Hello and welcome to the Affiliate Insider Podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scoop on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliates and tech entrepreneurs, and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started.
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SPEAKER_03Welcome back to the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast with Neely Ann Johnston. And this week I'm absolutely thrilled to invite on to this podcast somebody that I have known since the beginning of my affiliate journey, Jason Kilby, who is the co-founder of appeal.io. Thank you for being on the podcast with me today, mate. It is an absolute pleasure to have you here with me.
SPEAKER_01It's lovely to just be able to chat to you.
SPEAKER_03So, spoiler alert, Jason got me my very first gig in affiliate marketing a gazillion years ago. So he's been in the industry as long as what I have. And hopefully he's not going to give away any of my secrets or any of my uh good old stories from the bad old days when we were working in the wild, wild west of affiliate marketing. But today we're really going to be talking about something really cool, which is the mobile marketplace and what's been happening in that space in terms of affiliate marketing. So before I get started, I'd like you to tell everybody that's listening a little bit about your backstory of how you got into the world of affiliate marketing and what has led you now to form appeal.io.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so as you mentioned, my first affiliate role per se was um with a recruitment company. I set up the iGaming Division for a recruitment company and started working heavily uh with party poker and Ladbrooks generally back in the day, long time ago. I worked very closely and I got to understand the culture and the people who worked in the gaming industry were always on the front end of the curve or ahead of the curve. And it was it was great to work in. I loved it. I was a I was a mad poker player at the time. And I then after three years of doing that, I got offered a job as poker affiliate manager at Lab Brooks. And that was my first real step into the affiliate side of things. But within a year of that, I met a guy who was basically going into companies that weren't particularly doing well. Maybe the whole company was good, but a particular location wasn't doing great. So we would go in. I worked for Xanox, um big German affiliate network, and we went into the UK branch, and there were some amazing people there.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But um, it wasn't working for whatever reason. So we spent a year trying to figure it out, we yielding, and it gave me a huge insight. The guy I went and did this with there's a guy called Rob Wilson, who ended up as uh CEO of Trade Doubler. Yeah, he's now COO at Otschecker. He's you know, he's he was a great he was one of those guys I read about in the trade papers, and then I was able to work with him. So he told me a lot about how the businesses work top to bottom, which was a fascinating and a real lucky turn for me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Then we went on and we opened the European office for Azuga Labs, Epic Advertising, which was one of the big affiliate networks, and we were able to start that up. Um, so I got a little bit of knowledge of a startup, but with the backing of a big company, which was great. Um, had amazing people. We set out from scratch. We worked with Groupon over 40 countries when Groupon was really expanding. The end of that, there were some issues financially with them, and they had to close down. So I was able to start my own company, Aragon Advertising, um, which I worked on and with. It's still going now, but I left about three years ago. Uh, but it was for eight years of my life, and that was really setting up uh an affiliate network to start with, but then moving it to mobile app, to performance agency, to paper call, lots of different things, so really interesting products as well. So they gave me a real like again top to bottom, and I was able to uh leave that very amicably. And uh they they've gone from strength to strength uh since I've left. I'm not sure if that's related or not, but I'm sure it maybe. That went to Freeno Digital, which was uh acquired, and and then eventually on the end of that, that's when we got more heavily into mobile app up yield, is probably 90% mobile app acquisition. It was a new thing for me, so I was able to really sort of learn. I'm still learning, I learn every day. Um, I have people who are much smarter than me working who do I ask stupid questions, but it's it's fascinating and it's allowed me now to work with lots of big brands. We work on programmatic, we have media buying internally, we have a partner network as well. So, yeah, that's how I got here.
SPEAKER_03The sum of all of your experiences and all the people that you've met along the way, and one thing that I wanted to just call out that you said is you are still learning. So even though you and I have been in since day dot, 20 odd years. I mean, we started when we were obviously very young, but we are still learning. We still consider ourselves connoisseurs of affiliate marketing that are learning new things every day. So, anybody listening to this podcast, if you're new into the industry, this is a job where you are never going to stop learning things, and that's what makes it so exciting. So let's get down and dirty into the mobile app marketplace, because this is something most affiliate managers tend to avoid unless they're specifically in that industry and are looking for that type of traffic. Why is that? Like, what is the hesitance into looking into the app marketplace for traffic?
