When it comes to successful adult sites, there’s one thing they all have in common: mass visibility. As any webmaster knows, visibility through affiliates is the key to converting traffic into paying customers. Recently, however, some webmasters have decided to branch out and explore uncharted territories to secure additional presence in other venues such as print and snail-mail flyers, hooking up with marketing companies in order to achieve their goals. Pacific Marketing, a successful print-based company located in Woodland Hills, Calif., is one such outfit.
An offshoot of parent company NTS (Network Telephone Services) – which was founded in late 1980s as a service bureau for phone sex clients—Pacific Marketing was created in 1996 as an advertising agency for NTS clients to use for all their marketing needs. “The impetus was first to give added value to our clients,” says Vice President David Wood of Pacific’s birth. “Instead of our clients going elsewhere to purchase media, we thought we could do it better and cheaper in-house.” Indeed, with the company’s connections to just about every major adult publication on the market (including Hustler, Penthouse, Barely Legal, and all the gay Specialty Publications titles, among others), choosing Pacific Marketing is a virtual no-brainer. “We are a clearing house for all the main publishers, so instead of our clients going to 24 different adult publications to place their add, they can do one-stop shopping with us,” Wood says, adding, “We buy a lot of media for our clients.”
Though the bulk of the company’s business is made up of its phone sex clients, Pacific Marketing does service the needs of an increasing roster of webmasters who are looking to make their presence known. “We’re starting to see a lot of clients from the Web,” Wood divulges. “It’s been somewhat of a hard sell, because nobody really has the model in place on how to drive traffic yet, but it’s slowly becoming more commonplace to have webmasters advertise with us so that they don’t have to pay other people to send them traffic. This way, clients go directly to their sites.” While that may sound shocking (not to mention discouraging) to a number of webmasters who rely on the income generated through affiliate programs, Wood says it’s really just a matter of thinking outside the box – and the changing face of the Internet market. “I think we will start seeing more webmasters advertising in print as Web search engines get more saturated and ultimately more expensive,” he predicts. “Print advertising has a permanence that a Web site can’t offer. Men’s magazines in particular have a particular permanence. They’re like National Geographic; no one ever throws them away.”
Meanwhile, he adds, utilizing the services of a company like Pacific can increase the speed in which webmasters do business. “We offer webmasters a way to reach consumers directly,” he continues. “No revsharing, no paying for un-usable click-throughs, no long-term commissions to pay. When a consumer browsing through a magazine sees an attractive ad for an interesting Web site, he simply goes to his computer and [looks it up].”
To get the job done, Pacific Marketing enlists a team of advertising specialists (consisting of a creative director, art director, and six graphic artists) who work closely with clients to achieve the most effective results. Says Creative Director Ernest Floyd, “We have everything from highly-involved to ‘Do everything for me’ clients. Sometimes they will have it in their minds exactly what they want, and sometimes they have no idea. Either way, they usually leave happy.”
When it comes to designing ads for placement, both Wood and Floyd stress that good advertising always begins with the product, in this case the domain name (otherwise known as the URL) or the “vanity” (the phone number for sex operators). “In this business, the telephone number or the Web domain is the product. There are stronger telephone numbers and domain names than others. The key is to get clients to call the number or visit that site when they’re not looking at the magazine – to create something people will remember when they decide they’re horny.” Other key elements involved in designing ads, Wood says, are the price and the fetish, both of which can help drive traffic to webmaster sites or get people to pick up the phone and dial up “little Cindy’s” home-based sex chat line.
Of course, a great-looking ad is only as good as its placement. Using savvy business know-how, Pacific’s staff of experienced marketers apply methods of testing and analysis to determine which publications will work best for each client, and also help clients develop media plans to ensure the highest level of visibility possible – at the lowest prices. “In the world of adult publishing, there are no audited statistics, so it’s difficult to know which magazines offer the most value for you advertising dollar,” Wood says. “We try to find the best cost per thousand for our clients.
“For example, there are better values in the magazine market,” he continues. “There are some expensive magazines and there are some cheap magazines, but they don’t always deliver the way you think they might. The expensive magazines have a higher price but might not deliver as many people, where the cheaper magazine might have a low price but reach a bigger readership. We try to get our clients into those magazines and go where the best value is.”
Pacific also likes to stress to their clients that the frequency of an ad’s placement is fundamental in increasing business. “Print advertising is all about consistency and recognizability,” Wood offers. “The more people see your ad, the more people are likely to respond.” Or, as Floyd adds, “You might not call today, but the day you do, it’ll have been burned in your mind for months.”
Though some have speculated that increased conservatism in the current political climate would lead to a crackdown in porn, Wood and Floyd say they don’t worry about closing their doors anytime soon. “The phone sex client is a little bit different,” Wood says, while Floyd offers, “I think the hammer is going to come down more on the Web than in print, just because the Web is so high-profile.” Add to that the phone sex business’ continued durability, and it’s clear that both NTS and Pacific Marketing will most likely be around for a long time to come. “We’re the largest business that nobody’s ever used,” Wood jokes. “If you asked a hundred men if they’ve ever used a phone sex line, they’ll tell you they’ve never done it. But we have a switchboard that rings 100,000 times a day.”
“It’s the immediacy,” Floyd suggests. “If you look at the percentages, there are more people connected to telephones than have DSL and go on the Web. That’s why the next big market for adult is going to be the cell phone market. It’s instantaneous.”
Meanwhile, Wood continues, there are no signs that the print world is in danger of extinction. “Print has durability,” he says. “Those old Hustler magazines get put under the bed, and they stay there for years. That’s why phone sex numbers that haven’t been advertised in 10 years still continue to ring.” Still, advertising continues to be the easiest way to get business. For that, Wood says, there’s just no substitute for experience and reputation. “We’re the largest agency in North America, and we can buy their print cheaper and more effectively than anyone else out there just by virtue of our size and buying power,” he proclaims. “We know the print market better than anyone else – we’ve been doing it longer than anyone else.”
