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Rebranding and the Mysterious Case of OnlyFans

Rebranding and the Mysterious Case of OnlyFans
7Sep

Mid-last month, the subscription site OnlyFans—prominent for its base of sexually explicit content creators—announced it would start banning “pornography” from its site at the beginning of October. This, understandably, came as a shock to both content creators and subscribers. 

If you thought that OnlyFans was a platform built specifically for explicit sexual content: no! It’s actually just like Patreon and other subscription-based services. You can create an OnlyFans account for any purpose, and many creators on the platform are going to be unaffected by this change.

So what happens when a majorly successful platform decides to go through what is, effectively, a rebrand? OnlyFans was only differentiated from its competitors by its endorsement and heavy promotion of sexually explicit content. Without that, what does the future of OnlyFans look like? 

Let’s take a walk down memory lane and look back with fondness at one of the great rebrands of history: McDonald’s. If you can remember all the way back to the early 1990s, you’ll likely remember a very different McDonald’s than exists today, one of differently themed restaurants and Ronald McDonald with his colorful cast of friends. What even was Grimace anyway? The answer remains unknown.

The fast-food chain had been long associated with children’s meals and maintained a child-friendly aesthetic. Unfortunately, McDonald’s also had a reputation for being really unclean and low quality. Soon, the area of Play Places and seats shaped like hamburgers was gone and now McDonald’s all have a uniform, cubist design and are going for more of a bistro feel.

A successful rebrand will do more than change the aesthetic appeal of a brand—when you do it right, it can change how customers feel about the brand itself. Pretty much overnight McDonald’s was a reputable establishment again. It had matured, but you could still go get a Big Mac when you wanted one. It was McDonald’s demeanor and appearance that changed, not their services.

With any rebrand comes some amount of backlash, but the inevitable turn that’s in store for OnlyFans is almost guaranteed to be more volatile, and at least partially deserved. Right now their decision has caused two potentially cataclysmic problems for their brand.

  1. Everyone who was paying OnlyFans for access to sexually explicit content is going to take their money to a competitor, likely JustFor.Fans, a site which is much less coy about the fact that it was specially designed for sex workers.
  2. All of the creators who were paying their rent with OnlyFans subscription money are going to have some choice words and tarnish the reputation of the site even further, painting the site as hypocritical. After all, they were fine with NSFW content up until now—what changed?

What changed was that it came time for OnlyFans to scale its operations and investors got nervous. If you’re internet savvy and this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s pretty much exactly what happened with one of the most disastrous examples of rebranding: Tumblr.

Tumblr was originally a blogging/comment board/fandom platform with little to no moderation, meaning that NSFW content was pretty common (although most of the sexually explicit content on Tumblr was stolen and not being posted there by creators so there is a little bit of difference). 

In 2013, Tumblr was bought for $1.1 billion by Yahoo, Inc., who promptly demanded that all sexual content be removed. The site’s views and usership plummeted and it’s changed hands multiple times as owners have tried to wash their hands of their bad purchase. What Yahoo once acquired for over a billion dollars, WordPress bought for around $3 million in 2019.

Is this an Icarus tale where OnlyFans tried to fly too close to the sun? With the money the platform is bound to lose, time may show that they would have been better off keeping their operations at the level they were.

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How to Succeed on Social Media By Using Your Competitors

How to Succeed on Social Media By Using Your Competitors
3Sep

by Christopher Tompkins | ENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP NETWORK CONTRIBUTOR

Social media marketing can all be a bit of a haze, especially if you’re going into it with an untrained eye. Your posts are getting interactions, but are they getting enough? What could you do to make them perform better? Are the conversions you’re making off of social media ads enough to justify the time spent?

Data is what’s going to define success. Being able to measure how well your content is doing will ultimately tell you if you’re succeeding in the digital arena or not.

In the past decade, brands have flooded to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more — and many of those brands are your competitors.

This article originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com, on September 3, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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3 Reasons Why A Competitive Analysis Is Essential

3 Reasons Why A Competitive Analysis Is Essential
3Sep

You take on a new client: an ice cream brand that isn’t quite on the level of Ben & Jerry’s, but it’s on the rise and has serious potential to disrupt the industry. But, before you can start thinking big, you need to get a better picture of the landscape for the product to find how similar products in your industry are doing — and more importantly, what they’re doing. You need to do a competitive analysis.