SPEAKER_01People don't really, I think it's still reasonably new. Apps have been around for so long, right? Everyone uses them, but the the main way that apps have been used have kind of you sign up via desktop, right? And then you use the app. You don't sign up via the app. I think the last numbers I could actually find were a couple of years ago when I think only two or three percent mobile apps used the app as an acquisition channel, which is super low. So it makes it kind of the unknown, right? People are not quite sure. Is it the same as desktop funnel? Is it the same? And it is, right? It's but it until you've actually uh gone down that road and and started to see how it works and see how the tracking works and see how the optimizations, the data that's available, um, you don't really throw yourself into it. There's no commitment. And and I think that's that's fair, but I think it's really changing. You know, the the the numbers are just crazy on on app acquisition via app, the the billions. I think the it's between 80 and 100 billion just last year in terms of the the revenues generated just via app owners. But it's really, I think, just the unknown, to be honest with you. Um at Aragon, we about four years ago, we started working with some of the early cycle, right? So they would uh the apps like Stash and you know, the really cool fintech apps. We were learning as we go, but there were ways that we would work with them on a on a long life cycle plan. So we would we would help them with critical mass with the users that they wanted, but also give them a plan that we could then monetize those users for them so we can help them. And with bigger brands, they have so much acquisition going on that maybe they haven't really committed to it yet. Because it's a commitment, you know, you need to get integrated. There's certain tracking that you need to do, you can't just do it. But the the rise of the people like Impact, you know, and the the progression that they've made and the the SAS platforms, but also the MMPs, the apps fires and the branches. Um, it's a commitment to do, but there's more and more doing it. The more and more I talk to people, fire agencies, and to direct a brand, they're really looking as part of their plan for this year into next year is to develop the app strategies that they use.
SPEAKER_03I think that's quite exciting because I mean there are apps that have lived on my phone for years that I open every now and then. So the longevity of having customers that can actually view your content, but there's also apps that have been developed where companies haven't even thought of the fact that they can monetize those customers. So I traveled to Estonia recently, I traveled, uh uh downloaded an app called Bolt, and I thought, wow, this is an amazing app. It's a little bit like Uber. I'm gonna use it quickly for a week. I haven't deleted that app off my phone. Brands that have apps, they're not even thinking about how they can monetize that device, how they can monetize the eyeballs, looking at the content that they're pushing out, or even using that content to do marketing and you know, brand to brand marketing, even. So I think you've hit the nail on the head. I think we're kind of ignoring it because it's not desktop. And we are going to talk a little bit about the difference between mobile and desktop um later on. But what are some of the big trends that you're seeing from the Apple trenches? Because our theme of this podcast is all about affiliate marketing in the trenches and mobile is one of those trenches. Can you share any information on why programs should be looking a little bit harder outside of just the fact that there's longevity, that it's easy to kind of integrate a market. But you know, what kind of partnerships are you seeing and and what sort of trends are you seeing right now with the big brands that you're working with?
SPEAKER_01The real hurdles that everyone's had to jump for the last year is the start of uh God, it's nearly a year now, um, of the privacy changes that Apple brought in, the ATT, which is their um the opt-in. You'll see if you've used an app, then after April 26th of last year or after, not everyone introduced it straight away because everyone was scared. It was kind of like what everyone thought was going to happen on New Year's Eve 1999, that everything was gonna collapse and die and nothing was gonna work. So everyone was reasonably calm, but that was the day last year. We're coming up to the year. Where there were lots of changes where you have to, if you go into an app, you are asked if you allow you to be tracked. Obviously, that people didn't quite know what it was because the natural reaction is to say no. But obviously, what marketers use for that is to make your your experience when you're using your app and going around the World Wide Web more personalized, you know, which I think people, when they understood it, actually like that. And and you've seen over the last year that the the takeup rate and the the allowance of that to be done to an average user has gone up um much higher than was expected. That's been a real big change that's still going on. You know, there were the SCAD network, but the attribution is something that we could talk for hours about. But overall, the trends in the in the mobile app are just going up and up and up. The the revenues I spoke of earlier, the billions have gone up like year on year, they're up 30 or 40 percent. Mobile search, most mo most search happen on a mobile phone. People just use their mobile phone more than desktop. In the last year, I think it actually ticked over the 50%, I believe 53% now of what about great search on that?
