The tagline on this NSFW animated spot for a German adult-movie channel roughly translates to something like: "They see it. Their children don't." That's meant to be a reference to the channel's evidently strident parental controls. In the ad, it's illustrated by those familiar and beloved children's cartoon characters Vagina Chicken, Sodomy Horse and Penis Snowman, the latter of which gives me new respect for Frosty's magic hat. This is a nice ad, creatively speaking, but turning two of the three suggestive images into animals just reinforces some unpleasant stereotypes about German porn. Via YesButNoButYes.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

America has always been pretty melodramatic when it comes to pornography, so this collection of 10 Ridiculous Anti-Pornography Commercials shouldn't surprise anyone. What's interesting is how little many of these concerns have to do with pornography. A lot of them are just warnings not to post explicit personal information online where random people can see it, and the other stuff is either paternalistic Freudian crap about your daughter or your sister having a distinct sex life, or just poorly researched. The bit about the cheetah was particularly far-fetched, to say nothing of that bomb comparison. It's funny that these people put so much energy into denouncing smut, because all of them need to get laid.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Time.com today weighs in on this Web ad for Bud Light, in which a guy tries to buy a porn magazine with his six-pack of beer, only to see events comically unfold in the most outlandish and shameful way imaginable. The writer wonders if the ad, coming from such a huge brand, "seems to mark some kind of cultural tipping point, where pornography has soaked so far into the fabric of mainstream culture that it's no longer seen as a stain." She quotes an anti-pornography activist and a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, neither of whom are laughing. But is it really that transgressive? Joking about the awkwardness of buying a dirty magazine is about as conservative a reference to porn as you're going to get. Plus, the joke still works because porn is still taboo, not because it's suddenly acceptable. Anyway, harder to argue with is Rob Frankel's take: "This ad is about a guy who would like a brew and some ass. That's right in [Bud Light's] strike zone."

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Both the video and print portions of this Predator Watch campaign from Canada use striking visuals to put adults who trawl the Web for teens and kids on notice. The print, which you can see at Adland, is especially unsettling. Still, would hard-core online stalkers be dissuaded for long by seeing kids' portraits plastered on the faces of undercover officers? The TV spot might be more persuasive, as it turns the tables on a perp and broadcasts his crime across the Internet for all to see. Stripping away his anonymity seems a stronger deterrent. Why warn predators at all? One could argue that if a single stalker (or wannabe) sees the work, thinks twice, powers down and seeks help, that's more than enough.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Porn stars and directors urge fans not to steal their movies from torrent sites in this PSA from the Free Speech Coalition. In the best industry tradition, the spot is poorly lit, though they did forego the bass-pumping soundtrack. "What we're trying to communicate in these new videos is that this is not just hurting the big companies like Larry Flynt but the people who work in production, the performers, the sideline businesses like makeup artists," a coalition rep tells Wired. "Piracy is really a problem for our industry in terms of dropping revenues. This is what we're trying to communicate to the consumer." Charlie Laine appears by herself in a more revealing spot after the jump. Via The Awl and AgencySpy.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

"You won't watch for the acting," brags Canadian adult-entertainment network Amour in a bunch of new promos by Cossette. That's probably true of the movies on Amour—but not of these ads, which feature bad acting by brainless bimbos honed to perfection. The hotties' hopeless audition readings of Shakespeare and porn piffle like "It's getting hot in here" and "Room for one more in that hot tub?" are spot-on. But the off-screen director seals the deal with his exuberant exhortations and earnest encouragement. Oddly, these spots are also satisfying with the sound off. Check out two companion print ads after the jump.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

The Australian Sex Party, formed in 2008 as "a political response to the sexual needs of Australia in the 21st century," not surprisingly has a one-track mind when it comes to advertising. Its latest ad (full image after the jump) asks people if they are "legal," meaning legally registered to vote. The party has legitimate if somewhat narrow goals involving sex education, equality, censorship and health, but is still having a difficult time earning respect in politics. As one YouTube commenter writes under a clip of the party's manifesto: "Good luck with the next erection."

