20 Lessons from 20 Years: The Importance of Great Branding

I remember the exact moment I realized branding wasn’t a “nice to have.” It was when I was naming JuicyAds. As the story goes, I spent a lot of time getting that brand right because it was one of the first really successful things I built from scratch. I registered juicyads.com for $20 but it cost me days of brainstorming and spinning keywords and searching to find it. Before that, I didn’t care that much about brands and names because everything up to that point was mostly websites I had bought rather than ones I had built. I wasnt concerned with rebranding back then, things were often domain-specific, and I took what I could get.

After spending most of my career in affiliate marketing and advertising networks, I’ve lived on both sides of the equation. I’ve been the guy buying traffic at scale, and I’ve been the guy providing the platform or infrastructure others depend on. In both roles, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself over years and cycles. When something works unusually well, people rush to copy it. Some people even go as far as to say all this industry does it copy. They clone funnels, mimic creatives, and reverse engineer payouts. What they don’t copy is the thing that actually made it pop. Most of the time, that thing is the brand.

Very early on, I didn’t think that way. Like a lot of people in this industry, I thought branding was what you did once the “real work” was done. You got the tech right, the offer dialed in, the payout competitive, and then you worried about logos and names. I launched projects with placeholder or “good enough” branding that stuck around far longer than it should have because the numbers looked okay. I had learned early in life to make due what what you had, not to complain, and to make the most of limited resources. The problem was that “okay” never became “great,” and “temporary” had a habit of becoming permanent. Thats just the eay it is when you’re young, rumb, broke, and I still see others doing it, especially with really bad domain names. But, I digress.

I’ve split tested nearly identical offers. Same traffic sources, same pricing, same underlying mechanics. One had a name and message that clearly articulated what it was and who it was for. The other was built in a hurry, without much thought. Generic, safe, and forgettable. No obvious flaw, just nothing memorable. Over time, steadily, the difference between them widened. One attracted more signups, more type-ins, and more revenue. The other just didnt convert as well. The product hadn’t changed. The brand had done the heavy lifting.

Years later, I came across the idea of starting with “why,” popularized by Simon Sinek, and it resonated. In our world, we’re conditioned to start with “what.” What’s the payout? What’s the conversion rate? What’s the hook? Those questions matter, but they don’t answer why anyone should care beyond the immediate transaction. A brand, whether you intend it or not, is the answer to that question. It reflects what the business does, what it believes, and what it stands for. That’s exactly why branding is hard. You can’t fake it.

The truth is that a weak brand produces weak results, even if everything else looks solid. It might convert in the short term, but it won’t flourish. I’ve watched platforms with better technology lose ground to competitors with clearer messaging and stronger identity. I’ve also seen mediocre products outperform expectations because the brand and marketing communicated better. In markets where multiple players offer similar services, marketing becomes the ultimate deciding factor, and branding is the foundation of that marketing.

There’s a control aspect here that doesn’t get talked about enough. As affiliates and advertisers, we like things we can tweak quickly. Bids, creatives, placements. Branding doesn’t give you that immediate feedback loop. You don’t know if a name or message is wrong until months or years later, when you realize partners don’t remember you, or users don’t come back, or every deal feels like it has to start from zero. That lack of instant validation makes branding feel risky, but in reality, it’s the opposite. A well-thought-out brand is one of the few things you truly own. Algorithms change, traffic sources disappear, regulations tighten. A brand, once established, compounds quietly.

Branding forces you to make tradeoffs. You can’t be everything to everyone and still mean something. Some of the hardest decisions to be made aren’t about features or pricing, but about what a brand is explicitly not going to be. Walking away from certain types of partners, traffic, or revenue because they don’t align with a brand can feel irrational in the moment (saying no to business is counter-intuitive). In hindsight, those decisions create clarity, and clarity creates momentum. The brand doesn’t just describe the business; it shapes it.

One of the more humbling lessons comes from rebrands that didn’t go as planned. Changing a name or message without changing the underlying reality of the business doesn’t fix anything. If anything, it makes the disconnect more obvious. Branding isn’t a coat of paint. It’s an expression of truth. When the brand and the business are misaligned, people sense it immediately, even if they can’t articulate why. Trust erodes quietly, and once it’s gone, no amount of clever copy brings it back.

Branding is one of the most valuable assets a company can have, second only to the actual value it delivers. It’s not because branding is flashy or creative for its own sake. It’s because it reduces friction everywhere else. It makes marketing more efficient, partnerships more natural, and decisions more coherent. It also acts as a filter, attracting the right people and repelling the wrong ones, which saves time and energy in ways spreadsheets don’t capture.

Branding, at its core, is about meaning. In an industry obsessed with performance, metrics, and efficiency, meaning can feel irrelevant, abstract, or indulgent. But over time, it’s meaning that creates traction and resilience. The basics of branding aren’t about colors or taglines. They’re about aligning what you do with why you do it, and being willing to let that guide decisions even when it’s uncomfortable. That’s not easy, and it’s not fast, but in my experience, it’s the difference between building something that works for a while and building something that lasts.