Risk-taking often goes hand-in-hand with creativity. Progressive leaders blaze unknown trails to explore what’s on the horizon and adopt new strategies that often become standard practices for years to come.
XBIZ World’s “Execs of 2018: The Year in Review” showcases the thoughts and strategies implemented by the forward-thinking executives that are driving the digital media market into the future.
Each of the executives we spoke to below is among the finalist nominees for the Progressive Leadership Award in the digital edition of the 2019 XBIZ Exec Awards.
What unique efforts did you make to inspire innovation at your company this year?
Colin Rowntree
Wasteland
“Our company doubled down on production quality in our films this year, which has now resulted in our most recent feature film, “Invictus,” being picked up by Sky TV in Europe, with strong interest by Netflix and Hulu. The film also received seven XBIZ Award nominations and has been submitted and in consideration for Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, and others. It’s great when this happens as it is “marketing food” for mainstream media coverage that filters back to our paysites with fresh eyeballs that are willing to purchase memberships and content. Win-Win!”
Steven Grooby
Grooby
“For any company that is still growing and being competitive within its market, constant innovation and change has to take place on a continuous basis and cannot be judged on one idea. In 2018, we’re one of the few paysite companies to continue to build niche sites for traditionally marginalized groups and realize profit there. We’ve focused on sites for mature trans women, for BBW trans women and for post-operative trans women with success. We’ve developed new content ideas in “web series,” which offer a season pass, to new products, and we’ve continued to increase awareness about trans people, especially in porn.”
Bella French
ManyVids
“Inspiring others is one of the hardest challenges that I face daily as a CEO: getting everyone motivated to think of creative ways to push the boundaries while maintaining the day to day operations. What is unique in our organization is that the team’s key mandate is to care and make a positive change in our industry. Our Big Audacious Goal is to normalize what is an outlier, to bring into the mainstream what is stigmatized and praise where there was shame. We see the results of our efforts in practice constantly. The response from the community is so overwhelming that it continues to feed our relentless drive to do more.”
Sascha Eierdanz
Erotik.com
“With the design of our new website Erotik.com, we have gone new ways by hiring non-industry internet experts. This differentiated view promotes new innovations from which our customers now profit.”
Ameen Soleimani
SpankChain
“I made using and interacting with our product a part of company culture. At SpankChain, I function as both CEO and CTO, so I know firsthand the pitfalls of building innovative tech. In dealing with crypto, my team isn’t just creating using rules that exist, we’re constantly exploring uncharted territory. That can mean losing sight of who we’re building for... and why. That’s why our community and development teams work in tandem. The line between user and developer gets blurred: most of our team has cammed on Spank.live (from Shibari AMA’s to coding live to getting STD tested in real time). We invited our core performers to come hang at our HQ (and have pink cocktails with the dev team), and the performers, users, and staff all chat freely on our Discord. There’s no “us” and “them,” especially with a team that's half sex-workers and almost entirely porn-watchers. Closing the gap is essential for how we ideate because the future we’re building is for all of us.”
Leah Callon-Butler
Intimate.io
“In October 2017, my team and I were rejected from exhibiting at the world’s largest annual tech conference, Web Summit, because the organizers thought the nature of our business would make female entrepreneurs feel “uncomfortable.” As newcomers to the adult industry, we were warned that we’d come up against these obstacles again and again, and I hate to think how many other entrepreneurs have given up on their dreams because of this pervasive stigma about human sexuality. But since then, I’ve met scores of amazing people who refuse to take “no” as an answer, and they inspire us to keep burning. Such as Bella French, the co-founder, and CEO of ManyVids, who was awarded the inaugural intimate.io Award for Social Impact at the 8th Annual YNOT Awards in Prague this year. This newly created annual accolade will amplify the efforts of those who demonstrate a prevailing spirit of bravery, inclusivity, and sex-positivity to empower our community and drive our industry forward.”
Ross Allan
TrafficForce
“The entire team has been as focused as ever this year to take our platform programmatic and inspire an entirely new way of buying traffic from us. In early 2017, we identified a big shift in the way people were looking to buy traffic — it wasn’t as cut and dry as it had been for the previous eight to 10 years; more people were talking about using APIs, integrating stats to their own systems, being able to push data from their own system into ours. We had a big discussion in-house and decided the time was right to build the programmatic system that would allow us to sell our huge supply of traffic in an auction-style all through technology working together. It was a collective effort with developers and sales teams working together to fine-tune the process, create the opportunities with other buyers and properly test to ensure the system worked as we needed. It was a huge amount of work, but in the end, we feel we have one of the best and most robust SSP’s in the online advertising business.”
“While it is me who has been nominated for the award for progressive leadership, it is really down to every member of our team and if we win, it would be an amazing reflection on all the hard work we put in. 2018 has been challenging, not only have we been busy with development but a few members of the team, myself included, became fathers for the first time this year. So, to build what we did and take on big, new, life-changing things at home at the same time, speaks volumes for the dedication of our entire team.”
Stephen Winyard
AVSecure
“We listened. We listened to the industry, consumers, governments, regulators, privacy activists, security experts and trusted our own knowledge and understanding. Delivering age verification technology on this scale is not for the faint of heart, and there is no greater feeling for inspiration or innovation than getting it right. And we have really got it right!”
Jay Philips
iWantEmpire
“We created iWantFanClub to monetize content through social media; connected iWantClips, iWantCustomClips, iWantPhone and iWantFanClub so fans and models could conduct all transactions on one dashboard and upsell other services; and took the clips industry into mainstream with a radio show on Sirius XM, national billboard campaign and feature articles in Allure, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, and Playboy etc., and redefined Artist First Values by developing a full service department for artists. We also partnered with FSC to offer discount cards for medical and legal services to the entire community, while fostering valued traits including curiosity, reciprocal communication, a willingness to grow and change, innovation, creativity, and accountability.”
