So there you are, checking out the flight deals to Malaga, and you
stumble across a "Horny Little Devil" Edible Chocolate Card for £9.99. So you send it to an old flame and you end up booking two tickets
for a sexy weekend in the sun. Aaah.
Well, give or take a few clicks of the mouse it could happen, and if it
did, it would probably be at lastminute.com, which has launched a new
'Staying In' section that includes an Adult Fun zone. Along with staple
sexy offerings such as a subscription to Penthouse and a Bondage Starter
Kit, there are also more practical products, namely an inflatable wife
or husband.
Once your naughty preferences are known, the site seems to take note. So
when I went to the Books and Magazine section, Great Sex Games was
recommended and when I clicked on the TV listings, home-improvement show
Big Strong Boys came up ... but maybe that was just a coincidence.
The point is that the internet giants (lastminute.com in this case) can
learn more than just marketing from the most profitable web industry
there is. Of course, sex on the net is a massive, multi-million pound
business.
But 'conventional' e-tailers can dabble in the softer, safer areas and
make money.
Search engines have come under fire for providing links to adult content
- Yahoo! has faced its fair share of controversy - but done properly,
adult content can be a great site addition. We're not talking chat rooms
or porn sites here, but legal merchandise sold in a well-signposted
area.
Lastminute.com is blazing a confident trail in the realms of the cheeky.
And the company is adamant to stress that the Adult Fun area is to be
interesting and amusing - certainly not risque - and that it will
complement the main drive of the Staying In area, which is restaurant
food and DVD delivery.
Another mainstream brand venturing into the adult world - although more
in terms of satire than sex - is Flextech TV's Bravo, which has a
Flash-based animation series, produced by new-media agency Kerb, on its
web site (www.bravo.co.uk). Hellz Kitchen follows the lives of a group
of amoral vegetables living in a mouse hole. In this world, vegetables
are male and fruit are female (except for Lola the transsexual tomato)
with names like Tasty the potato, who likes hardcore, and Kweezy the
dope head. The series goes out on TV in October.
As long as clear-sighted brands like lastminute.com and Bravo remain
brave - and clever - enough to tread the 'adult' line, and make a
healthy profit from it, the internet might have found another way to
grow up.
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