their ad budgets to do more with less. The greatest number of eyeballs for the least amount of money is the Holy Grail.

In this digitally splintered world, it gets harder and harder to find big audiences. That's why events like the Super Bowl are so desirable and so expensive. Where else can you find 100 million people in one place at one time? Well, there is another place porn sites so here we are at an interesting crossroad the porn world finds itself in need of revenue and the ad world is in need of huge affordable audiences could mainstream advertisers be tempted to tiptoe into the world of porn? Is it possible? Well, it's more than possible.

It's happening. We'll be right back to our show. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you,

whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. E24 is an online food delivery service in the U.S. It represents over 30,000 restaurants in 1,500 cities. You just email, text, or use the handy Eat24 app, tap on the restaurant and the takeout food you want,

and Eat24 will take care of all of the details, handle the transaction, and deliver it for free. The slogan? It's like a food truck in your pants. The company was started without any venture capital funding, so it had a limited budget and couldn't afford expensive traditional media advertising. So that got the company thinking about porn sites. When it did some research, it discovered 85% of porn was viewed between 7pm and 3am,

which happened to coincide with E24's busiest delivery period. When it looked at the top websites by traffic count, many of them were porn sites. When it looked at the cost of running a campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and Google, then compared running that same campaign on porn sites, E24 realized it could get more ad exposure than the big three combined at roughly one-tenth the cost. Next, E24 looked at all the ads on porn sites

and realized they were just more porn. So, in order to stand out, the company decided to go with humor. So, one ad said, Want a BLT with your BDSM? Get it delivered. Another one showed a monkey with the headline, Porn doesn't watch itself, get delivery. Meaning, order food and watch porn at the same time.

Then, Eat24 submitted their ads to the porn network. Surprisingly, the ads were rejected. You're probably thinking it's pretty hard to get an ad rejected on a porn site. But it was one ad in particular. The one with the monkey in it. When the food delivery service called the porn tech support line to ask about the rejection, it was told porn sites do not accept any content containing animals. Fair enough. The monkey was toast. Eat24 experimented by putting its ads on the Pornhub homepage and on the actual video landing pages

and discovered that five times as many people clicked on the banner ad when it was next to a video. The overall result of the campaign? Tens of thousands clicked the ads and ordered food. There was a huge spike in orders and app downloads, especially late at night. And Eat24 generated that business by spending 90% less than it would have spent on Google, Twitter, or Facebook. At that price, it was able to maintain its campaign for weeks, unlike on Google, where it would have spent its entire budget in just a few days.

What's more, 90% were first-time customers, so E24 reached an entirely new market. And those customers kept coming back. Retention on porn banners was four times higher than the company's Facebook ads. E24 gained a few other insights with their porn advertising. First, its most successful ad showed a woman eating takeout in lingerie. Its second most successful ad was a close-up of a bacon sandwich. Never underestimate the power of bacon.

The top three cities ordering food from porn sites were Chicago, Vegas, and Washington, D.C. New Yorkers ordered most of their food at lunchtime. Interesting. Washington, D.C. ordered late at night. And Houston, Texas surprised everybody by doing most of its porn food ordering first thing in the morning. There was an additional bonus, too. The mainstream press picked up on the fact E24 was advertising on porn sites and ran several stories on the food delivery service, giving it even more reach and awareness.

In the end, Eat24 was thrilled with its porn site campaign and, according to its website, is still advertising there with great success. Controversy fueled their limited budget to get more attention. And on top of it all, Eat24 coined a new word to describe the secret to its new advertising success, Hungary. New year, new me. Season is here and honestly, we're already over it. Enter Felix, the healthcare company

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Must be 19 years of age or older to wager Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BitMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. As marketers toy with crossing the dangerous line into porn advertising, not every brand is able to get by the stigma. But for some, it's a shorter hop.

For a long time now, the world of fashion advertising has used sex to sell. Many of those ads have included nudity and very suggestive imagery. So maybe it shouldn't be surprising that Diesel, the Italian fashion giant, has begun advertising on multiple porn sites. When the company's PR manager was asked why his company would choose to advertise on Pornhub, he simply said, because that's where people are. He said it made sense because the Diesel campaign was advertising intimates and underwear to young, sexy people. And the company wanted to communicate with their customers when they had sex on their minds. He also said, let's not pretend people don't go to porn sites. The fashion company wanted to honestly reflect the world we live in.

