Situation:

The lockdowns in Spring 2020 hit small businesses around the world particularly hard. Their sales suffered and, particularly for small local businesses, it was practically impossible to compete in online sales against big corporations with massive marketing budgets. At the same time, governments weren't providing the stimulus assistance they so desperately needed.

Brief:

Pornhub wanted to find a way to help small business owners around the world get through the crisis.

Objectives:

*Convince small businesses to advertise on pornhub.com for free.

*Redirect Pornhub's users directly to the small businesses' websites, in order to increase their sales and traffic.

While the governments of the world were taking far too long to approve much-needed stimulus packages, we decided to create one of our own, "Pornhub's Big Package for Small Businesses": Free ads on pornhub.com exclusively for struggling small businesses.

We took advantage of the fact that pornhub.com had become one of the world's most visited sites during the global lockdowns to create free banners ads for small businesses specifically customised to attract the attention of the brand's massive user base, geo-targeting each businesses' audience to help them reactivate their sales in a time of crisis.

When Pornhub.com received a boost during worldwide lockdowns, becoming one of the top 10 most visited sites on the web, their traffic increased to a peak of over 180 million unique visitors a day. As a result, banner ads on the site experienced an +30% increase in click rate. Seeing the increase in efficacy and traffic, we decided to use that valuable ad space to help others who weren’t so fortunate: Small businesses (which according to several reports, suffered disproportionately during the pandemic).

Normally, banners ads on Pornhub promote things related to the adult industry (sex toys, adult websites, etc.), so we decided to employ that same seductive language to create customised ads for thousands of struggling small businesses, targeting millions of Pornhub users around the world and turning them into potential customers for everything from pet food to high-end wines.

In order to get the word out directly to different types of small businesses around the world, in early July 2020 we launched a call-to-action video featuring real small business owners from some of the cities most affected by the pandemic: Tokyo,Japan; Milan, Italy; NYC, USA; Rio de Janeiro,Brazil and Madrid,Spain.

Any business with less than 100 employees could participate, they simply had to register through the initiative's website and wait to be selected. Once they were approved, we analysed their service, and within 24 hours we designed and posted a banner created specifically for that business. Each banner would appear based on the keywords a user typed in. So, for example: if someone searched for videos in the "mature" category, a banner for an online store selling vintage wines would appear.

The campaign was active for one month, during which over 6,000 businesses on 5 continents signed up.

Over 6,000 small businesses on 5 continents registered to take part.

More than 6.1 million Pornhub users clicked on the small business banners.

More than 1 billion impressions-worth of custom banner ads were donated to participating businesses.

Participants experienced up to 130% growth in traffic to each of their websites.

And we were able to get a whole range of new types of business to see the value of advertising on Pornhub, with 78% of the participants saying they would consider purchasing ad space on the site in the future.