Look what I found on Facebook today. HAW, busy spending tens of millions of dollars in VC money, has just launched an $150/month upscale dating deals service for couples, and yet they rely on this kind of bottom-feeder marketing.
A sampling from the post:
Girls ignore guys’ b***s, but Lord knows why. Suck on them or play with them!
Lick the meatus. That’s the incredibly-sensitive hole on the tip of his p***s.
This is a blog for a venture-backed business, with worldwide partnerships. I wonder how their partners like Business Insider and other top sites feel about this?
What do you think the click-through rate on this ad is? Probably through the roof. Don’t get me wrong, HAW periodically has some great marketing ideas, and I love Nerve.com-style smart-smut, but this was a real turn-off. This kind of marketing makes me sad for HowAboutWe and the rest of the dating industry. Aim high, right? I see this overt sexual marketing so often now, I don’t even pay attention to it (usually). Hope this works out well for HAW, because it is truly embarrassing for the rest of us to watch.
To make matters worse, the HAW post is so poorly written and isn’t even targeted at me correctly.
I think the bigger issue is that social media marketing people have basically run out of ideas and the newness of it all has run its course. Nobody has the deep pockets or quality of marketing that Match does, or the analytical capabilities of OKCupid, so the rest of the decent sites out there are left to compete on sex how-to articles written at the high-school level.
There is absolutely zero creativity in the online dating advertising world outside of the large site tv advertising. Even eHarmony’s ads don’t suck as much as they used to. (I can’t believe I just wrote that either). Is anyone doing anything even remotely interesting with advertising? Relying solely on online advertising and social media can be cost-effective and the performance insights are amazing, but there is no soul in anything anymore and I miss that.
I remember when Sam Yagan at OKCupid handed out roses at T stops in Boston on Valentine’s Day back in the day. That was so refreshing. Even the PlentyOfFish massive speed-dating event makes me nostalgic.
But alas, HAW traffic for the last six months is up 600%, give or take. Sex sells, as they say.
