Who's Who: Cindy Gallop
Cindy Gallop is an English advertising consultant, founder and former chair of the US branch of advertising firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and founder of the IfWeRanTheWorld and [MakeLoveNotPorn] companies. According to the TED blog, Gallop's TEDTalk "Make Love Not Porn" was one of the "most talked about presentations" at the 2009 TED conference. She currently lives in New York City.
What I’m up to...
Raising funding for [MakeLoveNotPorn].
[MakeLoveNotPorn] came about through direct first experience. I date younger men who tend to be men in their 20s and about 9 or 10 years ago, before the media ever picked up any of this, I began realizing through dating younger men, that I was encountering an issue that would never have crossed my mind if I had not encountered it so very intimately and personally. I realized I was encountering what happens when two things converge. When today's total gain of access to hardcore online porn meets our societies' equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex, it results in porn becoming by default the sex education of today in a bad way. So, I found myself encountering a number of sexual behavioral means and I went “oh! I know where that behavior is coming from”. I felt “gosh if I am experiencing this, other people must be as well”. Nine or ten years ago I didn’t know that because no one was talking about this and no one was writing about it, and being naturally a very action-oriented person I decided to do something about it. So, eight years ago I put up on my own money a tiny cocky website at [MakeLoveNotPorn] that posts the nits of hardcore porn and bounces them with reality. The construct is porn world versus real world. I had the opportunity to launch [MakeLoveNotPorn] at TED. My talk went viral and it drove an extraordinary response to my tiny cocky website that I had never anticipated. And the most extraordinary thing was not just instantly huge traffic on the website from every country in the world, but the most extraordinary thing is that every single day for the past 8 years, and this is ongoing, I received thousands of e-mails to my [MakeLoveNotPorn] inbox and they come from everybody. They come from young and old, male and female, straight and gay, every country in the world, and even before the actual site I put up, what amazes people is simply the fact I took the stage in public, I talked about and I’m doing something about what everybody knows and no one ever speaks about, and, as a result people feel able to tell me anything. They pour their hearts out through an e-mail. They tell me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they never told anybody before. They write for advice: 15 year-old boys write, 50 year-old women write, and it was the shear impact of all of these e-mails arriving day after day after day that eventually made me feel that I now have a personal responsibility. I have to take this mission forward in a way that would make it much more far-reaching, helpful and effective. So I saw an opportunity in something that I believe in very strongly, which is that the future of business is doing good and making money simultaneously. I saw the opportunity for a big business solution to a huge untapped global social need. And I use the word “big” advisedly because even when I was concepting makelovenotporn.tv I realized that if I wanted to counter the global impact of porn as default sex education I had to create something with the potential to one day be just as mass, just as mainstream and just as all pervasive in our society as porn currently is today. So what I decided to do was I always emphasize to people that [MakeLoveNotPorn] is not anti-porn because the issue isn’t porn. The issue is we don’t talk about sex in the real world. If we did, amongst many other benefits, it would mean that people would bring a real world mindset to the viewing of what is simply an artificial entertainment. Our tagline is pro-sex, pro-porn, pro knowing the difference. Our mission is one thing only, which is to help make it easier to talk about sex. Talk about sex openly, honestly in the public domain, be that parents to kids, teachers to classrooms, everybody to everybody. Equally important is to talk about sex openly and honestly privately in your intimate relationships. So, what I decided to do, therefore, was to take every dynamic that exists out there in social media currently and apply them to the one area no other social network or platform is ever going to go in order to socialize sex and to make real world sex and talking about it socially acceptable and therefore ultimately just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram. So three and a half years ago my team and I launched makelovenotporn.tv, which is an entirely user generated crowd-sourced video sharing platform that celebrates real world sex. Anybody from anywhere in the world can submit, videos of themselves having real world sex and we’re very clear what we mean by this: we’re not porn, we’re not amateur. We’re building a whole new category on the internet that has never previously existed: Social Sex. So our competition isn’t porn, it’s Facebook and Youtube, or rather it would be if Facebook and Youtube allowed sexual self-expression and self-identification which they don’t. So real world sex videos on makelovenotporn are not about performing for the camera, they simply are about doing what you’re doing on every other social platform, which is capturing what goes on in the real world as it happens in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly, wonderful, beautiful, ridiculous humanness. We curate to make sure of that. We watch every single video from beginning to end to make sure it’s real. We don’t publish unless it is and we have a revenue sharing business model where part of the sharing economy, like Uber and AirBnb, you pay to rent and stream real world sex videos, and then 50% of that income goes to our contributors or as we like to call them, our [MakeLoveNotPorn] stars, because we would like our [MakeLoveNotPorn] stars one day to be as famous and celebrated as Youtube stars for the same reasons: authenticity, realness, individuality, and we would like them to make just as much money. We want to hit the kind of critical mass where one day your real world sex video [MakeLoveNotPorn] could hit a million rentals at 5$ per rental and we give you half of that income. We are the answer to the global economy. Now the one thing I did not realize when I created my team was that I would fight a battle every single day to build it. Every piece of business infrastructure, any other startup can at least take for granted; we can’t because the small print always says no at our content. And this is all pervasive across every area of the business in ways people beyond this realm don’t realize. We’ve been enormously well received in the three and a half years we’ve been going. In that time we’ve built up a community of 400.000 members with over 100 [MakeLoveNotPorn] stars. We have had over 1000 videos submitted. We began taking income on day one. Our revenue is very low, in the very low five figures every month, but in a world where the perceived wisdom is nobody pays for porn, they’re paying for real world sex, and we’ve done all this with only two full time employees – one of them is me, unpaid. So I have been working for some time to raise funding to enable [MakeLoveNotPorn] to scale. I need to raise two million dollars to turn [MakeLoveNotPorn] into the billion dollar venture I know it can be, and that is my sole priority of the moment.
