Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S5E19 - Strange Bedfellows: Advertising & Porn, Part II

Episode Date: May 13, 2016

It’s part two of our Strange Bedfellows episode. It’s not just smaller brands that are beginning to advertise on porn sites, Hollywood has come knocking, too. Large audiences and cheap ad rates are making advertisers ignore the risk in the hunt for reward. At the same time, porn sites are starting to advertise in mainstream media, and are trying to entice advertisers with analytics, public service messages and even college scholarships. It’s an interesting crossroad and a very dangerous intersection. 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. We'll see you next time. 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. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 5, 2016. Waiter, that's no, no, no!

You're not you when you're hungry. You're in good hands with us. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. When the song More, More, More hit the charts in 1976, it was an instant smash. Rolling Stone magazine would go on to call it one of the iconic songs of the disco era. It was sung by Andrea True. What was interesting about Andrea

True was that she was a hardcore porn actress. At the height of her porn career, she had been hired to go to Jamaica to star in some commercials for a real estate company. While there, a political crisis ensued. The Caribbean island had elected Michael Manley, a Castro sympathizer. The U.S. immediately imposed sanctions and, as a response, Jamaica banned asset transfers out of the country.

That meant Andrea True couldn't take the money she had earned from the commercials back to the States. That's when she hit on a way to launder the money. She would record a song in Jamaica and take the money off the island in the form of a master tape. So, she contacted a record producer she knew and explained her idea. It took him about an hour to scribble down a song while on a flight to Jamaica. They recorded the song in a studio for $1,400.

That song was More, More, More. Originally, Buddha Records only released it into discos, but it became so popular, the record label put it out as a single in early 1976. It was a huge international hit, reaching number four on the Billboard charts, number two on the disco chart, and reached number one in Canada. Andrea True's porn background clearly inspired the lyrics. Ironically, Andrea True had been a radio advertising copywriter and jingle composer before her porn career. And after More More More was a hit, the advertising industry licensed her song often for commercials.

Like Honey Bunches of Oats cereal. Why settle for a one-note cereal? Get more with Honey Bunches of Oats. Four nutritious grains come together for more taste, more texture, more healthy satisfaction. Ford used it, and Save On Foods used it. Get ready to Save On Foods and more. It was an interesting song choice. Porn has always been toxic to the advertising industry.

Yet the fact the song was sung by a hardcore porn actress seems to have been forgotten or ignored. And marketers have continued to use the song in commercials to this day. Welcome to part two of our Strange Bedfellows episode. For decades, the two worlds of porn and advertising were separated like Antarctica and the Arctic. But now, those two poles are moving closer together. The new pornographers aren't hairy men with gold chains. They are masters of search engine optimization and traffic conversion ratios. Meanwhile, the advertising industry has impatient clients demanding digital success. It's not just a historic crossroad.

It's a dangerous intersection. You're under the influence. Many cite online porn as the first big revolution in the sex industry. It allowed the adult film world to suddenly scale up and reach hundreds of millions of customers at once. That massive audience is one of the reasons the porn industry is becoming attractive to the advertising industry. In our last episode, we talked about how pornography has been disrupted by the flood of free porn and is in need of advertising revenue. On the other side of the tracks, the advertising industry has been disrupted by the splintered digital world and is in need of huge, affordable audiences. That convergence of needs has led to some smaller brands to stretch their ad budgets

further by taking a chance and advertising on porn sites. Those traffic-heavy adult websites give them exposure to huge audiences, and the controversy gives their campaigns a kind of rocket fuel. Plus, they achieve that for one-tenth the price of traditional media. But it's one thing for small, feisty brands to tiptoe into the world of porn. It's quite another when big brands

risk it. Like Diesel, the Italian fashion giant has advertised on multiple porn sites. When big brands move into a new space, it creates a chain reaction. As advertising industry publication Campaign Magazine predicted, Diesel's move will influence traditional advertisers to consider advertising on porn sites for the first time ever.

So it's probably no surprise that Hollywood came knocking. In 2010, the trailers for a new movie titled Middlemen were advertised on the adult website YouPorn. While the film was about the start of online pornography, it was a mainstream movie starring Luke Wilson, Kelsey Grammer, and James Caan. Paramount Pictures presents the story of the World Wide Web and the man Get out, now. who started it all.

