Update: Zomato has pulled down its advertisements on porn websites, chief executive officer Deepinder Goyal said in a blog post. (hat tip: MediaNama reader Skiscontent)
Goyal said that it was highlighted to him that the marketing campaign might have been in poor taste and that by advertising on porn sites, the company might be, albeit indirectly, financially supporting abuse.
“For a start, we’re killing the porn site campaign, because we sense we crossed the fine line between marketing irreverence and cultural insensitivity. If we did, and ended up offending or disrespecting anyone in any way at all, we are sorry. That obviously wasn’t the intention, and we’ll work on doing things better in the future,” he added.
Earlier: Zomato is looking to put a new spin on food porn. In a new marketing initiative, the online food delivery service started advertising on pornographic websites to get better traction online. Zomato has started putting ads for late night food delivery between 11 pm and 4 am on porn websites. These ads appear on video landing pages on the right hand side of the video window.
Zomato set up accounts on Traffic Junky and Traffic Factory, two of the largest ad networks serving the top porn sites and another creative team designed ads for these sites. They mostly look like this and play on a lot of puns. That shouldn’t have been too hard.
Zomato said that the main goal of this initiative was to get people to click on the ads which would get people to install the app and order food. The company also had some interesting statistics from their week-long experiment. Some of them are:
– Cost per click (CPC) on pornographic sites are significantly lower. On Xvideos Network, the CPC was Rs 1.98 compared to Rs 23.5 on Google Adwords and Rs 17.5 on Facebook.
– People in Delhi NCR clicked on these ad banners the most on desktops (y’know to get a better hand on things), at an average click-through rate (CTR) of 0.12% while Bangalore came (no that’s too obvious a pun) a close second with an average CTR of 0.11%. The campaign average CTR so far is at 0.22%.
– The highest number of clicks in Delhi came from around the Hauz Khas area. In Bangalore, users in Koramangala clicked the most on these ads. In Mumbai, users in Powai were the naughtiest and clicked on these ads.
Eat 24’s seedy campaign
It’s also worth noting that US-based food delivery service Eat 24 also ran a similar online ad campaign. Eat 24 said that cost per thousand impressions on porn sites were $1.50 compared to nearly $18 on Google websites, $13 on Facebook and $12 on Twitter.
The service also mentions that it got 5 times as many people clicked on the banner ads which were next to the video window rather than on the homepage.
Eat 24’s porn banner ads saw three times the impressions of ads they ran on Google, Twitter and Facebook combined. Read more here.
