How a Food Delivery Service Got into Porn

Earlier today I asked my readers on Twitter what they would do if they had only a limited amount of time before their next meeting: grab a fast lunch or have a quickie? (I know you’re curious: 40 percent voted for sex, 15 percent voted for food, 35 percent said it depends, and 10 percent said they would go at it like the Minion — not safe for work! — and try to do both.) And just then, Eat24 piped in. Their recent foray into porn has more than loosened up what was already a pretty chill attitude toward costumer engagement.

The story of how Eat24 snubbed the notion of propriety embraced by other companies who turn away from magazines and sites that have anything to do with sex is going to go down in history as an advertising coup. The digital connector of hungry people and local delivery options isn’t funded by venture capitalists, so their budget for advertising is small. As a result, they spend a great deal of time looking over the numbers, trying to make sure they get the best return on their investments.

“We don’t really like throwing piles of cash at huge traditional media campaigns,” they write on their blog. “We prefer to be smart with our money, which is why we have to come up with creative and unique marketing strategies to fit our budget and brand. It’s an eternal quest to find the perfect ad platform with really high traffic, and dirt cheap inventory. Basically, a unicorn.”

The number of porn stars who swear by the site and its app got them thinking about porn, so they dug in and found that a completely unsurprising 30 percent of all web traffic hits porn sites. Even less surprising, because so few brands are willing to put their products next to porn, Eat24 discovered that advertising on these sites was one tenth the cost of advertising on Google or social sites like Facebook and Twitter. The question was how to advertise to porn consumers — since so few companies online had ever tried to do this, there was no clear indication of where to start. Sure, MeUndies has been selling socks on a TechCrunch-endorsed porn site since earlier this summer, but Eat24 was basically writing the how-to in their vertical.

“Our challenge with designing banner ads for porn sites was our competition, porn itself,” they recount. “We needed to create something eye catching enough to make someone stop what they’re doing (watching porn) and say, ‘You know what? Yes. I AM going to be hungry in 3-5 minutes. I better order delivery.’ Not an easy task. […] We wanted to make a connection between the pleasure you feel when eating a bacon double cheeseburger, and the pleasure of having sex. Everyone knows nothing makes people want to order food more than pictures of food, but we had to be careful with our dish selection. The sight of a seductive salmon skin roll next to a naughty nurse video might enhance the whole experience, while a hearty plate of chicken tikka masala might turn you off entirely, except in certain fetish categories. We need food that puts you in the mood.”

Their solution was a combination of food images and people images. Three of their five original ads display food — a BLT (an acronym to go with BDSM), tuna nigiri-zushi (a play on cunnilingus), and a nine-inch sub (to compete with those other nine-inchers) — but their most popular is the image of a woman in her underwear which features the text “fuck pants.”

“We did a little AB testing with the locations we assumed would get the most traffic,” they write. “The first place we stuck it was right on the homepage. Our test quickly revealed that five times as many people clicked our banner when it was placed next to the video itself. FIVE times! We assume this is due to the fact that people landing on the homepage of a porn site only have one thing on their minds, and it’s not double stuffed burritos. They want to get down and dirty ASAP. Once users find a video that really butters their biscuit, they stay for a while. Even if their focus is on what’s happening in the larger screen, subliminally, they’re thinking about sandwiches. Plus, after they’re done with the video, they’ve worked up an appetite. It’s the perfect time to remind them to wash their hands and order a large pizza with extra bacon for delivery.”

Eat24 received three times the impressions they got from Google Twitter and Facebook combined, rendering tens of thousands of clicks, which converted to a huge spike in orders and app downloads, all for 90 percent less money than what it costs to advertise on the aforementioned sites.

“The general consensus is that it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than retain existing ones, but of course, that’s just another convention flipped right on its ass by porn,” they write. “Of the total traffic generated by our ads, over 90% were first-time visitors to Eat24.com. We were reaching an almost entirely new market. Our porn banners were generating new customers cheaply. And guess what? They were coming back too (they always come back). New customer retention on porn banners was four times higher than that of our Facebook ads.”

So far, there seems to have been no backlash against Eat24 from its porn star fanbase for financially supporting sites that are effectively killing the adult industry by making snippets of porn flicks available to viewers for free — most frequently without paying any royalties to studios or performers.