AdAge Examines Greg Lansky's Approach to Marketing

LOS ANGELES—In an extensive write-up published Friday by advertising trade journal AdAge, three-time AVN Director of the Year Greg Lansky discusses his glossy, non-explicit branding of his quartet of labels—Vixen, Blacked, Tushy and Blacked Raw—almost exclusively via towering social media platform Instagram.

Dubbing Lansky "a master of SFW marketing," the piece also consults sociologist and adult industry scholar Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, veteran adult publicist Pete Housley and others about the porn mogul's tactics, and points to last week's endorsement of Blacked by Kanye West on Jimmy Kimmel Live! as an undeniable resulting coup.

Noting that Lansky holds up as the model for his marketing approach Ridley Scott's famous 1984 ad for the Apple Macintosh, the piece quotes him as expounding, "It didn't show the product. It didn't show a dude next to a computer, explaining what everything does. It was just some super-powerful imagery that kind of made sense but not really. What did any of that have to do with computers? I have no idea, but I remember that commercial, and it made a lot of people buy computers."

Elsewhere, he elaborates on his predilection for reaching the masses through Instagram by delineating, "I use the restrictions of Instagram as an asset. Who cares if we can't show adult content on social media? There's already too much porn online. You can just Google porn and spend two lifetimes trying to watch just a fraction of it. What's the point? What I figured out is, we can get more attention by playing to our strengths. We're in the image business. We're better at it than most ad agencies. We don’t need adult content to sell adult content."

Read the full AdAge profile here.