[Note: This ad has been exposed as a fake. See the update below.] We've rotated this S.C. Johnson ("A family company") ad from Draftfcb Indonesia by 90 degrees to make it somewhat less NSFW. See the original after the jump."Do you know what your kids are watching?" asks the copy at the bottom. "Parental guidance is needed in every access to TV and Internet. Keep your kids' eyes away from pornography." The great thing about the eye-vagina, of course, is that it's all-purpose—it can also be pro-pornography, as seen in this controversial Bulgarian billboard for Penthouse magazine. Via Copyranter. UPDATE: Draftfcb says the ad is a fake—that while it did originate from someone at the agency, it was not presented to or approved by agency management or the client. Says a rep: "The person who uploaded from his personal email account had neither client nor agency approval; he violated our corporate policy, and is no longer with the agency."

Straight men's desires are far more eclectic than we might imagine, and foot fetishes aren't deviant. Those are just a few of the conclusions drawn by a pair of researchers who studied logs of sex-related online searches from sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo in an attempt to find out what people really want sexually.

Sai Gaddam and former MIT researcher Ogi Ogas have included the findings from their study in the book  A Billion Wicked Thoughts. It’s being touted as the first massive undertaking in sexual research since the Kinsey Reports.

So what does the study tell us? Well, it turns out that straight men are interested in a wider range of erotica than was previously thought—and they’re searching a larger array of sites, including ones dedicated to the elderly and transsexuals. Also, foot fetishes aren’t considered sexually deviant because smaller feet in women are a sign of fertility, and men’s brains are wired to look for them.

Straight men also prefer heavier women to skinny ones, are fascinated by other men’s penises (which may be conscious or unconscious), and prefer amateur porn. Men fantasize about group sex more than women do, and they tend to imagine more females in the scenario.

Gay men and straight men have nearly identical brains, and their favorite body parts (chests, buttocks, and feet, if you were wondering) line up exactly. Many gay men like straight porn, and straight women like to watch and read about romances between two men, but it’s the emotional aspect that draws women, not the sex. Domination and submission is one of the most popular areas of sexual interest, and straight women and gay men are generally more drawn to the submissive role.

The assumption behind the study is that people don’t bother lying to search engines; they just search for what they’re actually interested in. So the results, say the authors, are an uncensored view into the searchers’ minds.

Seven porn stars, two 8-year-old kids, two sheep, and a puppet teamed up for this new PSA from online anti-pornography ministry XXXChurch.com that urges parents to monitor their children's computer habits—i.e., keep them away from all the pornography. The spot shows kids mistyping words and discovering a whole new world of smut that literally comes knocking at the door—becoming more and more, shall we say, fetishistic as the ad progresses. Along with Pete the Porno Puppet (a staple of XXXChurch's ads since 2004), the adult stars making cameos are Brenda Black, Brandy Anniston, Tia Gunn, Rayveness, FattyD, Crissy Moran—and then the money shot, Ron Jeremy, who shows up with a couple of sheep. Must have been weird explaining that one to the child actors. (Hey, he's been into animals for a while.) Onscreen copy at the end reads: "Attention Parents: The Internet makes a lousy babysitter because porno is just a typo away." Via Work That Matters.

Hustler, known for being shameless even by porn standards, has just released a new skin flick called America's Favorite Commercials Gone Porn, which is exactly what it sounds like. Famous ad campaigns like Subway's "$5 Footlong" and ad icons like Progressive Insurance's Flo are lampooned to the point of chafing. (Flo is now called "Ho" and works for Aggressive Insurance.) The advertisers get pornified names, too—the best one being "Whorebitz" (though it turns out they're spoofing Orbit gum, not the Orbitz travel site). Totally unbiased Hustler spokesman Rob Smith says the results are "hilarious stand-alone parodies that even without the porn are funny and entertaining." Whatever, Rob. You won't impress me until you manage an Eagle Man porn parody. More SFW scene trailers after the jump. 

Equal Pay Day, an organization dedicated to closing Belgium's 22 percent gender pay gap, just released this ad in which former porn star Sasha Grey makes sad faces against a backdrop of people nailing each other, and talks about porn being the only industry in which women consistently out-earn men. Equal Pay Day is also urging activist women to get temporary tramp stamps that say, "Close the wage gap, become a porn actress." Not sure how I feel about that, but this campaign has bigger problems—its slut-shaming tactics are regressive as hell, for one thing, plus it misrepresents Grey's actual feelings about her adult film career. What's left is a garbled, sensationalistic mess that uses porn to attract an audience that it simultaneously expects to be disgusted by porn. They should have just stuck with the sexy grannies from last year.

