If you are advertising on social media and/or the open web via hashtag#programmatic display, take some extra time this year to understand the available brand safety settings offered by each ad vendor or platform where you run campaigns.

The second stat below is quite clear. Over half of all consumers feel it's your job as the brand to control what content your ads are seen next to, even if you buy your media exclusively on a programmatic or automated method.

The third stat is equally as blunt in terms of outcome, if you don't control where your ads get served - 3 out of 5 people would be less likely to buy or use your product if it was advertised next to questionable content.

What defines "questionable content" will require you and your stakeholders to make some decisions which become updated ad targeting parameters and thus refined business rules around brand safety.

Years ago, this long winded phrase hit me like a brick: Innovation without monetization is art without an audience.

It sounds lofty, but the premise is straightforward. If you or your firm creates something amazing and it can't or doesn't get nurtured commercially, it won't be seen or used (art without an audience).

Whether you create entertainment content, artwork in any form, or technology & software, innovation, the cornerstone of progress, propels us forward, igniting revolutions across all industries, and occasionally helps reshape the contours of human existence.

Your brainchild's potential lies dormant without the vital tether to monetization. This intricate relationship between innovation and monetization mirrors the symbiotic bond between art and its audience. Just as art finds its purpose in the eyes of beholders, innovation finds its validation in the market's embrace. To overlook this nexus is to consign innovation to the shadows, rendering it a mere echo of its potential.

The intersection of innovation and monetization is indispensable, akin to the relationship between art and its audience. Just as art finds its purpose in the eyes of beholders, innovation finds its validation in the market's embrace. Innovation without monetization is akin to art without an audience—devoid of impact, relevance, and resonance.

Build and create products, technology and art that matters. Bring it to market and let innovation be fueled by audiences who benefit from the existence of your work.

As a principle learned from my technical colleagues and applied to the purchase of performance driven media on all platforms: optimizing advertising budgets requires embracing an agile approach!

More simply, it's about being scrappy!

In today's competitive market, every dollar counts. That's why we've adopted an agile methodology to our paid advertising strategy, ensuring we make the most of our resources while maximizing results, no matter the client, industry or audience focus.

Here's how we're maximizing impact:

**Efficient Allocation:** With agility, we're able to quickly identify high-performing channels and allocate budget accordingly. By continuously monitoring and adjusting our spend, we ensure that every penny is working towards our goals.

**Cost-Efficient Experimentation:** Agile empowers us to test new ideas and strategies without breaking the bank. By running small-scale experiments and learning quickly from the results, we minimize risk while uncovering valuable insights.

**Optimized Performance:** By focusing on what works and cutting out what doesn't, we're able to optimize our advertising performance over time. This iterative approach allows us to continuously improve efficiency and drive better ROI.

**Adaptability to Market Changes:** With agile, we're able to swiftly respond to shifts in the market or changes in consumer behavior. Whether it's reallocating budget to capitalize on emerging trends or scaling back in response to external factors, we stay nimble and adaptable.

**Transparent Reporting:** Agile is not just about making quick decisions—it's also about being data-driven. We provide transparent reporting on the performance of our advertising efforts, giving stakeholders visibility into where every dollar is spent and the return it generates.

All of these factors and more are applicable to every paid media format and platform, from paid social & SEM, to programmatic display.

Embracing an agile approach to advertising budgets isn't just about stretching your dollars—it's about making smarter investments that drive real results.

Curating wins for enterprise client growth via targeted paid media buying efforts is a passion 27 years in the making.

Never stop learning, even when you are nailing the metrics on the daily!

View Scott's certification here

Sometimes, an afternoon at the museum, in this case the High Museum of Art, can help inspire the next campaign’s visual themes through reflection on the meaning behind incredible artworks. Today did not disappoint.

As a site operator, it can be difficult to compete in the adult content landscape, but there are ways to do so. One is niche - the narrower the niche your content covers, the better your chances of competing are.

Relationship is another way that you can set yourself apart from the competition. Relationship has been a difference maker in sales since the beginning, when the first cave man was selling his buddy a new club.

What do I mean by relationship as it relates to your sites? Simple. Any interaction between two human beings results in a relationship. In our case, your websites act as an agent for you in the interaction with the other party. The better the interaction, the better the relationship developed.

I learned the impact of relationship first hand as one of the founders of Adult Revenue Service, more commonly known as ARS. In the early days of the internet, it was difficult to find places that were selling website traffic. And we needed website traffic to sell porn site memberships.

There came a time when I had exhausted all the available inventory and had to look elsewhere to further our growth. It was in the affiliate market that we focused our efforts with the creation of Adult Revenue Service.

There were other affiliate programs operating and they all had a policy of not communicating with the affiliates that were referring customers. With Mancash, and ARS, I took the opposite approach. I embraced communicating with affiliates. I made the phone number, email address and ICQ contacts available. And I personally answered affiliate requests for a long time.

During a time when contacting an adult affiliate program operator was nearly impossible, having the ability to pick up the phone and speak to another human being on the other side was a huge deal to affiliates. This resulted in many, many relationships developed that created not just loyalty, but a word-of-mouth growth machine that brought us new affiliates by the hundreds.

