Wer zur Hölle kauft einen Porno?

Who are the porn consumers?

Rafael Santeria was division manager of the hardcore production EROdays at the fetish and porn label Eronite. For AWM Pro he describes his first impressions from different areas of erotic marketing and management.

Flirting is the best advertising. It’s one thing to wave a banknote or have good contacts. But most important is the relationship of trust. I’m 25, a porn director at Eronite Movie Productions, so my full-time job is getting young women and men into bed with each other while I watch and one or two of our guys hold a camera on it.

Who can do that off the top of their head? In my limited experience so far, women are primarily looking for someone who makes them feel safe, accepted and validated. My job is to provide them with a pleasant atmosphere in which they feel they are in good hands. And you can do that especially well when that atmosphere is real: not acted, but truly authentic. Women have very sensitive antennae for hypocrisy and understandably react to it with defensiveness. So my first step is to build relationship with the ladies. I look at them and capture their very personal beauty. And already I can hardly help flirting with them.

This is fun for us as long as professional distance is maintained and brings us closer together. If I can also convey technical know-how and a certain structuring rigor, then I have a good chance of getting a shoot under my belt. It’s easier with men: With application ratios of 300:1 between men and women, I can – and must – screen much more strictly. The advantage: We men understand each other. We know the central role sex plays in our psyche. That makes communication easier: “My boy, do you have time for a shoot over the holidays? I don’t know anything for sure yet, but keep me posted.” “Yes, it fits.” It’s not much more complicated than that.

Who do you shoot porn with and who actually buys it?

So much for actor acquisition. More difficult to assess is the actual target group: the many, many anonymous men – and women – who buy our products. Should buy. Who would think that? It’s easier to find people who will let you film them fucking than those who will buy the final product. The people are just not visible. To be honest, I only have a very vague idea of who actually buys our DVDs and clips. Are these the middle-aged gentlemen who show up at our castings in columns? Surely it won’t be the people from my generation? They do get porn from the internet! But who knows? I am always surprised who comes across us. So, in a sense, I’m poking around in the dark.

So I just market myself and our label according to my own feeling: What would I myself find so awesome and appealing that I would be more interested in a certain production company? Clearly, coolness and flair are in demand, trustworthiness, style and quality. I want to give the “Generation Porn” what they also appreciate in other products: A lifestyle! Fast cars, awesome clothes, beautiful women, doomsday aesthetics, elaborate but sleek designs, a philosophy, good music, … Hipsterism of pornography, so to speak. I have no idea how the long-established customers will react to this. But at the end of the day, the market economy is always a bit of a gamble. What seems important to me is ease of use: no one wants things complicated when shopping. One click, one like, everything has to be easy to understand.

You should not fool yourself: Great attractiveness brings great success with a high probability. Michel Houellebecq says, “The whole world is geared to holding the door open for beautiful women. I think that is quite correctly observed. But: Beauty is not everything. When I want to stage a woman, I try to imagine which character I would find the horniest in her myself: Is she a horny nymphomaniac Eastern Bloc slut? A cute little disco girl I would like to fuck I virgin ass?

Is she possibly much too fat to be attractive to me, but suddenly she appeals to me because she’s just so incredibly necessary and also deepthroated like no other? When an actress fits her role well, it compensates for the fact that her tits might be hanging a bit too much. Their charisma then simply charms us men. And for the rest there are our sugary sweet make-up artists.

If I correctly assess the comment bars of well-known tube portals, letters to us, personal conversations and the little bit of relevant statistics on the subject, most men between 16 and 40 actually consume pornography on a more or less regular basis: the spectrum ranges from perverted freak to lifestyle consumer. My generation of the late 80s and early 90s also professes to me in no uncertain terms that they watch porn. But: Very few of them see the point of paying money for it in times of Xhamster. I have developed with me known webcam girls and from some own observations the following assumption: Money flows at enormously high quality and/or attractiveness or where participation is allowed and the medium porn reaches its limits – the men run to it if they are allowed to stick their dicks into one of the girls at fanfuck or porn casting.

The less brave like to give orders in webcam chat – well and good for a few euros a minute. And there is still a small remnant of people who really have it in for certain actresses: There go then well and gladly times a few dozen euros for a DVD, a fan package or other merch over the counter. Everything beyond that are the real niche products, which are still not available for download on every second amateur portal: Scat and very special fetishes like bone breaking or similar are especially worth mentioning here.

I understand little about the technical facets of the advertising industry. I have not studied it and have not had the appropriate training. A two-month internship at a renowned (non-porn) advertising agency taught me one thing above all: you have to try and not be discouraged by setbacks. Just keep going. And bring feeling into it. This replaces a lot of theoretical input. There are many doors open in the porn industry. I wish to find together with many people who want to walk these doors in friendship and with common goals. Because there is certainly still a lot to get out!

First published by: AWM Pro No. 8 – January 2014