Doing ads for adult-television networks—not an easy job. You can't use the channel's content, for one thing. Yet Amour, an XXX station in Canada, consistently does amusing work. A couple of years ago, they did a funny series of promos (via Cossette) in which porn actresses attempted to read Shakespeare—with text that clarified, "You won't watch for the acting." Now, Amour is back, with a new agency—Dare Vancouver—and another humorous series of ads. This time, the spots (directed by Tim Godsall of OPC/Biscuit Filmworks, with editing by Arcade Edit) start off like porn scenes—but take hilarious left turns at the end, pointing out that real life is quite a bit more mundane than what happens on Amour. "Fantasies happen, but only on Amour adult TV," says each spot. Two more ads after the jump.

What if being bad could do some good? That's the question asked by Come4.org, which describes itself as "the first user-generated, nonprofit pornography site devoted to funding charitable and ethically driven projects." The site is being unveiled with help from the Paris office of TBWA agency Being, which crafted an explicit 90-second short film, "The Lover," introducing Come4's first charitable initiative—helping to fund the Asta Philpot Foundation, which is committed to raising public awareness about the sexual rights of disabled people. (Philpot, an American living in Britain, advocates the right to an active sexual life for people with disabilities, even if it means paying for sex.) Check out the NSFW Web film below, followed by more from Come4.org about its philosophy and goals.

This film is NSFW due to nudity.

From Come4.org:

"Sex" is the top word searched on the Internet. With nearly billions of yearly revenues, the sex industry is one of the greatest markets online. Unfortunately, it is also one of the less ethical and transparent ones. Many people consuming free adult contents think that the only risk they may run into is that of being discovered by others. This idea, however, is plainly wrong, for the current model of consuming online sexual contents has many other negative implications.

The prevailing model is finalized to business, and thus it systematically aims at subjugating our sexual imagination to marketing standards. As a result, instead of reflecting the natural plurality of human sexuality, much of today's online sexual contents foster a one-dimensional perspective which is often fake, violent, macho-centered, and in many cases barely legal. We believe that we, as a self-aware community, can do better than this, and that time has come to rethink critically the relationship of online pornography and society.

With Come4 we aim to ignite a new sexual revolution, one that has at its core people instead of money, respect for diversity instead of uniformity, and solidarity instead of selfishness. Our goal is to devolve at least 1 percent of the total revenue of the online sex industry to support ethical causes aimed at defending and promoting sexual rights. Provided no one is harmed and that everything is legal, is there any reason why these revenues cannot be used for better ends?

CREDITS
Client: Come4.org
Spot: "The Lover"
Agency: Being, Paris
Creative Directors: Alasdhair MacGregor, Thierry Buriez
Art Director: Julien Chiapolini
Copywriter: Riccardo Fregoso
Head of TV: Maxime Boiron
Director: Jeppe Ronde
Executive Producer: Jean Ozannat
Production Company: Henry de Czar, Bacon

Here's your curious advertising case study of the day. Food-delivery app Eat24 has written a lengthy blog post detailing, from start to finish, why and how it went "where no marketing team has gone before. Well, at least not without clearing their browser history afterward."

Eat24, which apparently had something of a following among porn stars already, decided to advertise on adult websites. Its rationale? Almost no mainstream brands want anything to do with the XXX world. And yet the traffic figures are through the roof, and the CPMs are low. What's not to like?

Below are a few excerpts from the case study. Here's the whole thing. Via @hollybrocks.

The idea:
"If you ever take two seconds out of your naughty time to glance at the ads on porn sites, you'll notice that 99% of them are for more porn. It's a world where no one besides male enhancement pills and adult friend finders have dared to go. Not a single mainstream brand advertising there. We could be that 1%."

