Adult sites as add platforms instead of Google and Facebook? Yes, someone did it and the results beat all the odds!
Marketing of any kind requires the use of a mix of skills, the most important of which are analytical skills, knowledge of psychology and creativity. Since I have worked in the field of digital marketing for five years, I witnessed many great ideas fail due to the lack of courage to bring them to life. That’s why I wanted to tell you a different story, a story of courage, and the incredible result achieved by EAT24’s marketing team.
How it all began
EAT24 is a US food delivery service, but what sets them apart from other companies is a team of extremely talented marketing professionals, whose qualities you will be assured of as soon as you peek into their blog. Each of their articles is unusually humorous (as an example, we enclose this article where they explain in the form of termination letters why they shut down their Facebook page).
Analyticity
Realizing that there are several porn stars among users and fans, they decided to analyze the idea of advertising on porn sites. What they found was that a huge number of Americans visit porn sites, and the cost of advertising on these sites is not high at all (which was a big surprise to them).
Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM – as the digital marketing world puts it), was such that 10 times less money could be spent on the same ad which on Facebook, Twitter, and Google combined would net get such exposal for 10 times higher cost.
Creativity
Creativity has come to the fore. Great banners have been created with ambiguous messages that were significantly different from other ads on porn sites:
Testing
Of course, as any real marketing professional would do, A / B testing was done. It was found that the ads next to the videos were clicked five times more than the advertisements that were on the homepage of the sites (they concluded that the reason for this lies in the behavior of the site visitors, ie the primary reason why they visited the site. The fact is that when they come to the porn site, people do not care much about food, however when they are done with watching the content they came for, the situation changes. Besides, there was a subliminal message recommending food throughout watching the movie.
Results?
Three times as many people saw their ad on porn sites than on Facebook, Twitter and Google combined. Tens of thousands of Americans clicked on the advertisement, all of which resulted in a large increase in sales in the moments when the advertisements were displayed. All this was achieved with 10% of the budget they would normally spend on advertising on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Also, 90% of the purchases came from new users, meaning they hit a whole new market for them. The retention of new users was 4 times higher than the users who came from Facebook.
How to use the full potential of a campaign like this?
The news of their ads soon became popular on Reddit and Buzzfeed, and EAT24 wrote a blog post about their campaign. That blog post has since been linked to more than 276 different sites (including The Guardian, CNBC, and many others), which has greatly enhanced the SEO value of the site.
If you would like to know in detail the emergence, development, and realization of the marketing campaign described above, visit their original blog post.
