Facing flak from people for advertising on porn sites to boost sales, Zomato has said it is withdrawing the marketing campaign.
In his blog post, Deepinder Goyal, Zomato co-founder and CEO, said that the campaign was successful in terms of generating millions of clicks and grabbing eyeballs resulting in a spike in online orders, all at low prices. But the company has decided to pull out ads from porn sites since some people "got offended" and felt it was in "poor taste".
He added that some people had warned the company that since all porn is not legal, the company ran the risk of abuse by advertising on porn sites, forcing the company to spike its successful ad campaign.
"We 're killing the porn site campaign, because we sense we crossed the fine line between marketing irreverence and cultural insensitivity," said Goyal.
Zomato, the online restaurant discovery platform, was reported as probably the first Indian venture to take the bold decision of advertising on porn sites.
The company said that it "ran these ads on desktop and mobile sites, between 11 pm and 4 am – when late-night delivery restaurants are at their busiest."
Citing statistics on porn watching behaviour of Indians, another Zomato blog post said: "India ranks #5 in terms of most daily visitors to Pornhub (the world's biggest porn site network)" and "outside of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and e-commerce sites, Xvideos is one of India's top visited sites."
The Zomato blog post added that Facebook, and Twitter ad campaigns were expensive, prompting it to look at porn sites that are considered cheaper whereon to advertise.
Here is the full blog post of Deepinder Goyal:
A couple of days ago, we wrote about a marketing campaign we were running on porn sites. We were pretty pleased with it, because it checked all the boxes of a successful growth hack – the ads got us lots of eyeballs, millions of clicks, a bump up in online orders, and all at aridiculously low cost.
The response to the campaign was largely positive. People said we were ballsy for trying this at all, and that we broke new ground for doing this in a country where porn has long been a touchy topic. But there were a few things said that we simply couldn't ignore. Some folks got offended by the campaign, felt the campaign was in poor taste, and it wasn't something they expected from a brand of our standard. Some also said that all porn is not legal, and by advertising on porn websites, we are financially supporting abuse – certainly something we don't want to do. Ever.
Over the past almost eight years now, we've worked really hard to build what we've built. And while we'll be the first ones to admit that we aren't even close to perfect, we can confidently say we've always stood for doing what's good and what's right. We've focused on instilling the right values in our people – values we live by every day – and built our own unique culture along the way. We feel honoured when we're told that we've set an example for young companies in India to go take over the world, by doing what we do and proving the naysayers wrong. In short, we have a lot to live up to.
Like we said earlier, this campaign was almost textbook 'startup' marketing. But we've probably reached a stage where it's fair to expect that even if we're doing what we need to do, we do it in ways that are more 'grown up'. We understand that we owe it to ourselves, and to those who've helped get us to where we are, to set the right examples and convey the right messages. That isn't to say that we'll crawl into a shell and stop doing what's needed. There will be growth hacks and marketing campaigns, and they may or may not be everybody's cup of tea. But we will also be more mindful of the boundaries we're playing inside.
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.
To paraphrase Travis over at Uber – as you get to a place where people perceive you as the big guy or the man, you have to approach things differently. We're not there yet. We want to be there and we're going to get better.
And we will.
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