The Online Adult Industry: Masters of Profit, but PR Neophytes
Given the current conditions, it blows my mind that there is anything but alarm and a frenzy of corrective marketing activity from the Adult industry.
When i think about how frail the chain of links really is -- each step (each click) brings the customer one step closer -- but, each transition (whether from site to site or medium to medium) is also a FAILURE OPPORTUNITY.
To better understand the special vulnerabilities and unique opportunities of 21st century marketing, it pays to reminisce a bit about the ways in which merchants in the pre-Internet world acquired their customers. Remember?
For most companies operating 15 years ago, marketing was a vast cost center of vast and nebulous effect. Obviously, that has changed -- but what has also changed, in just 15 years, is nothing less than the very essence of Marketing -- once upon a time, the "science" of Marketing, from its lowest copywriters to its most elite "thinkers", was entirely PREDICTIVE in nature -- meaning, simply, that, to market successfully, was to predict correctly.
In pre-internet marketing, all the research and the analytics, and all the theories that derived from them -- however fanciful and acronym-soaked -- stood vulnerable to one, very simple, very inescapable, seldom-articulated challenge -- "prove it -- !" -- and, short of paying someone to sit with Joe Consumer in his living room while your 15-second spot came on the air, and then to hang out with him long enough (maybe spend the night, maybe much, much, much longer) in order to observe any subsequent behavior relating to the advertised product -- short of THAT, marketing was never more than GUESSWORK. they could never, with anything less than extraordinary difficulty and expense, PROVE a direct correlation between a unique* "ad" and a sale.
*(unique -- as in THIS ad, appearing THERE, at THAT time.)
It sounds absurd to describe it that way now, in light of our recent "online enlightenment" -- but it was THIS that was always LACKING in marketing -- the fundamental verification of effect -- you could never REALLY KNOW why the customer came THAT day -- nor ever REALLY CONNECT that customer to a SPECIFIC marketing activity.
Even as a kid, i understood this was why the ads always IMPLORED me -- "...mention so and so when you come to the store..." -- and i assert that printed coupons were the first "cookies" ever conceived -- think about it -- the customer would tell the merchant all the things the customer had done to get to the store (the merchant could know all this from the unique distribution characteristics of the coupon), and then the merchant could MARRY all that sales channel data to the particulars of the purchase at the POS -- brilliant, and an early incidence of using the customer as the transfer vehicle for marketing meta-data.
For online marketers today -- verification of effect is the very FIRST thing we get -- before we know anything else, we know which ad and what was sold -- that's quite a LOT for a mareketer to know, isn't it -- ?()?
And nowhere has more money been made with that knowledge than right here in Adult -- (but when I say "money", I mean CONSUMER PURCHASE REVENUE, and not
But what concerns me is the fact that our success (for having conquered the "prove it" challenge) is distracting us from a much bigger picture than that contained between a customer's mouse and our payment processor -- for all these billions we're making, there's STILL a whole lotta OFFLINE world -- with a whole LOTTA influence over our success -- and I AM NOT talking about legislative or regulatory events, which, if anything, DE-FOCUS us further from BIZ-AS-USUAL -- i'm talking about the basics -- PR -- branding, and the level of political sophistication required by ANY large industry, much less one with so many inherent political challenges.
I have to be honest with you, the more I see us rankle and cuss like a bunch of insecure, reactionary EXTREMISTS -- the more worried I get.
There is a time to stand straight-up and resist -- but there is also a time for patience and camouflage... The Hey-Dey of Pimp Lore and gangsta-fly is no doubt still a fervid nostalgia for many of you -- it musta been a blast -- I've seen the pictures -- -- but -- my colleagues and dear friends -- as I observe the landscape and notice the direction of the wind -- I'm afraid it looks like the Adult Biz has a bit of an image problem on its hands -- and worse than that, I see very few of us doing ANYTHING about it.
It's not the clothes, it's not the partying -- smart businessmen in other industries understand and appreciate that is a part of our marketing -- it's the impression among those influential personages, within both commerce and government, that we're just not SHREWD and SUBTLE enough to assist in a re-architecture of our industry that will address a few political necessities, but that will also -- and this is the important part -- preserve a very nice livelihood for ALL involved.
2hp
