If you want people to pay attention to your product, it’s a good idea to reach them when they’re doing something they enjoy. And the bigger the stage, the better.
That’s why companies and campaigns pay billions of dollars to advertise during major sporting and music events, or for their content to be embedded on social networks.
Environmental organisation Ocean Polymers’ latest awareness-boosting collaboration should therefore make a lot of sense: it’s with a global brand that reaches as many people as the Superbowl every single day, and has more than ten times the reach of the World Cup in a single year**. The target audience is broad, with an average age of 36 years old, and particularly… focused on the task at hand.
What’s different, however, is that the partner is a porn site.
Adult awareness
Pornhub has come together with Ocean Polymers to create ‘the Dirtiest Porn Ever’, which sees a couple have sex on a beach littered with plastic pollution. During the film, people in Pornhub-branded boiler suits clean up the mess — which Dezeen says is to showcase “how plastic and waste can ruin an otherwise beautiful scene.”
Every time the video is viewed, Pornhub promises to donate money to Ocean Polymers’ tanker project, which collects plastic from the ocean and turns it into fuel.
“We are all part of the problem and must work together to find solutions,” Heather Wigglesworth, Executive Director of Ocean Polymers, says in a press release.
“This is a brand with significant global reach spanning all demographics, so it is a very effective platform to raise awareness and support for the crisis we face in our oceans today. It would be great to see more companies of this size and stature taking the same responsibility with the audience they engage.”
Pornhub is indeed huge. According to the website’s most recent year in review, there were more than 33 billion visits to the site in 2018, with daily average visits to the site of around 100 million.
“To put that in perspective, that’s as if the combined populations of Canada, Poland and Australia all visited Pornhub every day,” the website adds.
Porn that cares
Alongside the film, Pornhub has created a new microsite to give viewers advice on recycling, cleaning up and buying habits to make sure single-use plastics do not end up in the ocean.
It forms part of a wider initiative called ‘Pornhub Cares’, which has seen Pornhub back campaigns to save bees, provide scholarships, and introduce accessibility measures for Deaf and visually-impaired users.
“We’re dirty here at Pornhub, but that doesn’t mean our beaches need to be,” Vice President of Pornhub Corey Price adds in the press release.
“Ocean pollution has grown to become one of the most significant global issues of our lifetime, and it’s only getting worse,” continued Price.
“That’s why it’s imperative that we use our platform to raise awareness and inspire change – not just for the time being but for generations to come.”
** A combined 3.57 billion viewers watched the 2018 World Cup, according to FIFA. Pornhub says it had 33 billion visitors in 2018.
Correction 03/09/2019: Ocean Polymers was previously referred to as a charity. This has been corrected.