The creative:
"We wanted to make a connection between the pleasure you feel when eating a bacon double cheeseburger, and the pleasure of having sex. Everyone knows nothing makes people want to order food more than pictures of food, but we had to be careful with our dish selection. The sight of a seductive salmon skin roll next to a naughty nurse video might enhance the whole experience, while a hearty plate of chicken tikka masala might turn you off entirely, except in certain fetish categories. We need food that puts you in the mood."

The results:
"No matter what metric you want to use to define success, our campaign kicked ass all the way across the board. Impressions? Our porn banner ads saw three times the impressions of ads we ran on Google, Twitter and Facebook combined. Click through? Tens of thousands of horngry Americans clicked our ads. Yeah, but did they convert? Psshhh, please. We saw a huge spike in orders and app downloads during the time our ads were live, especially late at night when that insatiable desire for DP (double pepperoni) is at its most intense.
     Did we mention the cost? We did? Well, it bears repeating. We were able to achieve the stellar metrics mentioned above all for the low low price of 90% less than what the big guys charge per 1,000 impressions. That's right, we saved 90%. Nine zero."

Those who have been waiting with bated breath for the results of Pornhub's SFW advertising contest were assuaged today with the unveiling of 15 finalists. And there's quite the smattering of innuendo and suggestion in this batch, featuring a few videos, some clever image and word plays, and some that almost literally spell it out.

To those just tuning in, the site challenged the world to make G-rated, family-friendly ads for the site in March. And many of the entries gave us quite the chuckle. Check out the finalists below and vote on PornHub's SFW tumblr.

Here's hoping this contest has a happy ending.

Via Business Insider.

Snapchat's gone wild. College kids have turned one of the app's most popular features—My Story—into a crowdsourced stream of public debauchery. Last week, the campus newspaper at San Jose State University exposed one such account that depicted the X-rated side of student life, a far cry from the closely monitored and clean stories Snapchat officially runs about colleges.

The account, username SJSUYAK, was posting a steady stream of drug-filled and sexual images of students at San Jose State. Several students ran the account, and they shared the username and password with others, allowing them to collect an array of photos and videos, one student who helped manage the account told Adweek. 

"Most users tend to see sexually explicit videos, alcohol and illegal drug use such as cocaine lines and bong hits," wrote Andrea Sandoval for the Spartan Daily, referring to the content on SJSUYAK.

After the article ran, Snapchat shut the account down, according to the student who asked to remain anonymous. (Snapchat declined a request for comment.) Even still, the group launched a similar account with a new username by the weekend. 

Social apps sometimes struggle to find that balance between G- and X-rated content, but it's becoming a crucial part of their mission as they try to win mainstream acceptance and attract advertisers. The example of SJSUYAK shows that policing for objectionable content takes constant monitoring, and even that often falls short.

"The Snapchat account is shut down; however, there are multiple backup accounts," Sandoval said by email. "I believe there is one mastermind behind it all."

There is no way to know if all the contributors to these accounts are college students. Still, it appeared that mostly students were discussing SJSUYAK on Twitter, where some expressed disappointment about the account shutting down before a new one replaced it.

The campus video compilations look much like an official Snapchat Story, which allows the public to submit videos and photos about a specific location or event. Snapchat then compiles such posts and calls them "Our Story." They run on a number of college campuses and also can be dedicated to shared experiences like New Year's Eve and March Madness.

Snapchat has said all Stories combined, public and private, attract more than 1 billion views on an active day. The company has been selling sponsorships, some for as much as $750,000 a day, on the official Stories. 

Snapchat censors decide which submissions are included in public Stories, reviewing all posts before choosing what goes up. And they wind up being pretty tame. An account like SJSUYAK offers a view of what Stories would look like unfiltered—lots of nudity, explicit sex, drugs and a general party atmosphere. 

The "Yak" in the username was based on another app popular on college campuses, Yik Yak, which lets students post anonymous messages to a virtual public bulletin board. Yik Yak has caused problems for some college administrators, who take issue with the unfettered free speech, which sometimes targets individuals and turns into bullying.

Snapchat has policies against pornography and depictions of illegal activity. It also retains the right to block any account it wants, according to its user policies.