SPEAKER_03Like, because I use my phone a lot in my car when I'm on Apple CarPlay or whatever the case may be, and I'm searching for something or searching for a destination or whatever the case may be. I mean, does that also impact the growth of that mobile app marketplace? I mean, does that tap into apps or is it only on search right now? Or how does it work?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think most people use their mobile phone for search, right? And you can just talk into it and it will search. And most of the searches for any product on their mobile phones, so that's mobile web and you know, mobile desktop, obviously. But that's that's now it's the majority of people use their phones to to buy things, you know, and do things on their phone with their head down, walking headlong into the street, not looking at anything still. But you know, the spend is is hugely up. And uh, I think the overall revenue now is beyond what desktop brings as well.
SPEAKER_03So we were talking about that, and maybe now's a good time to kind of pluck this into the session where we you were saying that conversion rates, they kind of stack up between desktop and mobile marketplace, and and some of the insights that you're seeing there where, you know, even though you've got two different types of consumer, you've got the one that does everything on the mobile and you know has a really big mobile maybe. And then you've got people like us who are a little bit old school, dare I say it, but we'll search for something on the app and then maybe we'll go to our desktop and actually complete the purchase. And there's a big thing to be said there in terms of how that tracking like moves across. So maybe talk to us a little bit about how that all works.
SPEAKER_01If you look at the amount of activity on a mobile phone is much higher and it keeps going up and up, and it will continue probably to go up. The the best estimates that it will reach 80% reasonably quickly. But if you look at the desktop, like a basket value bought on desktop, when people actually go to buy things, the desktop is probably twice as high as the mobile because I think that's a little bit of a trust thing. I think the privacy changes are gonna help that. But also, I like like I mentioned to you before we we came on. I'm I'm one of those people. I I use my phone, but I like a big screen when I'm buying things. It feels safer, it feels more like this. This is where I I can do it. Whether that's putting in like credit card details, I I I think that's that's changing and changing. But like I said, my wife does everything on her phone. She never picks up a laptop. She's just like everything is done on the phone. So I think that's changing. There's there's there is a um more and more emphasis on everyone using the mobile phone for everything. But the the the one trend that's very interesting is the bigger the handset you're using, so tablets are more trusted than mobile phones, and desktops are still more trusted.
SPEAKER_03But I think what's changing is is our interaction with our mobiles because now you've got things like Clana, Binar Pay Later, very simple. I mean, I bought an you know 800 bucks worth of furniture from made.com from a new house on my mobile phone, and I didn't think twice about it. Normally, and I do fit that first category that would want to be on my phone and then go check out online. But it was so easy to check out using Clana that I just did it all on my phone. And and if you think about it, that's a high basket value. Like an 800-pound first-time purchase all done through mobile. You can't ignore them numbers. Creation and reach of a mobile phone, if especially for brands that are looking to get into other markets, like you can't afford to ignore the space.
SPEAKER_01You can't. And Clarnett, that's exactly right. I think those are the moves that have been really smart. It's a great app itself, it's a great company to split that down into not that hundreds and hundreds. It's payments of you know, bite-sized payments you've you've you've signed in, they give you that feeling of confidence of buying on the mobile app. I also use it. So um, yeah, they that kind of thing is just going to come in. We know that technology always is ahead of the game on this. People will find ways to make it work. And um, you know, in in the affiliate business, always, like I said before, it attracts generally from what I found, the smartest people, you know, when they're they're they really will push the boundaries, they'll find ways around things, right? With the privacy, people have just found ways to do it, it just pushes people on, you know, which is the great thing about what we do.