A competitive analysis needs to go much deeper than looking at your competitors’ social media or advertising efforts for comparison. Take a look into their history, who they consider their closest competitor and where they’re succeeding and falling short on selling their products.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, on September 3, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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How Agency Executives Can Encourage More Diversity In The Industry

How Agency Executives Can Encourage More Diversity In The Industry
3Sep

by Forbes Agency Council | Expert Panel 

Diversity has been a hot topic in the business community for decades. Today, many companies are doing more than just talking about increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in their workplaces; they’re taking action, putting policies and practices in place that they hope will open new doors, eliminate bias and barriers to entry and entice candidates with different backgrounds, abilities, demographics, education levels, experiences, skills and expertise.

One industry in particular, however, has some catching up to do: Statistics show leaders and employees in marketing, advertising and PR are still, by and large, overwhelmingly white and male. As agencies work to spread brand messages extolling the virtues of equity and inclusion for their clients, the makeup of their workforce doesn’t always reflect those sentiments.

To provide a clearer picture of what can be done to improve DEI in their industry, a panel of Forbes Agency Council members explored different ways the executives who lead agencies can encourage more diversity by changing how they approach their work and hiring practices.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, on September 3, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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12 ‘Old-School’ Marketing Tactics That Still Work

12 ‘Old-School’ Marketing Tactics That Still Work
1Sep

by Forbes Agency Council | Expert Panel 

If you are old enough to remember the Fuller Brush salesperson knocking on your door, you may have noticed that certain marketing maneuvers that were once ubiquitous seem to have disappeared. Given the buzz and energy around digital and social media advertising in recent years, some old-school tactics have fallen out of favor with marketers, but as with everything in life, what once was old is new again.

Reaching consumers with your brand message without resorting to the tried-and-true modern standards of using display, programmatic and social media ads may sound impossible. However, adopting and updating strategies that once reigned supreme can breathe fresh life into your marketing efforts. Moreover, if you can integrate some of these old-fashioned marketing tactics into a comprehensive digital strategy, your brand could reach even more potential customers.

To inspire new ways of leveraging old tricks, the members of Forbes Agency Council shared “old-school” marketing tactics they recall from their youth that they continue to employ today because they are still effective.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, on September 1, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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11 Ways VR And AR Stand To Impact Advertising, Marketing And PR

11 Ways VR And AR Stand To Impact Advertising, Marketing And PR
31Aug

by Forbes Agency Council | Expert Panel 

When virtual reality and augmented reality technologies first appeared on the scene, consumers were excited about the possibilities. While VR/AR tech is still evolving, many of the futuristic applications people imagined have yet to manifest. Those that have been brought to life are popular among certain communities of early adopters, but the widespread use of VR and AR hasn’t quite taken off—except in the realm of advertising, marketing and PR.

Agencies and in-house marketers and advertisers are experimenting with VR and AR in unique ways that promise to change the landscape of advertising, marketing and PR over time. What does this mean for those working in this space? Here, 11 experts from Forbes Agency Council share different ways they envision the VR/AR evolution playing out in the world of marketing, advertising and PR in the near future.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, on August 31, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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10 Unexpected Storytelling Lessons From Agency Leaders

10 Unexpected Storytelling Lessons From Agency Leaders
27Aug

by Forbes Agency Council | Expert Panel 

If you go looking for tips on how to tell a great story, you won’t have to search very far or wide. There are millions of different pieces of advice out there on storytelling. Many are valuable and sound, but most of them reiterate the same basic concepts: Be authentic, know your audience and draw them in with an emotional hook.

While those are indeed useful bits of conventional storytelling wisdom, people who work in the fast-paced world of marketing and advertising and make a living out of telling stories that provoke thoughtful action have likely attained some more unusual perspectives on what makes a great story.

