043: Pornhub’s Purpose-Driven & Attention-Grabbing Marketing

Welcome to Will It Stick? podcast, where hosts Melissa and Alexis cover creative advertising campaigns, PR stunts, and marketing activations that brands of all shapes and sizes pull, and dive into the research and data to understand if it worked.

The company we’re going to talk about today isn’t for everybody, or let me re-phrase that. There is a big percentage of the population who would probably wouldn’t be comfortable admitting that this IS for them, but the stats show otherwise. Nearly 40 million people in the U.S. utilize this regularly. Actually, 35% of all internet traffic is related to this. Any ideas?

Porn. Consume porn on the internet. And the leader in all things internet porn happens to be Pornhub. I assume you are a regular visitor Lex, right? Well, PornHub has pulled some of the craziest marketing stunts and campaigns, and in honoring our mission here at WIS, I couldn’t leave them out of the mix. And I have to say, some of their tactics are insanely creative.

I’m assuming you’ve heard of Pornhub before? It’s actually Canadian-owned and it’s officially the 10th most trafficked website IN THE WORLD and they are the third most popular porn site in the world. They are a relatively newer company, being founded in just 2007. But they are actually considered a household name in the world of marketing, and somehow despite being a porn company, they are featured in the mainstream media because of their stunts quite often, and in big ways. I found some recent stats that said that Pornhub got about 2.4 billion website visits in the past 6 months alone, and they haven’t paid a DIME for advertising in that same 6 month period. 57% of their traffic comes from DIRECT visits – so they don’t really need anything other company or site to drive traffic for them. That is what every company dreams of. How many times have we had a client come to us saying they want their brand to be a “household name” – it’s not an easy task to accomplish.

So, how do they do it? I mean, besides the obvious fact that I think porn might be a little easier to “sell” than some other products… but really they are insanely creative and smart with their marketing. In this episode we cover:

Pornhub’s 2014 Search for the Best #SFW Advertising Campaign & Hunt for Creative Director
Pornhub’s Crowdfunding Campaign to Take Porn to Space
Pornhub’s Purpose Driven Marketing … PornHub Gives America Wood
Pornhub’s Sexy Data & How They Use it to Market