opinion

Build Your Brand With Marketing Consistency

Build Your Brand With Marketing Consistency

Has there ever been a time that a mistake was made with your marketing, that conveyed a message that didn’t truly embody your brand? We’ve all been there.

One of our publishers told me several years ago: “When I landed on the JuicyAds website, I knew that there was something different and it was something I wanted to be part of.” That choice is what ultimately drove them to be one of our publishers, and eventually that person rose above and became a very valued team member here at the company. Our company website changed a lot since those early days. For many years, I was solely in charge of our website design. That experience taught me one of my earliest and most valuable and humbling lessons about delegation: There is someone in the world better than you at most everything.

The world is filled with companies whose marketing does not truly embody what they are ... pursuing things that are not true to the brand, you run the risk of making the brand less of what it is for those who love it.

Six years ago I took a step back from the daily operations of JuicyAds for personal reasons. At that time I was rebuilding my life after a messy and soul-crushing divorce. The website was in dire need of a face lift and I was simply not in the mindset to handle it, and I had come to the hard realization that I was simply not a great web designer. The torch was passed to someone I hoped would revitalize it and they were allowed full creative freedom to do something amazing. What happened instead, was that we lost our juice.

I strongly believe our brand as the “sexy advertising network” was tarnished by that ill-fated design. After all, a company website is the first thing that new clients see before signing up, and the first thing existing clients see before logging in. New prospects often make up their minds swiftly. I’ve always strongly believed in keeping the JuicyAds brand “sexy and fun” but the new design seemed to make an effort to tone that down — a lot. The whole concept of being “juicy” has real meaning to us, but the new design was brutally mainstream, generic and boring. The design was not sexy and it wasn’t very JuicyAds, either. It lacked all the qualities that our brand embodied and undermined all the consistent marketing we had done over the years.

I voiced my concerns, emphasized what was truly wanted and even provided new images that we preferred to be included in the design. These suggestions did not materialize on the website during the time that design was live, and to this day, I believe that web designer just didn’t understand our brand and therefore could never deliver something true to it.

Sure, it’s possible that we gained thousands of clients who might not have been comfortable with our sexy feel. But, at what cost? How many thousands of others were not attracted to the mainstream feel? How many were shocked to discover that the majority of our advertising is for adult web properties? The company had not fundamentally changed, and the platform was the same. A mistake had been made. Our website marketing was at odds with the company itself.

The world is filled with companies whose marketing does not truly embody what they are. Sometimes companies will try to attract more people by becoming less of what they are through compromise. In the end, pursuing things that are not true to the brand, you run the risk of making the brand less of what it is for those who love it. Always remember that your brand doesn’t just belong to you and your company. Your brand belongs to everyone who uses it, believes in it and loves it.

After nearly 13 years, JuicyAds has won the award for “Best Adult Internet Brand” not once, but twice. Even though this happened during the years our “less juicy” website was online, it was a nod to the overall brand and provoked a strong desire to bring back the juice on our website. We took the necessary steps and brought in well-known adult industry designer Zuzana, who gutted the front-end design and delivered what we desired.

Despite what many companies attempt to do with their marketing (in adult, and mainstream alike) you can’t paint stripes on a horse and call it a zebra. We are a leading adult advertising network. That is who we are and we are proud of it. Unintentionally making our website look more “mainstream” made us less of what we are. This could happen to any brand, perhaps even yours. Mistakes happen, but what’s more important is correcting those mistakes as soon as possible and learning from them. Our new website redesign launched last month — that brought back the juice and we couldn’t be happier. We intend to stay true to what it means to be juicy and not lose our way again.

Juicy Jay is the CEO and founder of JuicyAds, the Sexy Advertising Network. You can follow Jay on Twitter @juicyads, visit JuicyAds.com or like on Facebook.com/juicyads.

Related:  

Copyright © 2024 Adnet Media. All Rights Reserved. XBIZ is a trademark of Adnet Media.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.

More Articles

profile

VerifyMy Seeks to Provide Frictionless Online Safety, Compliance Solutions

Before founding VerifyMy, Ryan Shaw was simply looking for an age verification solution for his previous business. The ones he found, however, were too expensive, too difficult to integrate with, or failed to take into account the needs of either the businesses implementing them or the end users who would be required to interact with them.

Alejandro Freixes ·
opinion

How Adult Website Operators Can Cash in on the 'Interchange' Class Action

The Payment Card Interchange Fee Settlement resulted from a landmark antitrust lawsuit involving Visa, Mastercard and several major banks. The case centered around the interchange fees charged to merchants for processing credit and debit card transactions. These fees are set by card networks and are paid by merchants to the banks that issue the cards.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

It's Time to Rock the Vote and Make Your Voice Heard

When I worked to defeat California’s Proposition 60 in 2016, our opposition campaign was outspent nearly 10 to 1. Nevertheless, our community came together and garnered enough support and awareness to defeat that harmful, misguided piece of proposed legislation — by more than a million votes.

Siouxsie Q ·
opinion

Staying Compliant to Avoid the Takedown Shakedown

Dealing with complaints is an everyday part of doing business — and a crucial one, since not dealing with them properly can haunt your business in multiple ways. Card brand regulations require every merchant doing business online to have in place a complaint process for reporting content that may be illegal or that violates the card brand rules.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Patricia Ucros

Born in Bogota, Colombia, Ucros graduated from college with a degree in education. She spent three years teaching third grade, which she enjoyed a lot, before heeding her father’s advice and moving to South Florida.

Women In Adult ·
opinion

Creating Payment Redundancies to Maximize Payout Uptime

During the global CrowdStrike outage that took place toward the end of July, a flawed software update brought air travel and electronic commerce to a grinding halt worldwide. This dramatically underscores the importance of having a backup plan in place for critical infrastructure.

Jonathan Corona ·
opinion

The Need for Minimal Friction in Age Verification Technology

In the adult sector, robust age assurance, comprised of age verification and age estimation methods, is critical to ensuring legal compliance with ever-evolving regulations, safeguarding minors from inappropriate content and protecting the privacy of adults wishing to view adult content.

Gavin Worrall ·
opinion

Account-to-Account Payments: The New Banking Disruptor?

So much of our industry relies upon Visa and Mastercard to support consumer payments — and with that reliance comes increased scrutiny by both brands. From a compliance perspective, the bar keeps getting raised until it feels like we end up spending half our time making sure we are compliant rather than growing our business.

Cathy Beardsley ·
profile

WIA Profile: Samantha Beatrice

Beatrice credits the sex positivity of Montreal for ultimately inspiring her to pursue work in adult entertainment. She had many friends working in the industry, from sex workers to production teams, so it felt like a natural fit and offered an opportunity to apply her marketing and social media savvy to support people she truly believes in and wants to see succeed.

Women In Adult ·
opinion

Understanding the Latest Server Processors

Over the last decade, we mostly stopped talking about CPU performance. Recently, however, there has been a seismic and exciting change in the CPU landscape, due to innovation by a chip company called Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Brad Mitchell ·
Show More