No one knows marketing better than the pornographers. They have somewhere between $2.5 and $10 billion reasons to get their product to us.2 A friend of mine once went to a workshop on a prominent college campus, where the speaker extolled the genius of the pornography dealers. He talked about how cutting edge their marketing strategies were and encouraged everyone present to study their lead. Let there be no mistake – there will be more pornography, not less, in the coming years. It’s hitting the mainstream.
Their marketing strategy is ever-evolving and increasingly effective. Here are just a few of the tricks they use to reel us in:
- Using innocent keywords in their websites to trick you into clicking on them while you are working on something else
- Buying expired domain names (even Christian ones) and using the sites to publish porn
- Purchasing domain names similar to popular sites (e.g., NASA.com instead of NASA.gov) and posting porn on them
- Piggy-backing on popular children’s site searches – sites like Disney, My Little Pony, Action Man or Nintendo
- Giving away free material hoping that you will get hooked
- Daisy-chaining sites so that clicking out of one only opens another, and another, and another…in an endless line of sites from which it is very difficult to extricate yourself (the technical terms for this are “circle-jerking” or “mousetrapping”)
- Hijacking you to a different site than you intended to visit (i.e., they own both sites, but the front site is just a façade to get you interested)
- Advertising in the margins on Google and other search engines when you do a keyword search
- Automatically making a site your home page
- Adding spyware, cookies and Trojan horses to your hard drive
- Sending pornographic spam to random email addresses (If you’ve visited a questionable site, this may not be completely random.)
- Offering “starter” videos (commonly referred to as “soft porn”) at your local video store
- Using bait and switch tactics (Recently, I was in a foreign country in a hotel that had a card advertising a movie popular in the United States. But when I turned to the channel where the movie was supposed to be, it was twenty-four hour porn. I was never able to find the real movie.)
- Sending friend requests using spam robots to MySpace patrons shortly after they log in
The pornographers have the dollars and the bright minds to invest in new technology. They know how to get the pornography to you. They are master marketers, who continually look for ways to make pornography low-hanging fruit.
In fact, pornographers don’t always care if you actually view their sites. If they can show their advertisers that their sites have more hits, they can drive up ad revenue. Just getting your computer to hit the sites helps them make more money…hence the popularity of some of the strategies listed above.
They know how powerful words are, so they changed their industry terminology to make it less offensive. “Soft porn” sure seems more palatable than regular pornography. “Mature” movies are for consenting adults. “Adult” movies even more so. Adults can do what they want, right? “Gentlemen’s clubs” seem much more high scale than striptease bars.
Pornographers know that by changing their vocabulary, they overcome some of our inhibitions. They confuse the lines between normal and abnormal, between morality and immorality. Because we don’t know where we should draw the line, we don’t know what to make of it when they call porn and sexual immorality something different than we’ve always thought it was. While we are trying to figure it all out, they push the line further back.
A few years ago, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake had to apologize for allowing Timberlake to remove a patch covering Jackson’s breast at the end of their Super Bowl halftime show. I never heard them or anyone apologize for the indecency of the rest of the event. The dance moves were bumping and grinding and very sexual in nature, but we all forgot about that when we saw the closer. That’s how Satan works. He shocks us so that we forget everything that came before. The shocking action is simply a diversion so that he can slip the rest of it under the radar.
Wallbuilder Ministries 