Below, ten members of  share surprising things they have learned after years spent building narratives that resonate with target audiences. See how they’ve put these unexpected lessons to work in their careers—and how you can do the same.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, on August 27, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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How Marketers Can Leverage Partnerships In The World Of Paid Fan Content

How Marketers Can Leverage Partnerships In The World Of Paid Fan Content
25Aug

by Forbes Agency Council | Expert Panel 

With the creator economy exploding and social media fans becoming more aware of its lucrative potential, quality user-generated content may not be free for brands to use much longer. In the burgeoning world of paid fan content, merely having their work showcased by a brand online might not be enough of a draw for fans any longer.

As social media users come to realize how valuable the fan content they produce really is to the brands they follow, marketers must focus on building stronger partnerships with these content creators to retain access to what used to be considered “free” user-generated content.

Here, seven members of  share tips to help marketers build more effective partnerships with creators to create and leverage paid fan content.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, on August 25, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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Is Your Blog Terrible? Fix it in 5 Easy Steps

Is Your Blog Terrible Fix it in 5 Easy Steps
24Aug

Look at your online marketing as a multi-layer, albeit unified machine. Your website, email blasts, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even your Angie’s List page should all work together. But there’s something missing. A blog.

Blogs are what we like to call “semi-temporary content”, meaning that in 5 years one of your blogs could still be useful, but nobody is going to be studying them in high school English class 200 years from now. What they’re mostly useful for is establishing yourself as a thought leader and having a constant churn of content that will generate clicks to your website. In short: it ain’t that serious. But, that isn’t an excuse to have a bad blog.

Before you sign up and start fooling around with your layout, be wary of these 5 BIG mistakes even the most experienced bloggers may find themselves making:

  1. Going in blind. One of the greatest sins in the world of blogging is leaving massive gaps of time between posts. It’s the best way to lose all your followers. The most common reason for this is a lack of strategy. You just don’t know what else to write! While that’s understandable, it’s not acceptable. Before you publish that first blog, get a calendar and plot out a few weeks to a month’s worth of content. Don’t run out!
  2. Isolating your blog. Remember what I said about your brand’s online marketing being a multi-layer, albeit unified machine? Don’t forget to promote your blog on your other avenues. Post about your new blogs on Facebook and Twitter, have a link on your website and spread the word via email blasts. Also, why do double work? If planned correctly, your long-form blog can be broken up into a couple of shorter newsletters, which could then be broken up into several posts – all linking and leading back to your website!
  3. Being a copycat. Yes, everyone needs a spark of inspiration at times and tends to find it by reading other people’s work. But do NOT plagiarize their info. It’s a good way to get into a whole mess of trouble. If you need to reference another article, do so in a courteous and professional fashion. All content is out there to be shared along with your thoughts on it—just be sure to give credit, where credit is due.
  4. Sloppy writing. I’m not just talking about typos or grammatical errors. (although you should definitely check your work. Have you tried Grammarly yet?)  Before you hit the keyboard, get your thoughts straight. Stick to a solid plan, get your point across, and keep your thoughts in order.
  5. Readers won’t learn anything. After reading a blog or article, a person should have taken away something from the experience. Whether it’s a new tip or a grudge against the reader’s opinions, your blogs should have an impact. Share knowledge, tips, tricks, and facts. Data always dominates (but make sure it’s correct). Whether people realize it or not, a blog tends to have an educational element at its core.

Are you ready to start blogging? It’s an integral part of a company’s online presence. Not a big fan of writing? No worries! The Go! Agency’s experienced copywriters create powerful and knowledgeable articles for our clients every single day.

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14 Key Customer Engagement Tools Startups Need In Their Martech Stack

14 Key Customer Engagement Tools Startups Need In Their Martech Stack
17Aug

by Forbes Agency Council | Expert Panel 

Every startup today needs to leverage marketing technology to be able to grow, scale, build strong customer relationships and keep up with competitors. However, not every startup has a huge marketing budget, and most can’t afford to spend those dollars on consulting fees and solutions that may not meet their needs in the end.

Curating the most useful martech stack for your startup is essential. With so many options available, though, knowing where to start can feel overwhelming if you’re not familiar with all of the different possibilities.

If you could use some guidance in selecting the right mix of tech tools to strengthen your startup’s marketing efforts, the members of Forbes Agency Council shared their best tips to help you determine where to invest your precious resources.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, on August 17, 2021. Read the rest of the article here.

 

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