There was another practical marketing reason, too. Diesel is a global company, and it needs to talk to millions of people to be successful. Pornhub offered 60 million daily visitors at very affordable rates, and an increasing percentage of those visitors are women. Diesel's advertising strategy is all about digital culture, which, according to the company, includes dating apps, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and porn. As Adweek magazine pointed out, there has been a generational shift with regard to the stigma of watching porn.

According to the Globe and Mail, a survey showed that 40% of Canadian teenage boys in grades 7 to 11 frequently view porn. That means some of those boys are as young as 11 years old. Kids no longer have to be 18 years or older to access adult sites. And when they grow up surrounded by it, it becomes normalized. As a result, young consumers don't consider it taboo. And the majority of advertisers want young consumers.

Even upscale fashion designers are open to an association with porn. Marc Jacobs recently gave a porn movie crew permission to film a scene in his Soho store location. According to Forbes magazine, it was a calculated decision. In the jaded world of fashion and entertainment, association with porn is becoming a way to demonstrate edginess. Groupon, the online coupon company, recently offered 60-minute walking tours of elaborate adult film sets in San Francisco,

as well as tours of the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. MeUndies.com is a subscription-based underwear company that's also based in L.A. It delivers underwear to you in one hour, should you suddenly need underwear in one hour. It will also send you new underwear on a monthly basis.

And as a signature move, it tucks condoms into the packages. The startup got a lot of attention not long ago by deciding to do its launch advertising on a Canadian porn site called PaintBottle.com. Are you starting to get the idea that Canada is a porn hotbed?

Don't blame you. While the porn site seems to have vanished, MeUndies.com was happy with the results. When asked why it chose to advertise on an adult film site, founder Jonathan Chakrian said they don't mind controversy at all. Like E24, controversy got them lots of attention with a small budget. With half the internet-connected populace

watching adult content, the company felt it only made sense to advertise there. Advertising on pornography sites is one thing, but French fashion company Shai, spelled S-H-A-I, went even further. It created X-rated video catalogs showing models wearing its clothes, then slowly undressing, and engaging in actual hardcore sex. The theme? There's no reason to be shy.

Before the models stripped, viewers could mouse over small green dots that would freeze the video and bring up pricing and sizing information about the clothing. Within the first four months, over 2 million people from 117 countries had watched the videos. The strategy, according to the fashion company, was to create notoriety. Clearly, advertising and porn are no longer strange bedfellows. Soon, Hollywood would come knocking. Temptation is a powerful urge. There's always a tipping point that leads people and industries to cross the fault line.

The porn industry gave in to the temptation of the global reach of the internet, but free porn overtook pay porn, and now it needs advertising revenue. The advertising industry has been wracked with contracting budgets and punishing recessions, and now finds itself handling prickly clients demanding they do more with less. A call the porn industry is happy to answer. Huge audiences delivered at dirt-cheap prices

is a powerful temptation, and Madison Avenue might need a 12-step program to resist it. But that resistance is already showing signs of crumbling. Meanwhile, the porn industry is giving in to another temptation. It's polishing its act to attract advertisers. Next week in part two, we'll talk about how the biggest porn sites are looking for acceptance

by advertising in mainstream media, sponsoring sports teams, planting trees, saving whales, and even granting scholarships. Porn product placement companies are even popping up. There was a time when you could say you read Playboy for the articles.

Now you can say you watch porn for the fashion ads. When you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode brought to you by HairClub. That leaves hair feeling like hair. Under the Influence was recorded at Pirate Toronto. Series producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound engineer, Keith Oman.

Theme music by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Research, James Gangle. Follow us on Instagram at Terry O'Influence. Um, do you wear clothes when you listen to our show? If so, have we got a t-shirt for you. Go to terryoreilly.ca slash shop. See you next week. redefining weight loss for Canadians with a smarter, more personalized approach to help you crush your health goals is here. Losing weight is about more than diet and exercise.

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