SPEAKER_03Practice too, because you've got to do things in a certain way, and everybody has to get used to doing them in a certain way. But going back to that kind of penetration and reach, I mean, for brands at the moment who want to get into new marketplaces, so as you know, I'm South African, like most people in South Africa bypass desktop and went straight to mobile because their penetration on a mobile network was a lot quicker to get access to the internet. So if you think about it, if you want to go and in uh and get traffic in niche like areas and also by niche geos where traditional desktop shopping isn't available. And and really in a place like South Africa, where people still go to the shopping mall, you know, because social services don't work. Like you can't ignore the app marketplace as a channel to reach the consumer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, in terms of targeting people, there's nothing like it. You know, there's just not possible. When you're a media buyer, you can the the cost per clicks, the cheaper, the average, you know, that that's why brands should really be looking into this if they're not already. I think a lot more are and you can really see it. But the potential to acquire users, you know, if you if you balance the fact that people buy more and feel safer on desktop, but it's cheaper to find those users online, then you know, it it's really something that acquisition costs are so much lower, you know, in in general and across the board. So, and yes, if you have your phone, you know where they are, you know what they do, you know where they buy, what they previously bought, you know, it's it's a it's a real high target ball. You're exactly right. So I think all the trends are going that way. That it it's and everyone's seeing it, and and the more uh agencies are also seeing it, which is great. It's just persuading them to take the plunge. And it it's happening more and more. Um, I've sent out a whole bunch of, you know, my last six months has has really been to set things up and we've done that. I have a great team now. They all kind of are are great and they look after things. Some mine now is is building up partnerships, talking to agencies. We are lucky enough to work with some very large brands um who are uh ahead of the game on this, you know, and a lot of that's through programmatic buying. A lot of it we haven't the media buyers, but also a lot of big brands in general, but also via apps don't see the incremental uh possibilities with the affiliate traffic. It's a lot on the app side is is very much hard KPIs, right? You have to do this, it's this, it has to work straight away, it's got to be straight away. But there's definitely a softening there. And what they need to do is it look longer term when we're trying to work with them to look longer term and say, look, we optimize heavy, obviously, we want things to work. So we can set click caps early, we can set a very low caps our side and make sure that it's working for you, but you've got to work with us as well. You know, a lot of the time in the past it's been okay, it hasn't worked in a week or two, we're never working with you, right? You know, but then that's on both sides because networks and and media buyers have often flooded things and spend a lot of money very quickly, you know. It there's a responsibility for both of us. So it's trying to educate them a little bit more. There's definitely a move within bigger agencies to the affiliate side, but more traditional affiliate, right? It's the influencer, it's the the content sites, um, which is fine. But they've also moving into bringing more old school uh affiliate paper calls coming in. But what we do, and it's making sure that when they talk to their brands that you know they educate them as well that this is what we're gonna do. It's not gonna be huge early on, but it's gonna be worth working through the first few months because you can find some amazing traffic and and traffic that they're not getting access to out there, you know, and it's just it it takes time because these are big brands, you know, it takes a little bit of time for them to move the agencies to all the trends seem to point to the fact that they're they're starting to see it as a really, really exciting venture in the coming years.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so let's myth bust a couple of things quickly. What do programs need to have in place to ensure that a voyage into advertising with in-app marketplaces or or or doing partnership deals within apps as a as a whole will be successful for driving incremental sales in their customer funnels? Like, are there different apps that appear at different stages of the customer buyer journey? Is it the same as how we purchase traffic for desktop? You know, what sort of tracking data budgets do they need to have in place before they jump right in?
