At divorce360.com, the chat rooms are abuzz with those buckled into the matrimonial roller coaster. "In the state of Georgia can a spouse go to jail if adultery is proved against him or her?" Anne1 writes. (No, answers a family lawyer, spaznskitz, who posts frequently, but "it would be nice, wouldn't it?")

And, asks Neshee, "I have made the decision to divorce my husband but my family keeps telling me to stay with him -- how do I tell them to butt out?" ("Let them know that you are fully aware of their opinion … but that you disagree," says Rhondaesq.)

Divorce isn't pretty, but it is a big business, as about half of all marriages in the U.S. break up. Yet despite the $72 million spent in the U.S. this year on getting hitched, per theknot.com -- with everyone from big-box retailers to florists peeling money off the newlyweds -- hardly anyone besides family lawyers advertising on the Web and in the Yellow Pages have targeted the divorced.

Enter divorce360.com. Launched last December, it's the most ambitious of the handful of Web sites now out there devoted to the category. It includes sections for each stage of divorce such as deciding, beginning and moving on, and articles for the bliss-less, including how to find out if spouses are cheating (check EZ Pass bills) and broaching divorce on a date (keep it short and don't deride the ex). It also features chat rooms and blogs to vent, sympathize and advise.

It's one of a growing number of sites with social-networking capabilities riding the wave of people flocking to "micro-communities," which center around particular interests or lifestyles. Spending on U.S. online social-network advertising is projected to exceed $2 billion in 2012, up from $920 million in 2007, per eMarketer, the Internet research firm.

Ann Mack, director of trendspotting at JWT, says what she calls the "nichification" of social media into smaller sites like divorce360.com is a boon for both users and advertisers. "I have so many friends in Facebook that I don't know who they are," says Mack. "It's nice to find a haven of like-minded people in the same or relatively same situation so you have shared experiences."

It's this evolution of the Internet, says Cotter Cunningham, chief executive of divorce360, that has made the Web site possible. "More than 6,500 people have written into the site, either keeping journals or posting in chat rooms," Cunningham says. "What we hear is that it's comforting to contribute and to hear what others are going through, and that's something that a traditional magazine just can't offer."

The site, according to Quantcast, now draws 72,000 unique visitors a month, and Cunningham aims to increase that to 500,000 by the end of the year, a level he says will draw major advertisers.

But despite its ubiquity, divorce for many marketers is still fraught with stigma. Even industries well aware that the newly divorced figure prominently among their customers have been reluctant to risk being a buzz-kill by depicting them in ads. So can a Web site on divorce, even one focused on community, convince marketers to come aboard?



Divorce: the final frontier

Cunningham is the former COO of publicly traded Bankrate.com, which had reported earnings of $95.6 million in 2007, and says last year it had nearly 60 million unique visitors. His interest in "life-event marketing" resulted in an initial investment of $1.5 million in divorce360, and the raising of millions more in venture capital.

"In general, most of the positive life events had been pretty much done," he says. "We started looking at the less-positive life events, like a death in the family, illness and divorce. And those were pretty open, frankly."

In settling on divorce, he cast his line into a well-stocked pond. In the U.S., 23 percent of women and 21 percent of men over the age of 15 have been divorced at least once, according to Census data. As many as half of first marriages are expected to end in divorce. (Although high, the annual number of divorces has been on the decline since the 1980s.)

And divorce, per divorce360's promotional materials, "is a significant driver of new purchases -- from financial needs such as credit reports, credit cards and mortgages, to personal improvement opportunities like diet and fitness programs. [It's also when] new brand preferences and loyalties will be established."

After all, it may have been decades since a newly separated husband decided what brand of cornflakes or toothpaste to buy, or a just-divorced wife managed a stock portfolio. (Or, vice versa.)

A Roper poll commissioned by divorce360 asked divorced respondents about various behaviors in the midst of their splits. Among the most common: losing weight (36 percent); changing or getting a job (33 percent); buying a car (30 percent), furniture (28 percent), or a house or apartment (25 percent); going on vacation (22 percent); going back to school (27 percent); and changing appearance (20 percent).

That sounds about right to divorce360 editor Marisa Porto, whose marriage hit the skids a decade ago. "I did pretty much all those things," Porto says. "I got a divorce, moved from Florida to Ohio, started a new job, sold a house and rented a new one, bought a Honda Accord and lost a bunch of weight -- all within three months in '98."

Attitude adjustments

Scott Coltrane, a sociologist and director of the Center for Family Studies at the University of California, Riverside, says attitudes about divorce have come a long way since the 1950s.