We had no idea what the internet would become. Changing the world is a wild ride. Middle Men What made the choice to advertise the film on a porn site so interesting was the fact this movie wasn't made by some small indie studio. It was from Paramount. Paramount is a division of Viacom, one of the biggest publicly traded companies in cable and entertainment,

owned by billionaire Sumner Redstone, who also owns a controlling interest in CBS. So when a company owned by the executive chairman of CBS advertises on porn sites, it's not an insignificant move.

In other words, the entertainment giant had just treated YouPorn as mass media. In 2013, a film titled Movie 43 was advertised on YouPorn. It featured a bevy of big-name stars including Dennis Quaid, Kate Winslet, and Hugh Jackman. It was produced by the company behind 21 Jump Street and Bridesmaids. That same company also advertised a film titled 21 and Over on Pornhub. Later that same year, the movie Dawn John was released.

There's only a few things I really care about in life. My body. My pad. My ride. My family. My church. my boys, my girls, and my porn. My body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls, my porn. It starred actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and directed the film. It was about a guy who was addicted to pornography.

He meets a girl, played by Scarlett Johansson, and she insists he give up his habit for her. The film was advertised heavily on Pornhub. But what was doubly interesting about Don John was the fact the Montreal-based porn site had a co-starring role. Gordon-Levitt's character is hooked on Pornhub. It was product placement.

You could argue the link between the pornography plotline and Pornhub is what resulted in that media buy. But it wouldn't explain the decision to advertise this film on porn sites.

They are the world's greatest mercenaries. The only life they've ever known is war. The only loyalty they've ever had is to each other. The Expendables. Starring perhaps the longest list of action stars in one film, including Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li and Mickey Rourke,

The Expendables was a major mainstream release. Lionsgate Films rolled out a major advertising campaign to launch the movie. The company's president of worldwide marketing told The Hollywood Reporter his company also advertised the Expendables on porn sites. His reason? It was inexpensive and efficient. The film was aimed at men

and porn sites delivered that audience affordably and abundantly. He went on to say his company has no problem advertising on X-rated websites. Lionsgate even promoted its horror film Saw in S&M magazines. Now that Hollywood was partnering with porn sites, it was only a matter of time before porn invited brands to be part of the action. 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. With some mainstream brands beginning to advertise on porn sites,

it comes as no surprise porn studios are now inviting mainstream companies to place their products in porn films. Fashion brand Echo Unlimited, for example, has been utilizing product placement in porn films for quite some time now. Product placement in porn was inevitable, says Echo's marketing director. He went on to say his company had placed its products in other films, so why not porn? Echo has always taken risks, but the company saw it as a mutually beneficial deal. The porn production company gets to be associated with the leading urban wear

manufacturer, and Echo gets massive exposure to its main 18-35 demographic. There is actually a company that will place your brand in adult films. It's called PornYourProduct.com. It was started by a former Wall Street intern named Paige Jennings. She was fired for tweeting suggestive photos of herself, then made her way into porn by appearing in some videos. While exploring the adult movie business, Jennings realized there was a big opportunity being underserved. Product placement in porn films.

Her website says, It's time to shake the stigma. It goes on to say marketers should realize the untapped potential of product placement in pornography. Here's how she described it on CNN. Explain kind of this business idea you've got. When all the media stuff sort of happened, I started tweeting at companies I thought would be a good fit

for product placement and adult content. It was a big pitch to the advertising industry. Meanwhile, the advertising industry convenes at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France. It's a week-long awards show where advertising agencies from around the world come to compete, and an excellent roster of speakers present fascinating case studies and reveal emerging trends.

While there last year, I noticed one campaign in particular that partially inspired this episode. It was for a porn site called Dorcel.com, based in France. It got my attention because it caused a long, heated debate in the jury room. It was a telling moment

because the judges weren't trying to decide if a marketing campaign promoting pornography should be allowed into the competition, but rather they were debating whether the porn campaign should be given the Grand Prix award as the best campaign of the year, or if that honor should go to another campaign by Volvo. The jury was split. Dorsell.com is a pay site suffering from what all paid porn sites are suffering from, a drop in paying customers. Dorsell believed the problem was that people don't have an appreciation for what premium porn is.

