BARCELONA, Spain - In a report released last week, Cherry Media Holdings, the new parent company of the adult
mobile brand Cherrysauce, cited
the strategies of high-street retailing as keys to unlocking the full
commercial potential of mobile adult entertainment.
In "Mobile
Adult Report 2007-2012," released by Juniper
Research, Cherry Media Managing Director Julia Dimambro stated that selling
adult content should not be the sole domain of large, recognizable adult-industry
brands or mobile aggregators. Instead, she asserted, mobile operators should
look to the basics of retail marketing,
"aggregating consumers instead of aggregating content."
Dimambro likens this model to that of large supermarket chains that engage
impulsive consumers over many years.
"Hypermarkets offer the likes
of discount petrol to entice customers to their doors," she said. "Once there,
people invariably pop in to pick up a few essential bits. You have fresh-bread
smells coming through the entrance air vents to create a feeling of hunger, you
place the best-selling items at eye level to encourage extra purchases, and
feature impulse buys at the checkout. All of this has been highly developed by
studying customer purchasing patterns, and we believe the same can be applied
to mobile."
In the report, I-Play President David Gosen concurred.
"When you walk into a Wal-Mart [and] you get to the end gondola, it's well marketed and promoted," he wrote. "That's where the mobile-phone deck needs to be."
Dimambro suggested that understanding the mobile adult consumer "perhaps [is] the
key hurdle to ensuring mass-adoption of adult services ... ensuring that content
is made available, which customers want to buy."
The Juniper report also asserts that companies with content specialties are "unconvinced
as to the operators' efficacy in marketing their particular product" because
the operators are "mobile specialists" and don't specialize in the content they
provide.
"Many people know adult and many people know mobile," Dimambro added, "but very
few people know how to manipulate both skill sets with an inherent marketing
knowledge of what Cherry Media coins as ‘consumer
context that converts content.'"
The report reflects Cherry Media's stance that though some mobile operators believe
that famous brands in the adult sector drive consumer demand on mobile devices,
the current commercial growth in adult mobile entertainment is being driven by
white-label or amateur content, user-generated content and chat applications.
In the report, Dimambro cited the delivery of a big-name adult brand to a top-tier mobile operator for nearly five years. She wrote that during a temporary suspension of the service, the operator used Cherrysauce white-label content instead, which matched the branded content and increased sales by more than 20 percent.
