COMEDY, SPOOFS, & MARKETING: Not a Joking Matter
- By Brandon Palmer
"Led by the Evil Overlord and the Dark Witch, an ominous shadow has swept across the universe, destroying countless planets in its wake. The Clitoran System, one of the last remaining independent realms, may yet fall, for the Evil Overlord's shyster minions have discovered a legal loophole: whomever the Princess Hubba Hubba weds will become the de facto heir to the Clitoran System. With this information brought to light, the Princess has fled the star system, joining a ragtag underground of interplanetary Eco-Warriors who are attempting to align the planets. In the struggle between good and evil, the hopes of billions rest on the shoulders of a few."
What you're reading here isn't erotica from an adult novel, but the plot to the award-winning porn comedy Space Nuts, which spoofs Star Wars and other legendary sci-fi shows, such as Space Odyssey 2001 and Star Trek. Done right, comedy can make for good adult content, and can even work as a marketing tool for your site. We've all heard those crazy porn titles: Battlestar Gigantic-Cock, Star Whores Episode 2: Attack of the Bones, and on and on. Even movie star Matt Damon was recently quoted as saying he wants to film a porn movie, with The Porn Identity speculated as a possible title. Knowing how to make comedy work for you beyond silly plots and titles can make for an effective, if not fun, strategy.
Why combine comedy and porn, and how do you use it effectively while remaining legal and in good taste? Comedy and porn rank as the two most popular pastimes of all time. They are both highly valued by the public, yet mostly ignored by academia, and attacked by the government - just look at the censorship crackdown on everything from swear words to sex jokes to nipple revelations. Regardless, they work together like magic, with sitcoms using sex for shock value, and porn using comedy to break the intensity of continuous sex scenes.
Comedy in porn is normally done with parodies and spoofs, and the Web is no different. To get the easy laugh, and maybe even get people talking about it, simple concepts can be highly effective marketing tools. One example is the plus-size, large-breasted women site OgrePorn.com (www.ogreporn.com). The splash page features the green, large-breasted Shrex, a takeoff on the Shrek film character. The viral nature of the page has led to more than a few sales for the site, and provides a unique angle that stands out from other sites. Your spoofs should be humorous takes on your service or brand while tying into popular culture. Include a "send to a friend" link on your spoof, and distribute it everywhere possible - boards, fan sites, Yahoo groups, P2P networks, blogs -- even give it to your affiliates as a marketing tool.
Another example is Pornolize.com, a "dirty" translation service that works in a way similar to babelfish. Visitors to the site can enter any url on the Web for an instant translation of the entire site text into "adultspeak" - in other words, an "adult" version using expletives and humorous, sexual words and phrases. Any site on the Web including cnn.com is instantly transformed into a funny take on the morning news. As site owner Mikael Svenson explains, "We are trying to help people have a good time and get a laugh in their everyday life. Since the user decides what page to Pornolize, they often do it at someone else's expense, but that's part of the fun." The site averages 20,000 page views and 50,000 hits per day with no advertising, just word of mouth, making for a highly viral application. While Svenson says this is mostly a "for fun" venture, he has sold one version to a Web portal, and has been in discussions to sell other versions as tools for promoting TV shows, although nothing has come of that yet.
Can this be an effective marketing tool for a site? "Judging from our traffic I think it might be," says Svenson. "You could set up automatically Pornolized sites and have them spread over time. By first looking at the Pornolized version you would think it was the actual site, but on closer look you would see it was a spoof, and catch links/glimpses to an adult service." He adds that if access is provided via a pre-made link, a small disclaimer should be written at the top of the site telling people it's a Pornolized version and that it hasn't been hijacked.
Svenson also has advice for creating effective spoofs. "For one thing, you shouldn't be too over the top, because then a lot of people will be turned off. We Pornolized pictures as well in the beginning, overlaying and changing the images on the sites, but it was too much strain on our server and there are legal issues when playing with other peoples' photographs," he says.
Which leads to an important consideration here: legal concerns. This is generally not a major issue since it's usually clear the site is a spoof or parody, and adding a short disclaimer is always a good idea. Svenson's experience with the issue amounts to no real problems. "We have had numerous complaints -- people threatening to press charges, cease and desist, etc.," he says. "Most of the time they think we have stolen their website and spoofed it. But all we do is download the page and translate the content into dirty language at users' requests. All images are linked directly from the source. When we explain to them that we only provide a translation service we usually stop hearing from them. They are free to block our website from downloading content from their sites."
There are some sites you don't want to Pornolize or make into irreverent sexual takes. "When people who run children's sites contact us, we usually put a block in our code to stop Pornolizing those sites. But in total I think we have ten sites that we block on our end," explains Svenson. "Not long ago we were contacted by the sheriff's office in a small county in Ohio. They had had their site Pornolized, and wanted to know who had done it. They were right in the middle of campaigning," laughs Svenson. He also reminds us that it's not a good idea to send links to Pornolized sites around the workplace. "We had one guy lose his job because of the service. He sent a Pornolize link to a co-worker which got caught in a porn filter and he actually got fired."
So, with a few minor precautions, you can let the creative juices flow and use humor to make your sites stand out from the pack. You just might create the Space Nuts of the Web.
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