"People are having a shared experience of not having to create a fantasy of what a perfect family is," Coltrane says. "We've reached a critical mass and the stigma has reduced to the point where divorce is normal."



Coltrane, who has co-written articles with Michele Adams in scholarly journals about the history of divorce, says the topic became less toxic in the 1970s, when states began passing no-fault divorce laws. Instead of accusing a spouse of breaking vows by adultery or some other transgression, divorces could now be blameless, simply citing irreconcilable differences.

But today Coltrane sees the "potential for restigmatization" of divorce, as he and Adams put it in an article in the journal Family Process in 2006. President George W. Bush's Healthy Marriage Initiative, the growing prominence of fathers' rights groups and various state-level attempts to discourage divorce like requiring longer waiting periods between filing and final decrees all "reinforce the symbolic image of divorce as social disorder," they write.

Divorce in advertising "was definitely steered away from" well into the 1990s, says Jerry Della Femina, chairman and CEO of Della Femina, Rothschild Jeary & Partners. Della Femina says the industry tends to conform to mores, not question them.

"Advertising doesn't do anything until it's sure that everyone else is OK with it," he says. "Advertising doesn't lead, but we follow beautifully."

But we've come a long way since the 1970s, and Della Femina says for the new openness about divorce we can thank boomers. "Baby boomers are not that stoic generation that bit their lips and didn't say anything," he notes. "If they're not happy, they get divorced."

The millennial generation and Gen Xers, adds Mack, who "are products of divorced households," are helping to change attitudes as well.

But while less stigmatized than in earlier eras, divorce has barely surfaced in campaigns. Even the financial and real estate sectors, whose services are sought almost as much as lawyers' when marriages fail, traditionally have been circumspect about pitching to the divorced directly. And when it is broached, it's usually obliquely. Rarely is a spot explicit about whether, say, a single parent is indeed divorced and not widowed, or someone who has adopted a child alone.

In the early 1990s, after the divorce rate had peaked and was trending slightly downward, companies including Home Depot, Ikea, Volvo, Ford, and John Hancock Financial Services began addressing the divorced in their ads. The ads were often one-offs rather than broader marketing efforts, eschewing humor for more poignant messages.

Typical is a 2006 spot produced by mcgarrybowen for Century 21. It opens in a living room where a woman talks to her real estate agent, also a young woman, while her small daughter colors among unpacked moving boxes.



"Thank you," the young mother says.

"For what?" the agent responds.

"For this," she says, looking around the room. "For everything. On my budget, most agents would have given up on me. You must have shown me 20 different places."

"It was about 34," the agent says, smiling. "What's a few-dozen places among friends?"

The TV spot ends with the text: "Because life changes." Then, the tagline, "Agents of change."

Ken Toumey, who worked for Century 21 as vp of brand management and has since become an account integration director for mcgarrybowen, where he works primarily on Century 21, says the ad was not targeted at the divorced per se, but at single women.

"It seemed like it would make sense to speak to single females in an ad and we thought putting what appeared to be a divorced female in the ad would heighten the emotional connection," he says. "Just having the child there shows the woman has more to worry about than just herself and it's not just about finding the cool new condo."

Toumey reviewed the divorce360 site and says "it would be the type of thing I'd recommend to Century 21 to advertise on" because such niche marketing -- with old media as well as new -- can be effective.

"Much of advertising is about being adjacent to editorial [related to] the business you're in," Toumey says. "I find that needs-based marketing is a much more solid, strategic way of marketing than just demographic marketing. Divorce is clearly rampant and is in many ways the great, unspoken target out there. It's not shameful; it's a very large market."

In 2005, a Schwab TV spot created by Euro RCSG featuring a woman at a ski resort riding a chairlift was more divorce- explicit.

"So the papers came through -- I'm officially in charge of my own investments," she says. "I want to get some help, but I want someone I can work with, someone who will listen to my ideas, not just make all the decisions for me. That'll be a change after Larry."



But while that ad is far less ambiguous than most, Ben Stuart, a brand strategist at Schwab, says the impetus was simply to highlight the company's private client services, which enable clients to be hands-on with investments rather than completely deferring to financial advisors.

"At Euro RCSG they thought a woman going through a separation might illustrate that," Stuart says. "We didn't start out thinking people getting divorced are a great target, but rather that we had a service to highlight that was particularly collaborative. For us the divorce was a subtext."

Subtext or not, the divorce theme had a "halo effect" by resonating with the newly unwed, Stuart says.

