LIVE NUDE GIRLS: Short, Sizzling Solicitation
by Eric Rogell
Being normal, red-blooded teens growing up in New York, my friends and I spent more time roaming the seamy streets of Times Square than we should have. Not the Giuliani-scrubbed, family friendly, sanitized for your protection, Times Square of today. No, we preferred the old school, Sodom and Gomorrah, mini skirt and thigh-high boot, geez the floors are sticky, Times Square.
My friend Bobby G. was a handful of years older, a few notches wiser, and, because he spent much of his day behind the wheel of a limo shuttling executives and visiting salesmen around Manhattan, he had the inside track on which direction to best point our boiling teenage hormones. But no matter where he steered us, or how explicit and enticing his descriptions- of what we were about to encounter, one sign would catch our eyes, turn our heads, and cause us to detour every time. Red neon, blazing out from a blackened window... "Live Nude Girls."
Three little words... That was it. Those three, one-syllable words were all that were necessary to get us to veer off course, and walk through the doors. It was pure marketing perfection. "Live Nude Girls." It doesn't get any better, more concise, more to the point, or more on target, than that. You learned everything you needed to know in a split second.
Live- let us know in no uncertain terms, that we would not be sitting in a booth staring at a video screen, or flipping through pages and pages of photos in magazines. Nope, there were real, live, flesh-and-blood women in there. And they were waiting for us.
Nude- said it all. Not topless, not scantily clad, but Nude. Naked. Au naturel. Nothing on, except for maybe a lace garter and some red stiletto pumps. Come on in here, boys, and we're gonna show you everything!
Girls- Not "women", which brings to mind older, more mature females. Not "ladies," because like most guys with elevated hormone levels, we were looking for anything but a lady. They told us they employed girls, conjuring images of young, nimble, fresh-faced maidens, ready to fulfill our every desire. Brilliant.
Would it have been any more effective, to have displayed a sign announcing: "We have hot, sexy babes inside, dancing naked!" I doubt it. People traveling the streets of Times Square are a hurried bunch. No time to stand idle in front of a sign. And why use eight words when three will do.
"Live Nude Girls" was the bait... it allowed them to set the hook. Once curiosity took over and we stepped inside, they had to reel us in with what they had to offer, and keep us there to spend money. The same goes for Web sites. Your banner or text link is the bait to get them to click to your site... the splash page and/or tour reels them in.
Looking at many of the ads and tours promoting sites today, I have to wonder: As adult online marketers, can we still learn a thing or two from our predecessors?
Times have changed, desires have changed, customers are much more sophisticated, and certainly the variety of what's available has changed. Access to whatever unique, unusual, sexual propensity someone may have has become virtually unlimited. And it's only a quick click away.
What has not changed, however, is the attention span of the person you are trying to entice. It used to be you had to catch the eye of the guy racing by on the street. Now, it has become essential to catch the eye of the surfer clicking through page after page, barely glancing at banners that flash by. And while there may have been only a handful of establishments to choose from back then, there are thousands and thousands of choices for the prospective customer to consider today.
Your banner has to catch their eye, peak their curiosity, and compel them to make that detour and come to your site. And you need to be able to this, using a limited amount of copy in a very limited space.
Take a few minutes and try something. Think of the core focus of your site, and describe it in three to four words. You may come up with something along the lines of "Barely Legal Teens," "Live Hardcore Sex," or "Real XXX Amateurs."
These are good, perfectly acceptable, descriptive ads. I'm sure you have seen them used on banners more than once... maybe more than a few times. Actually, you may have seen them used hundreds of times for dozens of sites. They are the Internet's version of "Live Nude Girls." And, they will get you click-throughs. But what if you want to push farther than that, improve upon what has come before, and set your site apart from the thousands of others that have similar content?
When I work with design students I tell them to think past the common, cliché answer ... to push their concepts as far as they can, to the extremes. Find that unique solution. This is essential in logo design. Often, if a company has a specific, recognizable object in its name, some designers tend to want to use a visual representation of that object in the logo. Perfectly acceptable- but not terribly unique. Let's say the company is a restaurant called The Lighthouse. Your first instinct might be to slap a picture of a lighthouse next to the name. That would be fine, but what if you pushed farther and decided to imply the lighthouse instead of actually showing it? What if the name The Lighthouse appeared to be illuminated by an unseen light source, and was very bright on the left side and faded into darkness at the far end of the name? It has a very different effect.
You can do the same thing with words in a banner. Many ad copyrighters, mindful of the limited space, try to tell the surfer what the site has in a literal way. For a fetish site you might see, "Hot Leather Sluts," or "Live Bondage Babes." This is fine, but let's get more creative.
What if you used something like: "Get a Virtual Spanking." The word "spanking" is likely to catch the attention of a surfer looking for fetish content, and the idea of a virtual one could peak his interest enough to warrant a click.
If you run a site with live feeds featuring teens, the inclination may be to use: "Live Teen Chat," or "Watch Live Teens!" You can get the same point across, and arouse some curiosity, by opting for, "Tiffany is Being Naughty," or, "Talk Dirty to Jennifer." These short tag lines are more personalized and enticing.
Keep these tips in mind the next time you are staring at a blank screen, desperately trying to come up with fresh traffic-driving ads. Remember, you don't have to be wordy, to be compelling and descriptive. You can still grab attention, set yourself apart, and get click-throughs- by being short and sizzling.
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