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Welcome to "The Most Handsome Man in the World" - a long overdue newsletter about business that takes the mainstream and adult space equally seriously.
2,662 words
Executive Summary:
- This is the home of a new business and marketing newsletter by Samuel Agboøla.
- Sam has a unique breadth of experience in both the mainstream and adult content space. This newsletter will be about both.
- The newsletter is for all business-people and entrepreneurs, and will draw on the complete range of Sam's unique experience, delivered in a safe for work format.
- You can join now for a unique and inclusive perspective on business, marketing and entrepreneurship which takes the adult space seriously; as a market people on the cutting edge can draw lessons from, and as an area which needs professional help.
In the year 2000 Seth Godin published his book, “Unleashing the Ideavirus”, for free online. It’s the ur expression of his belief that, because the cost of sharing things digitally is zero, any upside–however minuscule–is worth it.
His premise, in a paragraph, is as follows. Physical objects in the real world have tangible value, which means you can’t launch your homemade jam by handing people jars of it at the farmers market. You’ll run out of jam before you make any money. Online those economics don’t apply. Giving a million things away costs the same as giving away just one. Zero. So if it takes 10,000 freebies to generate a single sale that’s a scaleable, profitable approach.
Seth was among the first people to understand this shift. He realised that the people who give the most away, to the most people, most effectively, will be set to win the marketing wars of the digital age. Blitz-scaling marketing without the need for limitless investor cash, well before the phrase was invented.
It seems obvious because it’s smart, but it’s only ubiquitous because people read Godin, and others, and used their insights to build the world we live in now a quarter of a century on.
In the late 90s I was one of the 65,000 people who made up the H1-B visa’s 5th cohort. Thanks to a science degree and my job in publishing, I was seen as someone with a body of highly specialised knowledge who couldn’t easily be hired in the US. At least I was after my new employer’s attorneys stepped in to assist.
On arrival in California I, and my fellow immigrant H1-B co-worker, soon realised we were overqualified and underpaid. It explained how our employer had happily spent nine months, eight intercontinental flights, and 600 1997-dollars an hour with their white-glove legal firm, to bring us in. We’d paid for it all ourselves, in reduced wages relative to our peers. Even so, my income tripled thanks to the huge difference in compensation on either side of the pond, and I was happy.
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles my company—then the second largest retailer of computers in the US—arranged for a marketing guru to come in and give our team a talk, the then relatively unknown Seth Godin.
Appropriately bald and monk-like he was promoting his book Permission Marketing. Its premise was so spot on and influential that it’s hard to discuss without making the world seem insane before he came along. It boils down to earning the right to communicate with people via small interactions which respect their privacy and don’t waste their time. It was radical back when companies used the web like manic street preachers holding megaphones and email marketing meant spam. It’s still worth reading because a lot of his advice has been forgotten, ironically, in this era when the ancient and unsexy art of effective email has become central to a lot of businesses again. My copy still sits an arm’s length from my desk.
What I remember Seth saying most vividly during the Q&A when I asked him where to draw the line on offering people enticements was, “Give away as much as you can without slitting your own throat”.
It sounded practiced, but if it was he must have decided it wasn’t aligned to his personal brand as he doesn’t appear to have committed it to print. Therefore with full acknowledgment of his thought leadership I’m claiming it here as the first of my marketing principles.
“Give away as much as you can without slitting your own throat.” —Samuel Agboola
That’s what this blog/newsletter (nog? bog?) is inspired by. Giving away what I know without restraint. An effort to find a new audience, build a community of like-minded individuals, share knowledge, and learn something.
So why am I worth listening to?
”I’m probably one of the best read idiots in the world” —Louise Brooks
Personally and professionally I’ve always been what would have been described in Victorian times as a gentleman amateur. Someone then defined as a person deeply interested in a lot of things for reasons other than immediate financial gain.
I studied physics, computer science and microelectronics at university; received training in writing, sales, design and marketing at work; and taught myself everything else necessary to manage 20 years of technological change in business. Without doubt I know more about the things I’ve picked up over the course of my career, than the subjects I went to university to study, and I wouldn’t want to work with anyone (bar a new graduate) who said any different.
The greatest gift of my formal education has been learning to be comfortable with uncertainty. Science starts with the admission that something isn’t fully understood. To answer questions you are required to embrace results which don’t align with your preconceptions, and acknowledge that reality is messy. You learn that an experiment hasn’t failed when it doesn’t turn out as you expected it to, it’s just delivering results you didn’t predict. You are taught that extracting the right lesson from your data is what’s smart, not being able to correctly guess what will happen in advance. Most importantly you learn to say “I don’t know.”
The other benefit of a scientific education is a comfort with numbers. Not in terms of an ability to add things up, but an understanding of nuances like the difference between accuracy, repeatability and statistical noise.
The idea that numbers offer clarity independent of analysis is false, especially when they are being provided by companies with a vested interest in taking your money. More so when being analysed by people who don’t question them. Numbers in a business context are most often used to add a veneer of scientific legitimacy to outcomes which appear from a void.
We live in an age where common sense and good practice can be pounded into paste by someone with a Powerpoint deck and an extrapolated trend-line which moves up and to the right. Once the only numbers that mattered were what was in the bank, and how much you were making. Today people sit through meetings in which they debate how many seconds of a video clip count as a positive interaction, in order to decide how much more to spend on something which isn’t making money.
Bob Hoffman has been sounding the alarm on this, online and in print, for years. Not just about how corrupt the online ad business has proven to be, but how incompetent executives crave the illusory “proof” bogus statistics provide.
The extent of this madness is horrifying.
51% of all web traffic is non-human of which 37% is malicious. 22% of all ad spend on the web is lost to fraud, and 15% on mobile.