"A lot of financial services companies including Schwab look at life changers as a trigger point for financial marketing," Stuart says. "And when you get divorced, that's a financial life event, with money being divvied up and house transactions."

Still, Stuart says, the company's ads have been far more apt to feature upbeat life events like babies, weddings and retirement. Death and divorce are dealt with "a little more subtly because we want to respect the emotional pain in dealing with that," he explains. "We don't want to turn anyone's pain into a marketing platform."

While the financial and real estate sectors may be circumspect about pitching to the divorced directly, both tool-sharpen to serve such clients once they appear.

Fadi Baradihi, president at the Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts, for instance, says his organization has certified 5,000 financial planners in the particulars of helping the estranged divvy up assets. At Realtor.org, several articles offer agents advice about divorced buyers and sellers, including "keep mum" with potential buyers about why a divorcing couple's house is listed so the buyers don't "think it's a fire sale."

Unmarried and unbowed

"Husbands are like guns" begins a divorce announcement card available on caddylakgraffix.com. "Keep one around long enough and you're gonna want to shoot it! (Jus' letting you know I got a divorce instead.)"



Hallmark, not nearly as cheeky, is acknowledging divorce as well. In a print ad that ran in magazines including People last year, a wedding party photo with bride and groom at the center has text describing others' backstories, with the mother of the bride being a cancer survivor, the father of the bride sober a year and a bridesmaid on a diet. A man and woman standing beside one another with pinched smiles have this text pointing to them: "Newly divorced and trying to look 'OK with it.'"

The ad introduces Hallmark's Journeys line, which it says is "for the stuff we face today," namely "new cards with real words for real life."

One card in the line reads on the outside, "Now when people ask you what's new, you have an answer," and continues inside, "My life."

As it turns out, no cards actually use the d-word. Explains Hallmark representative Eileen Gaffen in an e-mail: "Because each person's sending situation is different, cards are oftentimes kept, as we call it, 'universally specific' so that multiple people feel that the card is relevant to their situation."

Other retailers are less oblique -- or restrained.

When she started her online divorced-themed store last year, Smashing Katie, Angie Schmidt says it was to counter "the Hallmark attitude I despise of 'buck up -- it will be OK!'"

Instead, Schmidt, who launched the business in the wake of her divorce (Katie was the name of the neighbor with whom her ex cheated), features products on her site that suggest "it's OK to be upset and pissed off and it's also OK to laugh and make fun of divorce," she says.

One of Schmidt's biggest sellers is The Ex, a knife set with a human-figure holder that the knives stab through.

Schmidt also sells gift packages for divorce parties, which some party planners report are gaining popularity, and which often feature divorce cakes where a bride or groom may be depicted tumbling off the confection. Hotels throughout the country, including Hotel ZaZa in Dallas and Embassy Suites in Chicago, advertise divorce parties for women. Hedonism Resorts in Jamaica has divorce vacations for women and their gal pals, with offerings including what publicity materials describe as a "striptease aerobic class for ladies to add some sexy moves to their repertoire,"

Spending while spending time alone

In less than five months since it went live, divorce360.com already is the third most popular divorce site, behind the law-oriented divorcesource.com and divorcenet.com, according to Quantcast Web traffic data.



Still, Dan Couvrette, publisher of the twice-yearly Divorce Magazine (divorcemag.com), is puzzled why Cunningham perceived an opening in the divorce-content niche.

"Between divorcenet.com, divorcesource.com and us, we have so much in the way of content, information and resources that I would have thought it would have discouraged anyone from entering the marketplace," says Couvrette, who credits paid lawyers' listings for as much as 80 percent of revenue and whose site has an ad for Lavalife, a dating site. "Maybe they're a lot smarter than I am. They probably are."

Cunningham, of divorce360, is optimistic that the site will soon be inking deals with advertisers. "The most interest we've seen initially has been with financial services companies," he says, declining to identify any. Other possible buys, he says, are from a cell phone company (a family plan is problematic when a family dissolves) and a pharmaceutical company, which he says may use the site to advertise drugs for depression, anxiety or erectile dysfunction.

Della Femina is optimistic about the future of divorce marketing.

"It's kind of refreshing that advertisers are trying to reach divorced people," says Della Femina, who posits that the divorced may be the ideal marketing target. "You're getting people when they're at their happiest. Think about it: some of them have been with miserable jerks for so long and they're finally happy. And individually, they have more to spend than when they were together, so they're ready to buy a new car and do all these things they weren't going to do when they were married."