How will you raise funds for MakeLoveNotPorn? Will you try to do it through KickStarter, through private investors or VCs?
Our biggest obstacle raising funding is the social dynamic of what I call “fear of what other people will think”, because it is never about what the person I’m talking to thinks. When you understand what we are doing and why we are doing it nobody can argue with it. The business case is clear. It is always the fear of what they think other people will think, which operates around sex more than in any other area. That rules out two of the usual three tech startup funding roots. First of all, it rules out the VCs: institution investors, too many stake holders. Secondly, it rules out crowd funding. Separate to the fact that all crowd funding platforms operate the 'no adult content' clause: KickStarter is no adult content, all other platforms draw an artificial distinction between sex-toys fine, people having sex on video not fine; but the bigger issue is that successful crowd funding requires a very large number of people willing to very publicly rally around something and very publicly invite everybody else in their network to do so as well. People will totally publicly rally around a piece of hardware, a video game, a movie concept – they will not publicly rally around in large numbers around anything to do with sex. So, that leaves the third root, which is angel-investors: privately wealthy individuals. And our challenge there is of any other startup: to do what they can with the our research and target. So, I have a two-pruned approach to find investors: a) I just ask publicly everywhere I go. I have no pride, I need help I ask for it. So, in every public speaking engagement I ask on stage for open-mind investors, every media interview I ask the journalist to write in the piece we look for investors and everything I do is I ask anybody I come across who they know personally because when you know somebody personally you know what they are like behind closed doors, what they like when they let their hair down, what they like when they talk about sex. Those are only key performance indicators for the kind of investor who might be our kind of investor. As you can imagine it is a very slow, painful process.
People/companies who influence me...
I guess I’d say John Bartle, Michael Bogle and John Hegarty and Dave Trott, he was my creative executive director at GGT before BBH.
In a film about my life, I’d like to be played by ...
Oh my God I have absolutely no idea. That is the kind of question you should ask other people. Honestly, I can’t answer that, I’ve never thought about it, I have no idea.
Would you play yourself? {laughs} I couldn’t imagine anybody making a movie about this.
A word or phrase I overuse ...
Umm… Fan-Fucking-Tastic.
My last social media update said ...
"It’s all the more reason to scrap next week’s third and final presidential debate. No person should have to be subjected to what Clinton dealt with on Sunday and, more important, no great democratic nation should be subjected to it either." The Boston Globe
My dream collaboration (both personal & professional) is ...
What would be your dream investor in this startup? If it would be the perfect investor and the perfect partner to take you to the next level.
I’ll give you a bit of a detailed answer for that ok? Um… because one of the things we’re raising funding for [MakeLoveNotPorn] is to be able to not just build up our capital, which is only half built at the moment because we’re tiny and bootstrapping, but we want to expand into several different areas on exactly the same principles as makelovenotporn.tv, use a generated crowd-sourced curated weapon sharing, and one of these areas is, pretty obvious, it’s sex education, so this is where instead of inviting people to submit real world sex videos, we would invite sex educators from all around the world to submit sex education materials that we would publish, segmented by age appropriateness, charge people to download, subscribe, bulk buy for your school and then split the revenue 50/50 with its creators. Another area is crafted content. So, we regularly get sent crafted produced videos, which are wonderful but are not in our criteria of social sex, which is at the moment spontaneous, as it happens. They’re somebody's fantasy, somebodies scenario. So, we want to expand to enable people to submit to us so that we can publish crafted erotic content from videos, art, photography, writing, essentially because at the moment if you are a writer, nobody encourages you to write creatively or expressively about sex. If you do you can’t get published. If you are an artist nobody encourages you to explore sexual things in your art. If you do you can’t find a gallery, you can’t find an agent, you can’t show your work, and you can’t sell it. I campaigned all the time for more honest, authentic portrayals of sex in popular culture as a whole, and so we want to enable people who are creatively exploring sex to be able to publish erotic videos, photography, art writing, be able to make money out of it with our revenue sharing business model but with the aim of pushing this out into the mainstream popular culture. The third area is we want to broaden out our definition of social sex and real world sex to embrace things like celebrations of body positivity, celebrations of love intimacy relationships, all across the media, art photography, writing. In other words we want to have an area of our platform where you can self-publish what currently gets you kicked off Instagram, blocked on Tumblr, Facebook account shut down, which is any form of perfectly natural healthy sexual self-expression and self-education, any nudity, even something as holy natural as you breastfeeding your baby. Currently if you publish a breastfeeding photograph on Facebook your account gets blocked. We are going backwards as a society when social platforms operate that policy, particularly when they operate at the kind of scale that Facebook does. And so my ideal investor and partner is Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook because we do so something that nobody else does: human curation. We have written a business plan that enables human curation to be scalable even at enormous scale for [MakeLoveNotPorn], and so I would like an investment from a partnership with Facebook. Because we curate everything from the eyes of human beings, because we have a specific philosophy that is about great sexual values, we would love a partnership with Facebook where when you publish something through [MakeLoveNotPorn] you can also publish it from Facebook because it is human curated sexual social self-expression. By that I don’t mean our real world sex videos, I mean safe for work content but that is nevertheless perfectly natural, normal, healthy sexual self-expression.
I teach in an ad school, because...
No, I haven’t taught, I’ve spoken at ad schools.
Why did you get involved? Because I was invited.
Among more than 40 world class speakers from advertising and creative industry who will share their knowledge at this year’s Golden Drum International Festival of Creativity, the biggest star of the show will definitely be the keynote speaker Cindy Gallop. Starting tomorrow in a new home, in Ljubljana.
