Advertisers are often choosy about where they put their commercials and content, worried that they will sully their reputation by appearing to endorse something offensive or racy.
But food delivery service Eat24 is taking an unusual advertising tactic: Instead of avoiding X-rated platforms, the company is seeking them out — and focusing part of their ad campaign on pornographic websites. “We’re always looking for new and unique ways to spread our brand message. As far as mainstream brand advertising goes, porn is about as ‘different’ as you can get. With the high traffic and low cost, it was an easy decision to just go for it,” explains Amir Eisentstein, the company’s social media chief. 
Eat24 is a young company, and it doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on traditional advertising campaigns. In a case study they published called “How to Advertise on a Porn Website” Eat24 delved into their unusual advertising model.
The company realized that advertising on porn sites had an excellent ROI. “We decided to seriously look into it and what we found was boobs. A lot of them. But, we also found an advertising gold mine. We always assumed that a lot of people love porn, but when you look at the numbers, the proof is in the hot tub full of pudding. A whopping 30 percent of all web traffic is dedicated to adult sites. In fact, by the time you’re done reading this sentence, about 197,806 people have looked at porn on the Internet (including you. We see that incognito tab).”
Although sites like YouPorn and XVideos have very high traffic rankings, it costs far less to advertise on them than other major Internet hubs like Google and Facebook. This is because mainstream brands want to avoid getting tied to porn — and that’s why most people see ads for other porn sites while they’re getting their naughty browse on. Eat24 decided to buck the don’t-touch-the-porn-with-a-10-foot-pole line of thinking and start broadcasting their message of tasty food delivered to your door on sites where people go to indulge their impulses — which is probably why they hilariously called their strategy “Me so Hongry.”
Eat24 decided to play into porn’s XXX nature by coming up with innuendo-laced ads, and although one of their initial ads featuring a monkey was rejected, their other ads were not. They discovered that the advertisements that they ran next to videos were clicked on five times more frequently than their other ads.
Their other discoveries were largely positive; the porn ads received three times the amount of impressions as ads they placed on Google, Twitter, and Facebook combined. More importantly, the company’s ad campaign resulted in a substantial increase in food orders — people watching porn weren’t only clicking on their ads, they were clicking on them and then deciding to buy pizza. And 90 percent of the people who visited the Eat24 site from a sex video were new customers, so Eat24 actually managed to woo a whole new crowd of porn-loving delivery fans. Even better? The retention rate for these customers was four times higher than customers who found Eat24 from Facebook ads.
So, all in all, the campaign was a giant success for Eat24. Obviously, it might not work for every brand, but it’s easy to suspect there’s a whole bevy of products that would benefit immensely from tapping (ha) into the vast, seething Internet porn audience. And the demographic hasn’t been shy. “We were surprised to get any response at all. We didn’t think anyone would be willing to admit that they saw our ads, or where they saw them. Even more surprising is that all the feedback we’ve gotten so far has been overwhelmingly positive,” Eisentstein says.
Eat24 learned that advertising on porn sites worked, and it also got an interesting glimpse into some of its customers’ habits. For instance, people in Chicago prefer to order cheeseburgers after they’ve watched explicit videos, whereas Seattlites like Pad Thai. People in New York City were more likely to click through during their lunch hours, suggesting an ominous reason why your boss insists on eating his lunch with the door closed.
