The Truth About Girls Gone Wild

The stories about the Neanderthal frat-boy founder of Girls Gone Wild, Joe Francis, started about a week after his first infomercial hit TV, but he’s never got as intense a dose of bad publicity as his recent LA Times profile.

Writer Claire Hoffman portrays him as a violent, egomaniac and rapist in an article which should be required reading in any course on ‘Bad Publicity’. It’s a public-relations disaster, sure to be quoted in every court-case he’s involved with including the one that inevitably leaves him broke and paraphrasing himself during his own home-invasion.

“My name is Joe Francis, I’m from Boys Gone Wild, and I like it up the ass.”

If allegations he’s a pedophile hold water, becoming another prisoner’s girlfriend will be something he can look forward to given what else will be in store for him.

The problem for porn is that Joe Francis, whose private life makes your average Max Hardcore DVD look like an episode of ‘The Electric Company’, is a story at all.

Francis has carefully cultivated a myth in which he’s a ‘marketing genius’ and ‘the next Hugh Hefner’ which the mainstream media continue to believe because either they don’t know enough about porn to tell good from bad, or are too scared to admit there’s any ‘good’ to discuss.

Hefner built an archive of timeless content he started by publishing nudes pictures of Marilyn Monroe the entire world wanted to see. When people saw Playboy they subscribed to it and told their friends. Playboy’s greatest asset is content.

Girls Gone Wild videos are poorly produced, unscripted amateur porn with little long-term value sold via a pre-internet business model. The people who experience Girls Gone Wild are generally unimpressed and its success is impossible without continual massive advertising.

So why is Joe Francis so rich?

The brilliance behind Girls Gone Wild is the original idea. Not drunk girls taking their tops off (sorry - “Going wild!”), but TV ads tailored to a late-night (read drunk, male and lonely) audience.

The realization sex would sell better in the traditionally dead 11:00 - 5:00 a.m. time-slot than kitchen equipment was revolutionary because TV ads are subject to natural selection. Successful infomercials pay for their airtime by offering the stations which broadcast them a share of their takings. When Girls Gone Wild arrived, in a world dominated by exercise equipment and grilling machines, it made vast profits and was able to buy up as much airtime as stations had to offer. Getting airtime on credit and pay ing for it later Girls Gone Wild quickly took over cable by buying millions of dollars or airtime without spending cash up front.

So while he does everything he can to erase reasonable doubt from the mind of any US juror who’s ever read a newspaper, it’s worth remembering the real story behind Girls Gone Wild is one of a smart media buyer - not celebutard, egomaniac, cretin Joe Francis.