How Pornhub pulled off its biggest philanthropic campaign yet

One thing that Madrid-based creative agency Officer & Gentleman learned early on was how to market the unmarketable. Their clients include an array of restricted industries, including gambling, alcohol and pornography. Their biggest client, Pornhub, is the largest streaming porn site in the world.

Over the years, O&G co-founders Alex Katz and Javier Iñiguez de Onzoño have produced a number of product- and service-related ads for the site, but they also work on the company’s charitable campaigns via the Pornhub Cares initiative. Ad Age Studio 30’s latest case study tells the story behind its biggest one yet.

Katz and Iñiguez de Onzoño predicated Pornhub’s “Dirtiest Porn Ever” campaign on a handful of basic truths: Sex sells, sex on a beach makes for great porn staging, and clean beaches are almost as much of a fantasy as actual sex on a beach.

“There is a whole genre of porn that’s shot outside on natural beaches, and they’re always super beautiful. But we thought, ‘Where are they finding these beaches?’” Katz says. “Most of the ones that we go to usually have a bunch of trash or plastic bags. So we thought what if we were able to create a porn that could solve this problem? And then what if we shot it on one of the dirtiest beaches in the world and actually cleaned it up?”

Of course, simply shooting a porn video wouldn’t be enough—there needed to be a shareable ad with a worthy call to action. “The whole idea was, let’s make it look like a trailer to the movie,” explains Iñiguez de Onzoño, “and then in the most exciting moment, the action is covered by the trash that’s on the beach.”

Finding a charity to partner with can sometimes be a challenge, as it was with this campaign. Officer & Gentleman talked to more than 40 environmental clean-up organizations and charities before finding Ocean Polymers, a small British recycling technology company that is working to clean the oceans using self-sustainable ships that can process up to 10 tons of ocean waste each day to create clean syngas, a fuel gas mixture that can be used to generate electricity or in internal combustion engines.

Difficulty finding partners is not new territory for Pornhub. Many brands are hesitant to be associated with pornography. A couple of recent stories by the UK paper The Sunday Times vividly illustrated why. In an October 2019 piece, the paper accused the site of failing to remove instances of revenge porn after it was reported as such, and then the next week, a follow-up article called out both Kraft Heinz and Unilever as major corporations whose subsidiaries had advertised on Pornhub. Kraft Heinz pulled the ads for its Devour frozen food brand, and Unilever did the same for Dollar Shave Club. Both companies publicly denounced their association with Pornhub and vowed to not advertise there again.

Pornhub has denied hosting any illegal content, and emphasized that they have a “robust internal policy” of monitoring and removing problematic content. “We have put a number of mechanisms in place to help ensure the safety of our users, creators and brands that advertise with us,” Pornhub VP Corey Price told Ad Age by email, “including reviewing all content to determine whether it is consensual or not, employing an expertly trained compliance team who monitor for specific cues and criteria, and by making it as easy as possible to flag illegal content.”

This more recent issue did not affect the late-summer success of “Dirtiest Porn Ever,” however. During the August 27-September 27, 2019 campaign, the full-length video racked up 6 million views and more than 750 articles in 75 countries (including here on Ad Age). To date, it has 8.2 million views and the shareable trailer ad has 3.2 million views on YouTube.

“People were incredibly positive about it,” Katz says, adding that it was the type of campaign that is both funny and sexy but also educational. “People would upload it and be like, ‘Hey guys, I just saved the planet!’—I could count 100,000 tweets that said the same thing from different people. But a lot of people really did take it very seriously and saw it for what it was, which is what we wanted to happen.”

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