Snapchat has been trying to polish its image as it grows into a $15 billion tech company with ambitions as a new media empire safe for advertisers. It has attracted big-name advertisers and media companies like ESPN, Vice and Comedy Central, which run their own channels on the app.

Snapchat is not alone in trying to curb the baser elements corrupting parts of social media.

Recently, Twitter developed tools to fight harassment and block hate messages. Its new filter has had early success, according to some users.

While Twitter cleans up its main platform, vitriol is springing up on its latest app, Periscope, where people can share live video from anywhere in the world. Last week, incidents of harassment surfaced, particularly women being hounded with unwanted sexual comments.

Facebook, known for strict decency rules, also constantly polices its network for hateful pages and pornography. The social network recently updated its community guidelines to encourage more civility. Facebook also is working on a video-sharing app called Riff, which is similar to Snapchat's Stories, where users send semipublic videos to one another in an ever-growing messaging chain. 

Meanwhile, SJSUYAK is gone, and students who opened the new account said they changed the name so it doesn't appear to be affiliated with the college.

Sandoval wrote in her newspaper article that such accounts raise privacy concerns for students, who may not want their private moments to be captured and shared.

Twitter has a porn problem, and it caused one brand to temporarily halt a campaign today. Nielsen, the television and digital data company, pulled the plug on its Promoted Tweets after they appeared near adult content on the site. 

Nielsen's promos showed up on Twitter profile pages called "Daily Dick Pictures" and "Homemade Porn." Ads are not supposed to appear on a profile page if X-rated content is posted there, and a bug was to blame, a source familiar with Twitter's technology said.

"As Twitter works to resolve this issue, we have temporarily suspended our campaign," a Nielsen spokesman told Adweek.

Nielsen was not alone, either. Marketers' promos from Duane Reade, NBCUniversal and Gatorade also showed up in feeds of pornographic photos and videos.

Brand safety is an issue across the digital advertising ecosystem, where it is difficult to police every website and social media post. Twitter rivals like YouTube and Facebook also have dealt with racy or offensive content that concerned advertisers.

"This is a huge issue facing the entire industry on these platforms, and we, along with everyone, are working hard to try to fix it," said one media executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity and whose company's ads have appeared near adult content. 

Other brands whose ads ran in similar contexts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"We're aware that Promoted Tweets are being displayed on some profiles that contain inappropriate content," a Twitter spokesman said in a statement to Adweek. "We are committed to providing a safe environment for brands to build their business, and our product team is working to fix the issue." 

Twitter is in a particularly tough position—it has to monitor 300 million active accounts filled with user-generated content—and its troubles with not-safe-for-work material have been raised before.

The San Francisco tech company has been trying to clean up its site—not just accounts that share NSFW pictures, but also those that support terrorism or harass other users. It recently introduced a quality filter that removes abusive or offensive tweets from a user's timeline.

But just last week, Robert Peck, a SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst, wrote a report warning that Twitter ads were appearing near pornography and that brands would pull back on spending if the problem became more widely known. Peck estimated there could be as many as 10 million Twitter accounts dedicated to sharing pornography and that Twitter needs to do a better job of blocking them.

Adult movies have suddenly become the hot place to put cancer PSAs.

M&C Saatchi in Sydney worked with adult film studio Digital Playground and the Nonprofit Blue Ball Foundation to place an unexpected testicular-cancer PSA inside Game of Balls, an X-rated Game of Thrones parody, last month.

During one of the flick's steamy scenes, actress Eva Lovia—who really should try harder with her porn name—briefly breaks character (such as it is) to demonstrate a cancer check on a male member of the cast. She also tells viewers to visit PlayWithYourself.org for more information. It's stroke of genius, I'd say! (But I say lots of silly things.)

Check out the case study below, which is not explicit but might be a bit NSFW anyway.



So far, 200,000 people have visited the site, and total video views have passed 1.5 million, according to the video. "We're overwhelmed with the amount of feedback we've been getting, from emails to Facebook messages to phone calls from all over the world," says Blue Balls founder Jamie Morgan.

This isn't the first ballsy way of generating exposure for the cause. McCann Lima and PornHub recently dispatched adult performer Charlotte Stokely—now that's a porn-star name!—to show men how to perform self-examinations, and Cancer Research U.K. went all-in with last year's selfie-sock campaign. (There was also DDB Bolivia's breast-check adult clip, though Pornhub has questioned that case study's claims of success.)