Anyone trying to work out why their promotions aren’t working, who isn’t factoring in that a quarter of their budget is being lost to thieves, is shooting themselves in the fly. Especially when some genius “expert” is trying to claim that changing the colour of a button will boost clickthrough by a fraction of a percent.
At the advent of my career I sold ads in magazines. There was no reliable data on their distribution because even if you knew who’d bought every copy, you couldn’t know how, or if, they were read. Despite this companies invested millions and huge businesses were built, including many entirely dependent on their advertising’s effectiveness.
I remember when one magazine my employer produced, Computer Shopper, sold a million pounds worth of ads in a single month for the first time. That book (pretentious publishing speak for magazine) was mostly ads. Huge 60 page catalogues printed by the thousand and blown-in to each issue. We couldn’t tell the people spending hundreds of thousands to produce and publish one who saw it, how long they looked at it for, their name, age or location. It didn’t matter. If you were looking at Computer Shopper you were, by definition, a computer shopper. The ads worked.
Back then advertisers could be assured that we’d held up our end of the deal, by walking into a shop, buying a copy and looking for their ad. A very different experience from giving someone your payment info and then hoping that the click count posted to a dashboard is real. Yet too many people steer their marketing efforts with a myopic focus on data they cannot audit, like confused drivers accelerating happily off a cliff because their navigation app told them to.
This does not mean all is lost. We can treat the data we collect with the same skepticism we did before the digital ad-space meant numbers are all we had. As a useful guide to what’s happening, but not a replacement for ground truth.
Without a numbers-only mindset what makes marketing work can be seen as what it always was. A creative art. I’d like to talk about that in detail.
“I know it when I see it" –United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart
The other quality that makes my insight valuable is the breadth of my experience. Everyone’s unique but I really have got around to an impressive degree. I was born, schooled, and went to University in the UK after which I started work in publishing in London. I then moved to California to work in tech, and from there went into the adult entertainment industry. I then launched my first startup from Eastern Europe, before becoming a global citizen, getting my American passport, and starting business in, and working from, all over Europe, Australasia and the US. My adventures touched on everything from online dating and mainstream film, to finance, consulting for public figures, and working with some of the biggest companies on the planet.
I’ll give you a moment to read that paragraph again in case you missed it.
Yes, at the turn of the century I was offered a job at a startup in Los Angeles. A thriving company with just under fifty employees all working for a thirty-one year old founder who’d started the business in her twenties. She had little formal education but a brilliant mind and a firm grasp on the future. She had turned her day-job as a stripper in Seattle into a multi-million dollar business and a Hedcut on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. She was for years the smart, pretty, eloquent face of America’s adult industry as well as the person I reported to. A woman known to the public as Danni Ashe.
The website she’d built wasn’t “porn” as it’s known today. It featured nude images of her and other women but no sex, no men, no toys, no penetration and nothing really explicit. It was “adult” at the level of Emily Ratajkowski's Instagram, or Playboy, if you swapped that publication’s pretence for a sense of humour. However in the puritanical United States porn-is-porn and, just a couple of years after everyone had seen Boogie Nights, people who found out about my new role assumed I was responsible for, or approving of, any real or imagined pornographic excess they could imagine.
They thought I toiled in a damp basement surrounded by men in stack heels and crying runaways, while in fact my days were spent talking to producers at Entertainment Tonight, chatting with Kara Swisher at the Wall St. Journal (back when porn was her beat), planning trips to the Cannes film festival and drafting Danni’s congressional testimony on child safety.
I remember getting into shape after a health kick, and being asked by a stranger at a party if I could share the names of any films I’d been in. I quickly learnt that when you have a “taboo” job everyone knows about it before you meet them. I can’t say I wasn’t flattered to be confused with someone anyone would pay to see naked, but I didn’t like being thought of as a “pornographer” when that word was so closely associated with abuse, crime and ugliness.
So for years my dip into the adult industry was something I held close and tried to minimise. Though it got me a lot of work from people who respected what Danni achieved, that admiration was always layered behind public opprobrium. People clung to the American fantasy that decent people don’t look at naked bodies and only masturbate between their 18th birthday and marriage.
Today I recognise my experience and insight as a unique advantage. Almost no one alive has worked as broadly as I have, and the adult industry is hard.
When your business is considered to be vice, every conventional door is closed. It’s impossible to borrow money and the people who do deign to talk to you are condescending and exploitative. For a well run company the additional hurdles are daunting. While the challenges for performers working alone, who are required to be businesspeople, advocates and athletes simultaneously, can seem impassable.
The result is that some of the smartest and hardest working people end up at the top, because being less than razor-sharp and indefatigable means falling to the barriers thrown in your path.
That’s one reason why the stories told about the adult industry leading innovation online are so often true. My company developed some of the most sophisticated credit card processing services in the world according to feedback from VISA. Danni had to because she couldn’t get anyone to process credit cards for her at reasonable rates. Hence she built a precursor to Stripe, as a side gig, between running her business and posing for photos.
Of course the world of adult content has changed enormously since then. Danni was a pioneer, a woman who owned everything she created when that was novel. She called the shots in an industry dominated by a handful of magazines and video companies almost exclusively run by men. The sexism ran so deep that after I started appearing on TV as her employee, people began to credit me in private with her success. It was easy for them to think of her as nothing but a “pretty face” and me as the “brains” behind the operation, and the more vehemently I corrected them the more they’d wink and tap their nose.
Today OnlyFans and tube sites have swept the old adult industry into the bin. What made Danni a pioneer, as a woman who independently created and sold her own content, has become the new normal. The problems she faced alone and dealt with are being faced by millions of people on hundreds of platforms. It’s something I know a bit about.
Speaking of OnlyFans, I actually invented that way back in 2004; it was my first startup idea. More on that soon.