Once we learned the lesson of relationship, we doubled down on our efforts. We introduced weekly payouts one week after the end of the payment period, in many different formats. We introduced the first rewards program, designed to improve our relationships with affiliates and earn their loyalty.

We designed the only program of its kind called Experts in the Field. This program recruited experts in a certain niche that were available to any affiliate to help them learn how to sell in that respective niche.

All of these were driven by our desire to build profitable, trusting relationships with our affiliates, who kept us supplied with customers, so much so we didn’t have to spend much on advertising our porn sites directly. We set the bar for all other programs to try to reach in order to attract affiliates and our numbers proved it. We were paying out over $1M a month in affiliate commissions in late 1999.

This is how relationship makes a difference and helps you compete in a highly competitive market. If you want to build relationships as a strategy to compete in your market, you need to first solve for your customers happiness - by giving them what they want. In the case of porn sites, that usually comes in some format of valuable content.

You can infer what your customer wants by narrowing down in terms of niche offering. You can infer what they want by how they got to your website. But the best way to know what your potential customers want is to ask them.

“Ask what people want, then give it to them.”
- Ask. by Ryan Levesque

If providing value through content is the engine that drives your sales funnel, it’s user intelligence that helps you create the valuable content they want. The user journey is where you collect this intelligence. Each piece is integral to growing your relationships, which will in turn grow your business.

What are you doing to grow profitable relationships with your visitors, leads, and customers?

If you’re interested in leveraging relationships to amplify your adult business, talk to me and my team. Let’s make the relationship better.

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Becky is COO and head of Marketing Technology at Buoyancy Digital, the premier digital advertising team for age restricted industries, including adult entertainment. For more information, contact her via email at becky@bdllc.org , on XBiz.net or at BuoyancyDigital.com

Let’s Fix your Conversion Process and Web Site Output

We are pleased to announce the availability of high level marketing infrastructure & operational support services. Our operations chief Becky brings over 20 years of proven talents with optimizing the digital end user experience to drive sales. She was a co-founder at ARS, one of the first and largest subscription content eCommerce site portfolios & affiliate networks online.

Becky and the Buoyancy Digital team will strategize and build optimized digital marketing infrastructure that blends content with user intelligence, personalization and automation to develop & nurture relationships via digital communication channels until they become profitable.

This offering is agnostic of how the client is sourcing their digital visitors, as well as their specific eCommerce business models & product/service offerings, markets served, etc.  For tangible deliverables, they  break down into these buckets:

1. Website design or redesign, guided by the client’s existing marketing goals and sales processes.

   This includes assessment of current website setup and associated technology & service provider integrations, with a comparison to company goals.

   Proposed integrations & changes to sites, systems or landing pages for clients will allow for major client gains in the following areas: improved data and actionable intelligence gathering; greater use of personalization in all client digital touchpoints; expanded use of marketing automation tools, systems and strategy; implementation and/or deployment of conversational interfaces are also included as necessary, to help brands better develop one-to-one relationships with all website & social media page visitors, regardless of which marketing channel drove the user, and thus improve the lifetime value of your customer relationships.

2. Paid media campaign augmentation: includes assessment, optimization or fresh creation of landing pages (designed to convert on your campaign objectives) integrated with a CRM (customer relationship management) platform to collect intelligence that your company can act on today to improve site output.

   Proposal and implementation of CTA (call to action) supporting mechanisms: dependent on campaign objectives (lead collection, point of sale, click to call, etc.).  It includes bespoke marketing tech stack to measure and optimize campaigns.

   Automated relationship nurturing to move users closer to finding value worth paying for whatever you are selling.

3. Funnel implementation: translate the sales process to well designed user experiences that create and build the necessary relationships to convert causal visitors into customers.

   Funnel steps and transitions are guided by company sales process, strategies, and goals.

4. Digital relationship management:  using communication channels such as email and messenger services to nurture relationships, and thus increase client engagement, CTR, & to meet and exceed sales/revenue objectives from your existing client base, across all channels of communication.

Talk to us. We’ve built, managed and/or improved upon site performance for clients across the Internet since it’s commercial inception in the 1990’s. We are no-bull, get into the weeds operators with over 60 years experience in the field. We can recommend, implement, optimize and report on the success of conversion and customer engagement solutions tailored to your specific brand situation and driven by data & experience.

For more information, contact us online or write Becky via convmar@bdllc.org

Register now at https://partnersconnect.withgoogle.com/event/buoyancy-digital-llc

We are a Google AdWords accredited agency with over 60 years of combined experience in digital marketing, SEM, eCommerce operations, SEO & affiliate & influencer program management.

Staying current with paid search best practices & techniques as well as AdWords policies & feature updates through certification is part of our commitment to bringing our best game to every client project.

As a committed digital marketing and SEM service provider, Buoyancy Digital is pleased to re-certify its' standing as an AdWords certified Google Partner, with a specialization in mobile SEM.

When you need to learn from a tried and proven branding expert at scale, talk to Martin, listen to his insights and read Small Data.