Is advertising through porn set to grow in 2014?

With media generally in a seemingly perpetual state of flux, there has been no shortage of predictions for content consumption patterns in 2014. Marketers have been advised to prioritize everything from trust, quality and discover-ability, to wearable technology and device integration. But amidst the scramble to find sure footing, some believe a trick is being missed – internet pornography.

Sex has always been a part of advertising, and the food industry is no exception. In 2009, Burger King sparked controversy when it ran an ad campaign comparing the consumption of a sandwich to oral sex.

More recently, Canadian restaurant guide Le Guide Restos Voir drew similar comparisons between male and female genitalia, and steak and oysters respectively. Last summer, American food company Eat24 took things a step further by advertising directly with pornographic website PornHub.

“Our biggest concern from the beginning was, how will the internet react?” says Eat24’s chief marketing officer Amir Eisenstein. “Who is actually going to say: ‘hey, I saw this cool Eat24 ad while watching porn last night?’ [But] strangely enough, we got tons of feedback and the response was overwhelmingly positive.”

Eisenstein says Eat24 decided to advertise on PornHub for two reasons: cost, and what he calls the company’s “organic” relationship with the porn actor community. “Huge porn icons like Tera Patrick and Ava Adams tweeted that they loved us. We approached a couple of them with sponsorship for more focused social media plugs. It got good reactions [and] this got us thinking about advertising on porn sites.”

The company did some research and, according to its blog, found that the cost of advertising on a typical internet porn site came out at “roughly one-tenth” of what it cost to advertise with Twitter, Facebook or Google. With the vast majority of ads on porn sites being for other porn, Eat24 wondered if it had discovered an “untapped market”.

The campaign ran for six months and has had seemingly impressive results. Banner ads have seen three times the number of impressions as on Twitter, Facebook and Google combined, and there has been a “huge spike” in sales, says Eisenstein.

Does this mean internet porn is set to become a major advertising platform? That depends on what you mean by porn, says Cindy Gallop, former US chair of advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty and founder of Make Love Not Porn.

Launched at TED 2009, Make Love Not Porn is a social enterprise of sorts. Its goal, as articulated by Gallop at her recent SXSW talk, is to “socialize sex” by making real-world sex “socially acceptable and therefore just as socially shareable as anything we share on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter or Instagram”.

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