What Marketers Can Learn from Two Brands’ Failed Pornhub Ad Campaigns

A couple months ago, personal grooming product company Dollar Shave Club, owned by consumer goods giant Unilever, launched a series of ad campaigns to promote its product on Pornhub. The campaign uses humor (as shown below) to engage the audience and direct traffic to its own website.

Coincidentally, a frozen food brand Devour, owned by the large US food company Craft Heinz also launched a one-day ad campaign on the popular pornography site at around the same time. The Devour ads feature an edited Pornhub logo to depict a fork running through it, and the copy reads “see hot food porn now”. A devour company spokesperson claimed in an interview with Wall Street Journal that this ad is a continuation of the brand’s Superbowl ad featuring a humorous depiction of a man’s addiction to “frozen food porn”.

At first glance, these campaigns are smart, funny and seems to make sense. They should totally be hugely successful and popular, right? Unfortunately, both brands ended up facing major backlash as a result of these ad campaigns. Many consumers voiced their concerns for these brands running ads on an adult content platform, calling the ads inappropriate. In addition, some politicians also publicly criticized the parent companies Unilever and Kraft Heinz allowing its subsidiaries to run ads on Pornhub since the site has hosted potentially illegal content due to the lack of scrutiny for user-uploaded videos.

Following the criticism, Unilever and Kraft representative both responded to media inquities with promises to cut out ads on adult sites. According to AdAge, Kraft Heinz has pledged not to advertise or promote any of its brands on this site or other similar sites. A Unilever spokesperson told CNBC that the company does not support advertising on porn websites and is “extremely concerned” about the reported ads from Dollar Shave Club.

However, what I found to be the most interesting thing about these two cases, are my peers’ reactions to them. When I told my friends in Annenberg about the original campaigns, almost every single person thought that they were great ideas and predicted they would work well. Clearly, these campaigns were far from great marketing hits in real life. This is a perfect example of how marketers could be biased when it comes to understanding the audience and the importance of alignment. My fellow Annenberg friends are perhaps younger, more liberal and media savvy in comparison to an average consumer of Devour or Dollar Shave Club. Therefore, our perspectives are skewed by our own background and experiences. It is critical to really understand the audience and evaluate whether the execution aligns with the brand identity and key messages of the campaign, no matter how smart and funny it sounds.