It is nothing new for dating sites to use sex appeal to get people–mostly guys I assume–to click on their ads. When I used MySpace, True ads littered the place.  I’m sure you’ve seen the ads unless they are so well targeted that only the male audience sees them. In case you haven’t seen them, here is a sample:

I can understand these kinds of banner ads for a dating site like True. It is definitely effective as in 2006 these ads resulted in True signing 1000 new members per hour. I have no idea how useful the site is for dating but, the absolute conversions in 2006 are impressive. It would be my guess that True has a lot more guys in their database than girls. In that scenario, how long will it be before you run out of suckers?

That is one way to do dating site ads. I would think those types of ads brings in a lot of creepy guys and very few ladies. I could be completely wrong as I don’t know True’s male to female ratio but, my gut instinct is that it doesn’t work. I like Match.com’s advertising a lot better. It is classy and not all about sex.

With Match.com, you see a real person. Not some model in an erotic pose. They don’t scream sex. I would have to think that Match.com has a more even gender distribution. It makes little sense for a woman to join a dating site like True to hook-up with guys. They could just put on their hottest outfit and hit up the bar or club. Guys will be tripping over themselves to talk to them.

With True, their models are dripping with sex:

I don’t think anyone who signs up to True is looking for “love”, unless by “love” they mean sex. True’s advertising is not a disaster considering the product they are selling but, when a free online web game–that has nothing to do with sex–uses the same tactics, I consider it an epic fail in good marketing.

The perpetrating game is Evony–I won’t link to them to give them any legitimacy. I’ve seen their earlier ads and I was never interested but, I knew what they were. They have gradually changed the content of their advertisements to go from something that represents their product to something that looks like a True ad.

These two ads are representative of their product: a game that takes place in medieval times. You have a Knight on the left and perhaps a Queen or Princess on the right. Now here is their new stuff:

How does anyone know that this is a game about medieval times? The style and font is identical to True ads. The flaw in this advertising strategy is that it might work extremely well to get you click-through’s but, what happens to your brand? How low are the response rates? Will this bring in any revenue? Maybe a fraction of a percent signs up to try the game but, are they going to stay or spend any money?

The game operates on a freemium model where a small percentage of the users shell out cash so that everyone else can play for free. If my interest in the advertisement was the sex and not the medieval fantasy, how likely am I to play the game and pay real money to buy a virtual product? Highly unlikely.

Is this type of advertising worth it? I can’t see Evony’s financials so it is hard to say if it is worth it from an immediate monetary perspective but, I can confidently say that the negative affect to the brand is not worth it. It is all very possible that the people behind this product don’t really care in which case, they will be happy to add to the plethora of garbage ads littering the world wide web. Thanks assholes.

UPDATE 9/7/09: So, I ran into some more of Evony’s advertising and it has gotten even worse. They don’t even bother noting it’s a game at all.