According to Advertising Age, the average American family spent $40,817 on goods and services in 2003. After expenses for housing, utilities, transportation, food, clothing, medical bills, and other basics, only 5 cents out of every dollar – or a little more than $2,000 per family for the entire year – was spent for entertainment. That’s not much money, when one considers the tremendous variety of entertainment options available to the average consumer. It’s easy to see why catching eyes and winning hearts and minds is so crucial to the success of any entertainment venture, and Adult entertainment is no exception.
Ask anyone who’s putting together a business plan for a new commercial endeavor, and he or she will admit that a fair-sized chunk of the proposed budget is devoted to advertising and marketing. "Getting the word out" about products and services is absolutely essential for any business, whether it’s an icon in its industry or a scrappy start-up. Even companies that are consistently on the entertainment "A" List advertise constantly just to keep their names in front of consumers who are always looking for a new diversion.
Advertising for advertising’s sake is worthless, however. In order to be effective, ads must both present products and services effectively and strike a chord with consumers. Ads that work seldom "just happen." Although some people occassionally get lucky, usually success embodies a combination of research, dedication, and creativity.
So how can an average Joe – who may have the "next big thing" just waiting to be discovered – transform a well-kept secret into a "gotta-have" phenom? Boiled down to essentials, here’s what we discovered.
Define Your Objectives
Before embarking on any advertising campaign, it’s essential to know the market. Invest in whatever data, research, and market analysis will help you understand your competition, as well as the consumers you’re trying to reach.
John Bohan, former CEO of L90 Inc., an Internet advertising and direct marketing solutions firm, suggests a few things to keep in mind. "Before deciding who you want to target and how to implement a campaign, it’s critically important that you know and understand the consumers you want to reach, define your message and have a clear picture of your objectives," he wrote in the Los Angeles Business Journal. "Are you trying to increase traffic? Drive sales? Build brand awareness?"
Although Bohan was speaking from a mainstream perspective, the Adult marketplace is no different, according to insiders. "It’s essential to know your target market as well as you can," asserts David Valentiner, a 38-year veteran of the commercial advertising biz and one of the founders of FlixMedia.com. "You’ve got to know who you’re selling to and play to your audience. Who’s your target? How do you reach them? What methods and media can you employ most effectively to get the best return on investment? Are you better off using only print, broadcast, direct mail, or the Internet, or some combination?"
Just how does one gather that demographic data? Advertising and marketing firms that specialize in certain industries usually make it their business to keep up with inside statistics and emerging trends. Some kinds of consumer information are available from research firms like Forrester Research Inc. (www.forrester.com), Gartner Inc. (www.gartner.com), and Juniper Research Ltd. (www.juniperresearch.com). In addition, trade groups and publications can be good resources for general information, and they’re in the business of sharing it. Although it shouldn’t be over-emphasized in an advertising scheme, personal experience also counts, especially if you’re marketing niche products and that niche is near and dear to your own heart. In other words, what would make you want to buy your product?
According to Valentiner, "whether they’re business-to-business or business-to-consumer, most ads are geared to make sales – maybe not immediately, but eventually. Some advertising is done to ‘brand’ a product or service and dollars have to be allocated for that, but that’s secondary to sales." Particularly in Adult, those sales represent impulse buys, as do most other sales of entertainment products and services. With that in mind, it pays to know a little something about human psychology in order to understand the way consumers actually make purchase decisions.
"Consumer involvement theory" is a marketing term that refers to the ways consumers utilize resources during the decision process. The theory breaks down consumer decisions into four categories:
* High involvement/rational: Consumers spend a good deal of time comparing features and benefits before making a decision, because the decisions involve big-ticket items that also play important roles in their lives. Items in this category include automobiles, real estate, and financial services.
* High involvement/emotional: Vacation destinations, luxury goods like jewelry, and major social events require lots of shopping around, but decisions are predicated more on an emotional response to the items than on features and cost-benefit analysis.
