PHILADELPHIA, PA – Tuesday night, Philadelphia-based ABC affiliate WPVI (Channel 6) ran a piece on its “Action News” program which was intended as an expose’, a story announcing the presence of A-1 National Advertising – the parent company of HotMovies.com – in historic Center City, Philadelphia.The 11pm news piece, which WPVI ran under the provocative heading “Porn Exposed,” was replete with ominous soundtrack, bold graphics and a general tone of a “true crime” story, undermining any objectivity the piece may have been intended to project.

Referring to A-1’s location as “secret,” the WPVI report focused on the security of the company’s building and interviewed an unidentified ex-employee – who used to work as a phone sex actress for the company – about the tight security, the money being generated by the phone sex division, and the ex-employee’s generally negative assessment of being a phone sex operator.

According to James Seibert, Director of Business Development for A-1, he allowed the crew of WPVI inside the building to film after seeing the news team around the property for several days previous.

“After Channel 6 lurked outside for a few days, we decided to invite them in, instead of letting them use their imaginations to figure out what’s going on inside the building,” Seibert said. “They even accosted a few unsuspecting employees leaving the building.”

Seibert said that his primary concern was for his employees, noting that nobody wants to clock out at their job only to find protestors outside the front door.

After the filming, the company braced for what they feared might be a flood of negative reaction from the community, possibly pressure from local activists, politicians, or even law enforcement.

So far, though, Seibert says the response has been virtually imperceptible.

“We’ve received some résumés,” Seibert said, “and traffic to HotMovies.com has been up, but other than that, we really haven’t seen anything as a result.”

Perhaps surprisingly, A-1’s story is not an uncommon one among adult companies that have been “exposed” by local media. Despite the presumption that negative publicity (or worse) will follow on the heels of such reports, there are at least two other prominent examples of adult internet companies being the subject of negative reporting in the local media, followed by a pronounced lack of impact.

Last summer, local print and broadcast news outlets in Tucson, Arizona, caught wind of the fact that a major player in the online adult market had an office on the mid-size city’s east side, smack in the middle of stretch known as “Restaurant Row.”

Accordingly, a local television news crew showed up in Cyberheat’s parking lot and began shooting not-so-revealing footage of the rather plain, burnt-orange exterior of the Cyberheat offices. Cyberheat officials opted not to grant an interview with the news crew or to let them film inside the building, as Seibert did with WPVI, instead issuing a brief written statement.

For all the hype and hoopla that the local news media attempted to inject, Tucsonans seemed to take little interest in the story, which was quickly supplanted in the newspapers and on local nightly news broadcasts by more pressing concerns.

“The monsoons came along two days later,” said Lee Bucyk, Director of Marketing for Cyberheat, “and literally blew us off the front page.”

Bucyk is referring to the summer rainy season in Tucson; the “monsoons” which bring violent thunderstorms, characterized by awe-inspiring displays of lightning and torrential rainfall, to the usually bone-dry Tucson valley.

Bucyk said there was no follow-up, no request for interviews, no calls from the public, no letters of complaint – nothing. It was as though the story had never aired in the first place – which suits Cyberheat just fine.

“Our main concern was for the staff,” Bucyk said, echoing the mind-set prevailing at A-1 prior to the airing of WPVI’s piece. Bucyk added that while management at Cyberheat was not concerned about fallout from the community response interfering with the operation of the business, the potential impact on the lives of individual employees was significant and troubling.

As has thus far been the case with A-1 though, the negative impact never materialized. Bucyk noted that Cyberheat now employs two people who used to work for a local television station in the news department. Whether it is coincidence or direct result of the publicity, it certainly isn’t indicative of adverse results from last summer’s expose’.

At last summer’s Internext Expo in Hollywood, FL, in an off-the-record conversation a high-ranking executive of Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network (AEBN), described a similar circumstance. A local news outlet ran a story intended to cast a negative light on the company and to rile up the surrounding community – which seemed a likely result at the time, given that AEBN’s offices are located in North Carolina, squarely within in America’s so-called “Bible Belt”.

While the news did generate a certain amount of local furor, the AEBN executive told YNOT that the eventual upshot was that the company received several job applications from programmers and other tech-related applicants, because within the story it was reported that AEBN, on average, paid a higher salary to its technical employees than did its local peers from other business sectors.

Do the anecdotes above mean you should schedule an office party the next time you hear that the local media is going to show up on the doorstep of your business? Not necessarily. Assuming that your business is conducted on the level, however, it could indicate that you needn’t panic if such attention comes your way, either.