Put another way, if viewers could see the difference between free porn and paid porn, they would be willing to pay the $11 per month to subscribe to the premium service. So the porn site's ad agency came up with this idea. They convinced Dorsell to make its entire library of premium porn available free for a limited time. They called the promotion Hands Off. When you logged onto the website, you could watch whatever video you wanted from Dorsell's entire premium library, but on one condition.

You had to keep both hands on the keyboard. In other words, you had to keep your left fingers on the Q and S keys and your right fingers on the P and L keys in order to keep the video rolling. The second you took your hands off the keyboard to do something else, the video would immediately stop and a message would appear asking you to return your hands to the keys. Hence, hands off. It was a humorous attempt to prove that

premium porn was worth paying for, while still leaving people a reason to sign up. As soon as the campaign was launched, it became a trending topic on Twitter, gaining 5,500 mentions and 13 million views. The public tried all sorts of ingenious ways to beat the system by placing various objects on the keys and uploaded hundreds of videos of the attempts.

Hands Off got mentioned 1,200 times in news programs and online articles in France. The total traffic of the site was multiplied by 27. The number of subscribers on the site multiplied by 50. In the end, the Cannes jury awarded the Grand Prix to Volvo, but still gave the French porn campaign a gold trophy because the number of new subscribers to the site was 50 times greater than it was before the campaign. The jury felt the campaign's success selling porn in a free porn world was an achievement worth recognizing.

Say what you will about the creativity of the idea, one fact remained. The advertising industry was awarding a campaign that promoted pornography. While the ad industry is beginning to ignore the stigma of porn, the porn industry is putting on its best suit to woo advertisers. Recently, X Hamster, the world's third largest porn

site, protested the contentious North Carolina transgender legislation by refusing access to anyone with a North Carolina IP address. X Hamster said it found the legislation hypocritical, since its analytics showed North Carolinians

searched the term transsexual 400,000 times in March alone. This may be the first time a porn site has voiced moral indignation. Ex-Hamster also sponsors an Italian cycling team. The team has competed

for the Italian Cup and its vice president said they are incredibly excited to have the porn site as one of their main sponsors. YouPorn sponsors an e-sports team that competes in video game tournaments. Pornhub sponsored a British University of Kent soccer team. Briefly.

The players couldn't find a single company to sponsor them. So for fun, they put Pornhub's logo on their shirts. That got the attention of the porn site, who happily agreed to sponsor the team. Until the university said it was inappropriate and forbid it. An adult site called woodrocket.com is trying to bridge the gap between adult content and mainstream audiences. It's a free porn site that relies on product placement, sponsorship, licensing, and merchandising.

It tries to attract advertisers by offering non-porn content alongside its X-rated material. For example, it features videos where porn stars comment on topical news items, like football games or the presidential election. The site creates comedic parodies like Donald Trump and Good Porn in America. It reviews the sexiest movies on other sites like Netflix and HBO. It has videos of porn stars reading books. It creates cartoons and even issues podcasts. But maybe no porn site works harder to attract advertisers than Pornhub.

For starters, Pornhub is trying to attract mainstream advertisers by advertising in mainstream media. It erected a huge billboard in Times Square recently with the headline, trying to attract mainstream advertisers by advertising in mainstream media. It erected a huge billboard in Times Square recently with the headline, All You Need Is Hand. On launch day, it hired the Gotham Rock Choir to sing on the sidewalk under the billboard. Ba-da-da, ba-da-da, all you need is hand. Ba-ba-da-da, all you need is hand. Ba-ba-da-da, all you need is hands. All you need is hands. All you need is hands. Hands.

Hands is all you need. Pornhub created a Christmas commercial and posted it on YouTube. It features a family exchanging gifts on Christmas Day. The scene is full of smiles and hugs, all shot in slow motion. But in the corner, we see a sad grandfather. He has no gifts and sits there dejected. Grandson notices sad look on Grandpa, then picks up an envelope with a bow on it and hands it to him.