* Low involvement/rational: These decisions are accomplished with very little thought as long as the product meets a need. Grocery items, household products, and many of the necessities of modern life fall into this category, where brand loyalty plays an important role.
* Low involvement/emotional: Entertainment decisions fit squarely under this heading, which also includes other products and services that provide great benefits, but those benefits are short-lived. Competition can be fierce for these items, which provoke immediate emotional responses but require little or no evaluation of pros and cons.
With Adult products and services falling primarily into the low involvement/emotional category, the advertising challenge is to convince the consumer of immediate and total gratification. According to Valentiner, "Adult [products and services are] a pure impulse buy. The consumer wants immediate gratification. If the ad meets his fantasy expectations, it strikes a very visceral response." Creating that visceral response is where the creative process comes in.
Get Creative
Basically, ads are designed to engender three things in viewers: cognition (thinking, understanding, remembering), emotion, and action. By manipulating these three responses, advertisers achieve the ultimate goal of influencing purchasing behavior. Although most professionals advise that the creative end of an advertising plan be left to trained professionals, there are some basic concepts almost anyone can master.
First and foremost, it’s important to make an ad stand out from its surroundings and competing advertisements. A good ad grabs a viewer’s attention immediately and holds it long enough to make a significant point.
"You have to have a hook to grab the attention of your specific demographic," advises Mark Galione, chief executive of online advertising agency CyberCat Inc. (www.cybercatinc.com). "One of the best ways to do that is to play to people’s curiosity. A tease is usually very successful, because people can’t keep themselves from wanting to solve a mystery. Give them a little, and make them come to you to see the rest."
Self-styled "Website conversion expert" Ron Lok (www.websiteconversionexpert.com) notes that "publishing and broadcasting professionals know that teasers tap into a deep, primal emotion that exists inside all of us. A teaser bypasses the brain and speaks directly to your curiosity. Whether you want to admit it or not, we’re all cats at heart when it comes to curiosity. Our whiskers start twitching and we have to start investigating whatever it is that has caught our interest. We want to know – we have to know – more. And where curiosity goes, sales are soon to follow."
Two of the most important elements of a tease – especially when it comes to Adult – are graphics and wording. Great ads really don’t need much more than a really eye-catching, provocative image and an evocative headline to be successful, the experts say. The trick is in how the two are combined. "When it comes to text ads versus images, it’s really to each his own," says Galione. "A graphic will work in some instances for some people, but text works equally well for others. In most cases, images produce a more immediate response, because they’re a quicker ‘read.’ If you go the text route, make every word count and take your best shot first. By that I mean lead with the most spectacular sales pitch you’ve got, and follow that with less interesting, but equally important, details."
There are some caveats for images, too. Advertising copywriter and author Jerry Fisher wrote in Entrepreneur magazine that "It’s no great revelation that an unusual illustration or photo has the power to draw scanning prospects to an ad. But it may come as a surprise that a ‘nice’ or ‘pretty’ visual doesn’t qualify. Ads must truly interrupt the passerby, not be a mild diversion. A unique visual, combined with a strong headline, will be the speed bump that grabs a reader's attention and causes him or her to do the unorthodox: read the text."
Arresting visuals work because they help ads to stand out. Ads do absolutely no good if people don’t see them, Galione says. He and Valentiner agree that’s why the best advertising is a "don’t try this at home" affair. Creative professionals are schooled and experienced in the psychology and art of advertising, and often can imbue ads with that little something extra that gets them noticed – and in a fraction of the time it would take a lay person to accomplish the task. "Effective ad designs depend on so many factors: the product, the placement, the price point, the market, etc.," Valentiner notes. "You want to make sure your ads look good. If they don’t ‘hit,’ you’ve wasted your money. In the long run, it will cost less to have a professional develop your ad than it will to do your own. If you’re a content producer, for example, no matter how artistic and creative you are, your time and energy – which is money, after all – are probably better spent creating new content to sell than in creating an ad."
Ads also don’t work if they’re deceptive, confusing, or simply too "wild." According to Fisher, "The design of an ad should make it inviting to read, not dress it up to show off its use of some fancy-schmancy typeface or irrelevantly brilliant graphic."
