This Is How Zomato Used Porn Websites To Drum Up Business

We often describe an awesome food experience using words that have sexual connotations, like foodgasm and food porn. Now, online food giant Zomato has taken the link between food and porn to a whole new level by advertising on pornography websites in India.

Bringing Porn To Work

Yup, you read that right. As an experiment, Zomato teamed up with Traffic Junky and Traffic Factory (advertising networks that operate the ads on pornographic sites) and began running ads on sites that are popular in India. The ads ran from 11 pm to 4 am, as Zomato was looking to tap into customers that want to order food late at night, and will use their Zomato Order feature.  

Zomato proudly made their experiments public in a blog post entitled ‘This post is (probably) safe for work’, written by Pramod Rao. Rao explains that the folks at Zomato had put their heads together to figure out a cost effective way to reach late night customers – “when someone said ‘Hey we should try advertising on porn sites’, and then justified it with ‘look, people watch porn, and people get hungry, so stop judging me.’”

And, the idea caught on, helped along by data that revealed India’s love for porn -, did you know that India ranks fifth in the amount of daily visitors to popular explicit content website PornHub?

Innuendo Laced Advertisements

The creative team at Zomato then sat down to design some ads with double meanings that they were sure would strike a chord with their target audience. Check them out:

Amusing, right? Amusing and apparently effective; Zomato reported that the campaign averaged a CTR (Click Through Rate) of 0.22%. Additionally, Zomato reports that advertising on porn websites tends to be cheaper than using more traditional platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

Is it possible that Zomato has unearthed a genius new method of reaching customers? It’s very likely, and we can bet other delivery companies will soon be trying out similar experiments.