Zomato Advertises on Porn Sites, Here’s Why It Makes Perfect Sense

A dirty secret that Zomato has capitalised on – India loves watching porn.

It’s a dirty secret that companies well know of: India loves watching porn. After Google, Facebook and Yahoo, websites such as Xvideos come in the list of India’s top visited websites.

But in front of high pedigree websites, how dare we bring up Xvideos, right? Because porn websites are an advertising goldmine; an Old Monk for ad rates; and a Sarojini Nagar for a shopper.

Then how could Zomato stay far behind? Playing on the oldest sexual cliche of “people getting hungry after having sex or choking the chicken”, the company ran ads for food delivery that the brand has launched recently, on desktop and mobile porn sites, between 11 pm and 4 am.

These ads appeared on video landing pages, just right of the video window.

The brand set up their accounts on Traffic Junky and Traffic Factory (the ad networks serving the top porn sites), and made creatives replete with sexual innuendos.

Sample these:

This isn’t frivolous stuff.

Ask anyone who’s been involved in the digital industry – highly optimised Adwords, and fashionable Facebook and Twitter ad campaigns can turn out to be quite expensive.

The alternative that the street smart marketers came up with – advertising on porn websites. It’s simple hypothesis: most people watch porn, and everyone eats food. Perfect for a brand that’s advertising its late night food delivery.

Plus, it’s accessing its target audience (the digital consumer in this case), for a fraction of the cost.

The Average CPC (cost per click) for platforms such as Adwords in India is Rs 23.5, as Zomato points out. For Facebook it is Rs 17.5, while for Xvideos network it is Rs 1.98.

The ad campaign also presented the brand with some interesting nuggets of information: people in Delhi NCR clicked the most on these banners, at an average click-through rate (CTR) of 0.12%, while Bangalore came a close second with an average CTR of 0.11%.

In Delhi, the highest number of clicks came from around the Hauz Khas area, while in Bangalore they came from Koramangala. Whereas in Mumbai, Powai won the race.

But the idea of marrying porn with hunger isn’t entirely novel.

Eat 24, which is one of US’s biggest mobile ordering apps, and covers over 1,500+ cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Miami, Boston, Washington D.C., Houston, Chicago, including over 25,000 restaurants, too used porn websites to aggressively market its food delivery service back in 2013. They even got prominent porn stars to endorse their brand as part of their digital campaign.

Guess food and sex really do go hand in hand, in India and elsewhere.

Update: After a public backlash, co-founder and CEO of Zomato, Deepinder Goyal has announced the campaign’s withdrawal in a blog post titled, This Post is Definitely Safe For Work.

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. 

Deepinder Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Zomato.