BARCELONA – When it comes to having your brand name uttered on national television by famous and influential celebrity, it’s hard to top the sort of plug Greg Lansky’s Blacked got from Kanye West during Ye’s recent appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“Blacked is my favorite,” West told Kimmel, when copping to the fact he watches online porn.
While West hasn’t responded to Lansky’s subsequent offer to direct a movie for Blacked “with full artistic control on your end,” from Lansky’s perspective, just having West mention his brand in itself was cause for celebration.
“You can’t buy that kind of free advertising,” Lansky said in an interview with AdAge. “For me, it’s proof that some of the most influential people in the world look at our brands.”
In the AdAge profile, Lansky credited his use of Instagram – and a marketing approach which diverges significantly from the usual titillation and tease of adult content promotion – as the source of his brands’ visibility.
“We market everything on Instagram,” Lansky said. “We almost solely use Instagram. We use Twitter as well, but Twitter is a lot less image focused. For us, we’re in the image business. And Instagram is like the perfect platform.”
While many adult industry figures have found it a challenge to navigate the acceptable use policies of various social media platforms and effectively promote themselves without having their accounts suspended (or banned outright), Lanksy sees an opportunity stemming from the same constraints.
“I use the restrictions of Instagram as an asset,” Lansky said. “Who cares if we can’t show adult content on social media? There’s already too much porn online. You can just Google porn and spend two lifetimes trying to watch just a fraction of it. What’s the point?”
Rather than try to compete in the crowded room of the adult market alone, Lansky saw opportunity to leverage Instagram’s popularity and image-driven nature to the benefit of Blacked and his other brands, VIXEN, Tushy and Blacked Raw.
“What I figured out is, we can get more attention by playing to our strengths,” Lansky added. “We’re in the image business. We’re better at it than most ad agencies at it. We don’t need adult content to sell adult content.”
One potential downside to the SFW approach of eschewing using graphic content to promote his decidedly graphic websites, presumably, is that it makes consumers jump through an extra set of hoops to find the sexually-explicit sites. Again, though, Lansky sees a big plus couched within this apparent disadvantage.
“People aren’t dumb,” Lansky said. “If they want to find you, they will. And if it’s harder to find you, if they have to make an effort to track you down, they’ll want you even more.”
Another way of putting this, perhaps, is that platforms like Instagram serve as part of filtration process, eliminating some of the free content seekers from your traffic base, leaving a higher percentage of motivated purchasers, people who are willing and able to buy, to seek out your content at its (subscription-required) source.
In explaining his affinity for using Instagram, as well as his use of non-explicit content to promote his porn brands, Lansky pointed to the classic “1984” TV ad Apple once used in promoting its Macintosh computers.
“It didn’t show the product,” Lansky noted. “It didn’t show a dude next to a computer, explaining what everything does. It was just some super-powerful imagery that kind of made sense but not really. What did any of that have to do with computers? I have no idea, but I remember that commercial, and it made a lot of people buy computers.”
There’s a lot more to AdAge’s profile on Lansky, which is well worth reading in full. Of course, his approach to the market isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition – and as AdAge noted, Lansky’s sites certainly don’t rival the likes of Pornhub when it comes to their traffic base.
It’s clear the strategy is working for Lansky and his family of brands, however, which were growing and thriving long before West name-dropped them on TV. And besides, Lansky is just fine with his brands residing outside the “middle of the curve” as he calls it.
“I’m making porn for the guys that wait two days in front of an Apple store to get a new iPhone,” Lansky said. “They’re out there. If you make something sleek and beautiful and remarkable, and not everybody can have it or even knows it exists, they will come.”