In any case, hopefully some of the messaging will rub off on the intended audience.

CREDITS
Client: The Blue Ball Foundation
Founder: Jamie Morgan
Agency: M&C Saatchi
Executive Creative Director: Ben Welsh
Creative Director: Ant Melder
Writer: Josh Bryer
Art Director: David Jackson
Public Relations Manager: Matt Porter
Chief Executive Officer: Jaimes Leggett
Chief Strategy Officer: Justin Graham
Public Relations: Bang PR
Managing Director: Annalise Brown
Account Manager: Peta Frost
Account Executive: Zoe Finlayson
Production: Digital Playground
Marketing, Public Relations Coordinator: Jeanette Li
Director: Jakodema

If your well-known spokesman ends up being convicted of a crime, the solution is easy: Fire him, and condemn his actions. But what's a brand to do when its best-known customer is tangled up in a child-porn investigation in which he hasn't been charged and could be anything from a suspect to an unwitting bystander?

Actually, crisis PR experts say, a brand should do exactly what Subway has done in the wake of an FBI search yesterday of Jared Fogle's home and computers.

The search of Fogle's home outside Indianapolis began at 6 a.m. yesterday morning. By noon, Subway—for whom Fogle has appeared in more than 300 television commercials since losing more than 200 pounds on an all-Subway diet as a college freshman in 1998—issued a statement expressing shock."We are very concerned and will be monitoring the situation closely," the brand said through a spokesman.

By 5:30 p.m., the sandwich chain issued a new statement: "Subway and Jared Fogle have mutually agreed to suspend their relationship due to the current investigation. Jared continues to cooperate with authorities and he expects no actions to be forthcoming. Both Jared and Subway agree that this was the appropriate step to take."

"They are doing the right thing," crisis PR expect Eric Dezenhall told Adweek today. Dezenhall is the the CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Dezenhall Resources and the author of Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal. "Remember, there are legal issues here. Firing somebody and implying you have embraced their guilt has contractual and defamation implications."

However, Dezenhall said, Subway had no choice but to act.

"You don't have to be guilty to lose everything; you just have to be in the same hemisphere as guilt," he said. "Companies are simply not set up to weather these types of scandals, so they immediately sever ties with a radioactive personality, and they have to. Subway has branched out since the original Jared campaigns, which will serve them well going forward."

Speaking to Adweek yesterday, before Subway's announcement that it was suspending its relationship with its spokesman of 15 years, Ernest DelBuono, svp at the PR firm Levick and chairman of its crisis practice, suggested what the chain's next step should be.

"Subway can't be silent in the near term, whether Jared is guilty or not," DelBuono said. "They need to put out a statement as soon as possible to make sure the public knows they are aware of the situation and keeping apprised of any further developments. They also have to deal with the fact that Jared has been a big part of Subway's growth and transformation into one of the biggest fast-casual restaurant chains in the United States."

But he also counseled against a rush to judgment. "Until all of the facts come out, they shouldn't show too much support and presume innocence or cut all ties and throw him under the bus by presuming his guilt," he said. "The reality right now is that we know very little about the details of the case at this point, so Subway has to walk a pretty tight rope. [They need to] acknowledge the situation without confirming or implying any management decisions that will paint the company into a corner later on."

Risa Heller, a New York crisis and political PR specialist who runs Risa Heller Communications, said that the sandwich chain was making the only moves it can.

"Subway has no choice here," she said. "Jared is a big part of their brand, and it would be nearly impossible for any company to stomach the fallout during this investigation." But she also noted that Subway "went out of their way to say that they 'mutually separated.'" 

"They seem to be leaving the door open to reconnect with him if it comes out that he had no role," she said."

Dezenhall stressed the importance of leaving that door open.

"We had a situation like this a few years ago where our client simply said, 'We support so-and-so's decision to take time off,'" he said. "That way, they didn't embrace the celebrity, nor did they disparage him. Of course, there will always be critics who say a company needs to do more, but they haven't lived in the crisis world I've lived in for 30-some years."