|
|
talk dirty to me
Email fantasies to spice up couples' love lives
By Jeff Bercovici
Unless you're an absolute newcomer to the online world, you probably know by now that pornography and its gentler sister, erotica, are harder to avoid on the web than to find.
But most of this material is, to put it mildly, not exactly the kind of thing you’d want to share with your spouse.
And certainly the sites where it's found aren't the types of places you’d want to put your message unless you're advertising hard-core videos or devices that are illegal in many southern states.
That pretty much summarizes the raison d’être of Pillowmail.com. The creation of a California marketing type and his screenwriting business partner, Pillowmail allows a user to email his or her lover an erotic "adventure" in the form of a fictional story, personalized to include the couples' names, genders, physical attributes, and tastes in food, drink, music and cars.
Apart from all this individual tailoring, Pillowmail differs from other web sex plays in that it's aimed not at lonely bachelors or bachelorettes but at men and women, both gay and straight, in stable, long-term, loving relationships.
That's according to founder Rob Frankel.
"If you’re married or if you’re in a monogamous relationship, you gotta keep things interesting," says Frankel, a Los Angeles-based branding consultant and author of the book "The Revenge of Brand X."
"Pillowmail is there to nudge the relationship along--either to get the wife back in action or to move that platonic relationship to the next step."
Here's how it works: You go to Pillowmail.com and fill out a questionnaire that asks you to provide your sex, hair color, eye color, city of residence, favorite flavor, favorite animal, etc., and the same information for your partner. You must both supply a name and email address.
You then select a story from a list of 10, with titles including "Always Shower After a Workout," "Let's Have a Midnight Snack" and "Here Comes the Bridesmaid."
Each story comes in three versions: Sexy, X-rated and Off the Wall, with that last one being the silliest rather than the steamiest.
Though they're fairly explicit about body parts and sex acts, the stories are more romantic than kinky, and more than a little corny.
When you're all finished, Pillowmail will send you an email to verify your address, and one to your partner. In order to receive the story, you must reply to the email, ensuring that nobody is able to use Pillowmail to harass an unwilling recipient.
At the end of each Pillowmail story is a banner ad. The products advertised are the types that might interest a couple looking to spice up their bedroom life, such as scented candles, flavored lotions, perfume and herbal aphrodisiacs, says Frankel.
"We'll do sex toys that are fun and healthy."
For the first test of Pillowmail's advertising, Frankel enlisted Adam & Eve, a mail-order marketer of erotic toys, videos and other products.
"They’re perfect for us: They’re not grimy, they’re not nasty, and they have a playful, healthy attitude toward this," says Frankel.
The test, he says, was a success, with Adam & Eve finding that it helped them acquire new customers at a cost of between $2.50 and $3.00 per person.
"In the adult industry, if you can bring in a new customer for under $10 per customer, you're doing great," says Frankel.
"Remember, most of the adult trade caters to a very small universe who are essentially addicts. It's a constant fight for market share. What we're doing is expanding the universe. We can act as a bridge and take mainstream users and introduce them to an adult vendor like Adam & Eve."
Pillowmail has also had great success getting users to click on sponsors’ ads, says Frankel, with the click-through rate averaging anywhere between 3 and 14 percent depending on the banner.
Part of that efficiency, he says, comes from the ads being so targeted.
"If we have you as an advertiser and you only want to buy ads on male-to-male stories at the X-rated level of the 'Here Comes the Bridesmaid' story, that’s all we’ll deliver to you."
Frankel, who in his day job as a consultant spends most of his time teaching companies how to make their web sites profitable, says he started Pillowmail partly as an attempt to bolster his own credibility.
"The bitch of being a consultant is getting people who tell you, 'Yeah, you're charging all this money, but what are you doing yourself?' They're always looking at me like 'Why don't you have a job?'"
He also wanted to refute the critics who insist that the internet will never mature as an advertising medium.
"The banner itself isn't bad. It's the way people use it," says Frankel. "The big problem is people go about it backwards--they dump all this money into it without knowing anything about how the web works."
September 19, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
Printer-Friendly
Version | Send
to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact
Us