Gramps opens the envelope, smiles widely, and jumps up to hug grandson. It's an emotional moment. That's when we see Grandpa is holding a Pornhub Premium gift card. The commercial ends by saying, This Christmas, give the most touching gift. If you're looking for flexible workouts,

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need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Pornhub also tried to buy Super Bowl ad time, but the network refused to accept the commercial. However, the high-profile turndown attracted lots of mainstream press attention. Pornhub also has an elaborate analytics section on its website, tailor-made for advertisers, called Pornhub Insights. There, it breaks down its audience into well-designed charts, listing traffic by age, gender, day part, geographical location, and the most popular search terms.

It dives even deeper with research showing what effect events like the Super Bowl have on porn habits, what people search on holidays like St. Patrick's Day, Thanksgiving, and so on. Perfect for advertisers looking for specific demographics. But maybe the most unexpected offering on the website is a section called Pornhub Cares. It has a Save the Whales initiative, where it donates one cent for every 2,000 videos viewed to a non-profit organization

dedicated to whale knowledge and conservation. It sells a limited-edition clothing line with all proceeds going to an End Domestic Violence program. It has a tree planting initiative called Give America Wood, where it donates one tree for every 100 videos viewed in its big fill-in-the-blank category. There is a Save the Boobs breast cancer program, where it pledges one cent for every video viewed from its big and small breast video categories and donates that money to charity.

There is also a Save the Balls program. In a further example of reaching out to Madison Avenue, Pornhub partnered with advertising agency McCann Peru to create a video starring a top porn star with the provocative title Charlotte Stokely Teaches You How to Last Longer. Do you want to know the secret to lasting longer? I'll show you.

It turned out to be a public service video teaching men how to check for testicular cancer. Watch porn, live longer, was the message. Early detection will help you last longer in life. But perhaps the most surprising element was a $25,000 college scholarship. Students looking to make some money to pay for their college tuition may be able to get some help from the adult video website Pornhub. Now it's offering $25,000 scholarship to a college student. The site is seeking applicants who have a 3.2 GPA and can write an essay answering the

question, how do you strive to make others happy? As well as an up to five minute video that elaborates on the good work you do and anything else you might want to say. In an interesting flip, the porn site said it would disqualify any submissions that contained explicit material in the videos. 1,000 people applied for the scholarship, and the winner was a mom from Texas. All of these initiatives are designed to position Pornhub and other large adult sites as viable advertising mediums.

The vice president of Pornhub insists that people who visit adult sites are no different from those who visit mainstream sites. He says the site attracts a strong online demographic made up of very active consumers. The top ten biggest porn sites in the world now see themselves as mass media companies looking to expand their pool of advertisers. And they are trying to push that conversation

out into the general public. Recently, that conversation got Pornhub into a bit of hot water. The site launched a new premium service with this commercial. Ah, hey, don't forget we have to get some cheese. Why don't we get this aged Parmigiano-Reggiano? When did you become such a foodie? They say it's the Pornhub premium of cheese.

The Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese Consortium of Italy, charged with protecting the Italian cheese-making industry, considered suing Pornhub over that commercial. The association maintains the porn site is damaging

the image of its product. It said Pornhub had vulgarly exploited the fame of cheese. An article in Time magazine back in 2001 was discussing the emergence of porn into the mainstream. It noted that while porn was a $10 billion industry in the U.S. at the time, it wasn't 10 perverts spending a billion dollars each. Adult content scaled up enormously by going online.

And the sense of outrage that tailgated porn for decades seems to diminish a little more each year. Now we see porn sites needing ad revenue and Madison Avenue reaching across the chasm in small but significant ways.

When Pornhub's Super Bowl commercial was rejected, the network was CBS. Yet CBS is owned by Viacom, the same company that advertises its movies on porn sites. It's a very dangerous game. The most valuable asset a company has is its reputation. And what is a reputation but the sum total of all the decisions a company has made over time. Those choices are getting

blurrier as porn takes its place in pop culture. Because advertising has always worshipped at the altar of pop culture. And it doesn't seem like the trend is showing signs of slowing down. Maybe Andrea True was predicting the future back

in 1976. It just looks like more, more, more when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode brought to you by Garden Weasel. When you got it, want it. Under the Influence was recorded at Pirate Toronto.

Series producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound engineer, Keith Ullman. Theme music by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Research, James Gangle. 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.