Other quick tips for the creative process:
* Identify your product. That may seem like a no-brainer, but most people would be surprised how often advertisers forget to specify exactly what it is they’re selling.
* Be honest, simple, and direct. If you advertise something, make sure you have it.
* If you pattern your ad after one that’s working for someone else, be sure to give it a unique twist that will make it memorably different. It’s less expensive to use a sponsor’s pre-made banner, for example, but that’s hardly going to stand out from the crowd. As Galione says, "Uniqueness counts!"
* Use words that persuade, inform, and sell. For example, instead of "Chat with live girls," try "Horny women want to talk to YOU!"
* "MEDIC" is not just a word yelled on the battlefield to alert doctors to a fallen comrade. It’s also an acronym for the components of successful advertising: motivation, enthusiasm, desire, image, creativity.
Monitor Results and Adjust Accordingly
Defining the market and creating the visuals are important parts of an advertising plan, to be sure, but no plan is complete without a thorough analysis of its effectiveness. It’s at this point that far too many advertisers fall completely off the ship, according to Valentiner. "Tracking is imperative," he says. "All advertising has to be on an ROI [return on investment] basis. Anybody can buy an ad, but once you buy it, what does it do for you? That’s the really important question."
Galione agrees. "Monitoring the results is absolutely critical," he says. "You’ve got to do it constantly. That’s the only way you’ll know if the ad is working. If it’s not working, you can change it quickly. If it is working, keep it going just like it is until it stops working – which you’ll only know if you’re monitoring it."
Of course, some ads are easier to monitor than others. Web-based advertising, in particular, generates a response that’s easy to track. Click-through rates (CTR), a very basic measure of advertising effectiveness, are easily calculable through Website server logs, which as Galione points out, "are gold mines. They don’t lie, and they’re free." Of more importance to most advertisers is cost per sale. As e-commerce consultant Dr. Ralph F. Wilson points out on his Website at www.wilsonweb.com, "In the final analysis, you don't care how high the CTR is if it doesn't result in a proportionate number of sales….You can only make this determination when you use sophisticated tracking methods using cookies to separate the lookers from the buyers, and determine which sites and which banner ads had the best result." This kind of precision is enabled by the mechanisms employed by affiliate programs.
Print, broadcast, and direct-mail advertising is far more difficult to track, but it can be done. "Use special promotional codes in print ads," Valentiner advises. "Buyers may be embarrassed to admit they read Playboy or Penthouse, but they’ll refer to ‘offer number AC17.’ Change the codes for every issue of every publication." Galione adds, "If you find your Website has a bunch of type-in traffic, chances are good it came from your print advertising."
Valentiner, who admits to being something of a statistics hound, says the more specific information you can gather about your advertising program, the better equipped you’ll be to make it effective. "The better your tracking is, the better your ability to spend your advertising dollars wisely," he insists. "No detail is too small." However, he notes, advertisers need to give their ads sufficient time to prove themselves before they’re dropped, relocated, or modified. Consumers can be skeptical, and often they don’t feel comfortable taking advantage of an advertiser’s offer until they’ve seen it several times. "Consistency shows legitimacy," he avers.
Galione agrees. "Don’t expect immediate results," he warns. "Consistency counts! Expect breakeven to take about two-and-one-half to three months in almost any medium. Once you’ve started seeing some effect from your ads, treat them like anything else: Watch the bottom line, and change them when revenues drop consistently."
Otherwise, Galione advises, don’t fool with success. "It’s a myth to say successful ads must be freshened," he says. "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it." He also calls other typical advertising behaviors myth-based. "If you’re doing well, don’t stop advertising. Advertise more. Double your advertising in ‘slow’ periods, when everybody else is slacking off. That gives you the opportunity to become so visible that consumers will think you’re the only out there. It works!"
The bottom line? "The people who make money in this industry are the ones who advertise," Galione says. "Content and advertising always deserve a good investment."
