When you possess a marketing budget that exceeds the GDP of several developing nations, it can take as little as the push of a button to, say, sell millions of hamburgers around the world. When you own half of all consumed media, it’s not too difficult to get behind a brand and make it a massive success. And when you have Chrissy Teigen in tow, as PepsiCo does, you can pretty much lead Gen Z by the nose.
Then there is Pornhub, which has none of those bullets in its canister. Its annual marketing budget likely amounts to little more than Bob Iger (Disney chairman and CEO) makes in a day and its core product is naked "celebrities" having sex on camera. Yet, with the massive amount of press coverage it earns, Pornhub is long overdue some industry recognition.
The adult media site has proven over and over again that by marketing its X-rated product in a PG-rated way, it can drive as much press coverage as, say, IHOP could by dropping its “P” for a “B.”
Pornhub’s success has been a double-edged sword. Kraft Heinz and Unilever had been advertising on the site—a badge of mainstream approval if there could ever be one—yet both pulled out in November after the U.K.’s Sunday Times reported the site was supposedly filled with “secretly filmed creepshots” and underage content. While it may seem both CPG giants had been caught out, let’s face it, Pornhub is hardly famous for showing Scorsese movies. Even “above board” YouTube is struggling to shake its own child-safety issues, while counting Hershey's, PepsiCo and Carat USA as clients.
Still, when you have a far steeper hill to climb, yet achieve more mainstream acceptance than most other brands out there, it makes the marketing world sit up and take note.
Here are 3 lessons all marketers can learn from Pornhub:
Use juxtaposition
Take two disparate subjects, collide them, and play it straight. “Comedy is contrast,” as my advertising exec friend says. The more outrageously apart those two things are, the bigger the sparks will fly.
Pornhub deftly inserts its risqué subject matter into mainstream tropes.
When award judges look back at 2019, they will surely consider the company’s one-two juxtaposition punch of its “Dirtiest Porn Ever” PSA to clean up waste, shot beautifully in the Caribbean. Or its lifetime-membership promotional video posted for Black Friday, which looks like an AARP ad of life milestones crossed with Terrence Malick-like sweeping slo-mo moments. Disney may wish "The Rise of Skywalker" would have received the uniformly positive reviews that the New York Post, Forbes, The Clio Awards blog, Coastal Living, GQ, Quartz, Vice, Daily Dot, PC Magazine (and Ad Age) gave these videos.
Be the first
Being the first of anything is a great press ploy, especially when it’s in a category created entirely by you.
Nobody had been screaming for the porn world’s first Hanukkah ad. But, two years ago. Pornhub obliged with the electric (lights and guitars) “Hanukkah Gets Lit” spot, winning a publicity game of dreidel with stories appearing in Mashable, Refinery29, Gizmodo and Men’s Health.
And no one had asked for a sex tape shot in space. Not to be outdone by Elon Musk’s intergalactic antics, Pornhub posted an Indiegogo campaign to raise $3.4 million for a mission to join “the ranks of Armstrong and Gagarin.” Even if the campaign raised "only" $236,000, Pornhub had defied logical gravity by making news everywhere, from CNBC and Business Insider to Newsweek, Complex and Engadget.
Be an authority
If the nature of your business drives consumer data of any kind, think about exploiting it to position your brand as an expert in your field.
In 2018, Pornhub transferred 4,403 petabytes of data, equal to “the brain capacity of Stanford University’s entire class of 2022,” according to Popular Mechanics. This year, that number increased to 6,597 petabytes!
Who needs Google when you can visit the highly scientific Pornhub Insights, which assumes that human behavior is reflected in Pornhub visits. Here, you can find out that Pornhub’s U.K. traffic dropped between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. when the results of the recent General Election came in; or discover that a rapid ascent of searches for the word “joker” began as the movie of the same name opened (a request made by TMZ); or see if Kylie Jenner's Playboy cover photo generated more Pornhub searches than her sister's (as Page Six did).
