Zomato lit up the online world last week with their advertising campaign on porn sites. It was a bold move for an Indian unicorn. The campaign was a success and won admirers but was eventually pulled within days under intense criticism. Pramod Rao, Zomato’s SVP for growth, explains it.

1. What was your rational to advertise on porn sites?
Marrying food and porn was something we did way back in 2012. Back then, we created zomato.xxx – the world’s first .xxx domain site dedicated solely to food. At that time, we couldn’t do much more with the idea of food and porn, given that we were still only a restaurant discovery and search platform and hadn’t launched our online ordering services. With the introduction of online ordering feature on Zomato a few months ago and the available options we have for late night delivery today, it made most sense to action the campaign now.

We’ve been using digital marketing platforms like Adwords, Facebook, Twitter to reach out to our audience; these ad campaigns are commoditised and therefore quite expensive. We decided to roll out advertisements on porn sites which costs was significantly cheaper than other platforms. While the response to the campaign was largely positive. People said we were ballsy for trying this at all, and that we broke new ground for doing this in a country where porn has long been a touchy topic. But there were a few things said that we simply couldn’t ignore. Some folks got offended by the campaign, felt it was in poor taste, and wasn’t something they expected from a brand of our standard. Some also said that all porn is not legal, and by advertising on porn websites, we are financially supporting abuse – certainly something we don’t want to do. Ever.

2. What’s the working name used internally?
Food Porn.

3. When was it planned?
We planned out the campaign early in the week of December 7th and went live with it in a day’s time.

4. Give us some insight of the debates & counter views leading up to campaign.
When we got together for a brainstorming session two weeks ago we were trying to figure out the most innovative marketing strategies to target users for late night food delivery. Advertising on porn sites seemed almost obvious when someone said ‘Hey we should try advertising on porn sites’, these sites have the highest traffic peaks between 11pm to 4am and seemed like a great place to advertise our online food ordering and delivery services – especially for late night food delivery.

Add to that the data we had outlining the traffic stats and click through rates, it made for a very compelling case to at-least give it a shot.

5. It’s brought Zomato back into the consumer conversation as intrigue/controversy is alway good publicity. How much of this buzz/backlash were you banking on?
We didn’t really do this with the intention of sparking a controversy, in fact the only reason we did the initial blog post talking about this is that we thought we discovered a growth hack and wanted to share it with other young start ups. The reason we took it off and did another blog post about that a couple of days later is also the same – we wanted startups and entrepreneurs to learn from our mistakes.

6. You’ve won plaudits & barbs, which of these two are more?
Like I mentioned earlier, the response to the campaign was largely positive, however we had some users tell us that while we might not see it as that, all porn is not legal, and by advertising on porn websites, we are financially supporting abuse. We definitely do not want to support or associate with that kind of abuse.

We also realised that we have reached a stage where it’s fair to expect that even if we’re doing what we need to do, we do it in ways that are more ‘grown up’. We understand that we owe it to ourselves, and to those who’ve helped get us to where we are, to set the right examples and convey the right messages.

7. What if you did not retract the campaign?
At Zomato, we have always lived by the sunshine test – if you think it would look bad if someone else knew, then don’t do it.

Our intention was to find a low cost high impact growth hack to market our newly launched late night delivery section. Some people wrote to us saying that they appreciate we’re a young organization that’s always thinking out of the box and looking for growth hacks, but some of our users also pointed out that not all porn is legal, and by advertising on these websites we may be financially supporting abuse. As we said earlier, this is not something we would want to do.

There were also some who pointed out to us that a lot of younger companies look to us as a role model, and it is therefore our responsibility to set the right precedent. So while we will definitely not stop thinking out of the box, or confine ourselves to safe and traditional marketing ideas, we will be more mindful of the boundaries we are playing inside.

8. Will you run it again?
No.