SACRAMENTO, CA — Eric Matis is the kind of VP of marketing who will go the extra mile for a cause he believes in. During the spring 2006 Phoenix Forum, the comely geography major sat in the Free Speech Coalition’s poolside kissing booth, lending his lips to help raise more than $700 by smooching generous members of the adult industry – including fellow kissing booth kisser, Tim Valenti of Naked Sword. Although there were moments when the assembled kissing booth volunteers wondered where the crowds were, as Matis sees it, “Sometimes it’s difficult to compete with food. I’m just glad we were so successful, especially with the number of people who were there.”
That kind of positive, can-do attitude is precisely what the webmasters and clients who crave face-time with the traveling marketing expert can expect. Well, that and a seemingly bottomless font of motivation.
“I felt like I was goin’ 100 miles and runnin’ with my hair on fire,” Matis admits about his most recent Phoenix Forum experience. “It was crazy. I was all over the place. It seemed like it was just one thing after another from the second you woke up until the second you went to bed at 7:00 the next morning.”
All of the late nights running and talking left Matis with very little voice even after he returned home to Sacramento, but that didn’t keep him from doing business. “I still had some people who wanted to do phone calls and stuff, so I said, ‘we can do a phone call but you’re going to be the only one talking, cuz I have no voice.”
While enjoying the great weather, food, and industry networking opportunities available during the Phoenix Forum, Matis wore a number of hats on his burning head while spreading the word about ICS Entertainment’s lineup of business entities, including webmaster message board GoFuckYourself.com, hard core Adult.com, and the company’s main program, RealityCash.com.
Adult.com was purchased by Playboy shortly after Matis came on board the ICS Entertainment bandwagon, with all of the properties ultimately coming under the bunny’s control. “It ended up being a great move for us,” he admits. “It was a great way for us to brand and use it as a kind of umbrella for everything that we were going to do and everything that we did.”
With the well-known Playboy name and power available to leverage and Adult.com’s hardcore content available to balance the famous company’s softer approach to erotica, Matis is finding himself in the middle of the best of both words. “They don’t want to push the Playboy brand into hardcore, but at the same time, they want it aware in our side of the industry that that’s where things are coming from.”
Playboy’s financials have been rocked by its online investments, but Matis thinks it’s an example of new business sense in an industry that has changed over the years. “When I first started, it was all about the immediate return,” he explains, “because people were getting involved in the industry either to supplement an income or to sustain one. But now a lot of the businesses and the people are getting involved with it as an investment over the long run.”
Examples of this new way of thinking include the explosion of exclusive content and the return to reliable income generators including solo girl and amateur sites, as well as the ability of programs with non-exclusive content to thrive. “With as much content as there is on the market today,” Matis observes, “you can buy content and chances are good that the surfer will never know the difference, because there’s just too much stuff out there being made.”
However much content there may be on the market, there’s only one Eric Matis, although he may still wear the hats of a main administrator, an advertising sales and marketing rep, the chief organizer of Webmaster Access shows and events ranging from Los Angeles to Toronto to Amsterdam to Cancun, and the ICS Entertainment representative always on the move and in attendance at as many trade shows as he can manage.
Growth in the business has inspired the hire of new traffic managers and the anticipated purchase of multiple future airline tickets, which is a good thing for the man who believes that the adult internet is becoming less a still image industry and more a video industry. Indicators are good that Matis, who describes work as something that “will always be there for you, will wait for you, will wrap you up in a nice little blanket whenever you need it,” will continue to be wrapped in a profitable blanket of adult webmasters, affiliates, kissing booths, and all things pornographic for many years to come.
