Animal rights activist group, PETA, is known for using controversial methods to attract attention. The newly launched raunchy adult domain website PETA.xxx might be something of an exception, however. While the website features several adult entertainment celebrities, including as Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson, Rose McGowan and Sasha Grey, the content of the site is surprisingly tame. The tagline on the main banner image reads “Too much sex can be a bad thing”, to promote the spaying and neutering of domestic pets – not exactly a warm welcome for the horny visitor.
A Tamed Beast?
Despite PETA’s gutsy reputation, PETA.xxx is an inoffensive, work-safe and feminine website with a warm and smouldering colour pallet and simple layout. The purpose of the site is explained in a video message by the decidedly unsexy porn star Ron Jeremy (sorry Ron!), which jars unpleasantly with classy rotating adverts featuring beauties Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey, beside which it shares pride of place on the home page. “Some of the biggest crimes committed against animals are just lack of education,” said Ron Jeremy in the video. “So if a site comes along that tries to educate people – and titillate them at the same time – so that they can keep watching, it’ll work.” So titillate! The “sex tips” section of the website is restricted to a list of performance-boosting veggie treats, for crying out loud!
Educating the Masses
The educational material on the site contrasts rudely with the type of content visitors on an adult-only domain. In fact, there is no human content on PETA.xxx that would not be equally suitable in the mainstream media or on the PETA.org main site. The only non family-friendly content is in the form of videos depicting animals in varying states of abuse and neglect, some of which are quite graphic and distressing and so would generally be deemed inappropriate content for general viewing. Talk about a mood killer!
Nudity Policy
In a mission statement on the website, entitled, ‘The reason behind PETA’s naked campaigns’, PETA unabashedly declare the move as a publicity stunt calculated to draw attention to themselves: “We believe that people should be free to use their minds and bodies as political instruments to bring attention to animal suffering. Typically, our racier ads, protests, and stunts seem to get the most attention.” The lack of explicit images makes PETA.xxx makes this new venture a simple extension of the “Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign, however, which PETA launched with the help of popular rock band The Go-Gos back in 1991.
Know your Audience
The human elements on the website are too discrete for the target adult audience, giving the impression that perhaps PETA is not in fact targeting the adult visitor at all, although the organisation claims otherwise: “It’s a safe bet that many visitors to PETA.xxx didn’t set out to learn about how animals are mercilessly slaughtered on today’s factory farms; understandably, such topics are convenient to ignore.” This raises the question of who PETA expects the ‘many visitors’ will be to this feminine website filled with low-relevance male-orientated images of women in distinctly non-pornographic scenarios on a pornography centric domain. It seems that this effort is purely a short-sighted ploy to gain a headline or two.
Get your Claws out PETA!
Whether you’re a vegan, an animal-lover, an environmentalist, an activist, or not – the majority of us can get on board with the concept, iterated in Ron Jeremy’s video, that cruelty is largely an unnecessary bi-product of ignorance and apathy.
PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said of the project, back in August 2011, “There are so many people cruising the web looking for adult entertainment and visiting triple-X sites that we felt we would really be short-changing our course if we didn’t take advantage of that.” There is something in that. Launching a website with an .xxx domain name as a large organisation will invariably draw attention. When the message does not cater to its audience, though, how can you expect capitalise on the opportunity and maximise goal conversions (to use a web-professional term)? There has to be a better strategy in place to catch the interest of the .xxx cruisers and to feed information to them in a way that does not require them to sit and watch footage that they are not receptive to.
Be Explicit
PETA must, as they say, make the message “impossible to forget”, and appeal to primal inclinations, whether that is through a role-reversed macabre approach to the subject matter or a graphic depiction of abusive scenarios with a BDSM edge. There is a middle ground to be found between sexually graphic imagery and the abuse of living things that could provoke an emotional response in those of us seeking an experience that goes beyond the mundane stimulation of the pornographic. Sex PETA.xxx up successfully, and PETA could be onto something – with impactful imagery and well considered editorial content, this could be their biggest campaign yet.
