Do We Need a Campaign to Help People Find Porn on the Web? ICM Thinks So
In what can only be described as a waste of money, ICM Registry has hired ad agency M&C Saatchi to create a campaign to help people find porn on the web. The brief is technically about encouraging the adult industry to register sites on the new ".xxx" web domain, and to engage in responsible business practices. But "a consumer campaign will roll out later next year," according to the Guardian because, er, it's currently so difficult to find racy material on the internet. Or something. The campaign will be "global." (ICM is a company that sells web site URLs, like GoDaddy or Register.com.)
Pornland actually opposes .xxx for a variety of reasons. The industry believes the creation of an adults-only web domain is essentially a money grab, as all publishers will have to pay $60 to secure the .xxx versions of the .com URLs they already own; and because they fear that one day all porn will be required to live only in a .xxx ghetto, where it could easily regulated and restricted either by filtering software or conservative governments.
Christians also oppose .xxx because they believe it grants an official approval to morally offensive material.
The M&C Saatchi campaign will first target the adult industry itself, encouraging practitioners to sign up and adopt "responsible" business practices (that's probably more about stopping credit card abuse than it is about using condoms). Doubtless M&C's staffers will have to do a lot of "research: into the industry before rolling out their effort. And they can bill it all to the client!
Interestingly, there's no reported budget for the ICM effort. That suggests it's quite small -- good thing too, because aside from a minimal PR effort letting people know the new addresses are online and available I can't see there being a lack awareness of .xxx on the part of either the businesses that might want to use them or their customers. Having said that, "." and "x" are quite far apart on the keyboard, so it isn't the easiest thing to type when you've only got one hand free....
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