SPEAKER_01Like let's let's talk about So it's it's roughly it's roughly the same, right? If you're an affiliate manager out there working on a desktop funnel, it's roughly the same. There's some differences, obviously. But you know, if you're an affiliate manager who's wondered about going into an app company or doing that, it's it's the same. You know, if you can we we've we've transitioned from a company where we had focuses on teams on app and teams on desktop, and they come together and they're learning. It's great for them because they learn new things, right? But what the traditional view of a lot of app traffic is, is that there's a lot of fake traffic out there, right? And there is, you know, there is a cross-desktop as well. It just depends how you deal with it, it depends what you work, you know, because you have you have different sections. You have the programmatic, we have our internal media buyers, but you also have traffic partners who are media buyers, and we grade them in our system over the last five years or so, how they've performed, what their deduction rates have been. And deduction rates in mobile app are much more common, right? The the the affiliates, the publishers are used to it happening. But we uh when we start, we we only put certain grades, you know, and those grades are not just purely good to bad, they can be high traffic, but if you you know, because sometimes an app when they first come on board want to do a burst campaign, want to get into the top tens of the app stores, right? So you can you want lots of traffic, lots of installs. It doesn't particularly matter what happens afterwards, then you get to that later in the end of cycle. But that's the real thing, and and the way we say and we sell to uh brands and to agencies is that we know how to deal with our traffic. So we will set it up in a way that we will put uh very hard caps on our side. We know what your KPIs are, but you've got to stick with us. You've got to say if there's some issues in the early stages, we need to know that it's you know, we've talked and this is a longer term plan because the the incremental traffic is absolutely there. Um they need to uh there's a specific tracking platform um set up that they need to do. So I'm talking with some bigger brands at the moment and they wanna work with us, but they don't have the integration into the the gap suppliers of the wells branch the branch. So, you know, there's there's quite a few of them. But the main one that apps right that everyone really knows. We do work with app campaigns to Impact, but generally it's better. We get much more data and in-depth conversion funnel so we can optimize and we can access through the MMPs, the tracking platforms. The MMP is the is the the platform, the tracking platforms that deal specifically with mobile. So they look the same, you know, you could they they're pretty much the same as well. Um but you can go in and what we do, which often is different from desktop, is that you can put uh postbacks on the whole journey. Because we run install campaigns, we run an install campaign and open, it doesn't trigger till then registration, free trials, full CPA, full sale, revenue share. So we want to have as much information as we can on where the drop-off is so we can optimize very early. And that tends to happen a lot more. There's a lot of data that you can use on the mobile app. And I'm not saying that it's not in desktop as well, but just having done both in the last three or four years, there's a ton more that I can see that helps you, you know, helps you as a partner to make the brand or the advertiser much happier and show them that you're really, you know, working hard to make the campaigns work.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so we've spoken about you need a strategy. You need to know why you are doing this. Is it for brand reach? Is it for targeting a new geo that you want to test out with cheaper source of traffic than trying to get onto SEO sites, for example? Or is it, I just want like registrations. I want to know exactly what my CPA is and registrations. You've spoken about tracking, that you need to be in a position to actually have the tracking in place to run these campaigns and to get that full funnel of information. So, you know, you can't just do this without, you know, your network or Apps Flyer being plugged in as well. What about budgets? Like if you're a brand that's looking to get into the space, what kind of budgets do you need to be kind of apportioning to test to kind of build long-term relationships and partnerships to really get reach into this space?
SPEAKER_01It's really, really accessible. So it it depends what stage of your cycle you're at. I've been talking to, there's a person who works in the same office here as me, who's another English guy who supports the same stupid little football team that I do, which is crazy in New York. There's only about 5,000 of us in the world. And he works for Tapcart, and the Tapcart basically go, they they work with big retail e-commerce brands and they make them an app. And I had a conversation with them, they work with thousands, they work with Pier One imports over here, some big fashion brands as well. And he asked me the same thing, and I said, look, it really depends. We we want to work with everyone. Yes, we can take budgets that are half a million a month from huge brands if they want to just get more and more app in stores, or we can work on 500 bucks to a thousand, you know, just to start you off. But what we also say to all of the partners that I talk to is just come and talk to us because we don't have to work with you, right? If you're at that stage that you don't know and you want to chat to someone that does or has an idea, I have a performance delivery team that I can go to and say, look, what are you trying to do? Are you just trying to launch? You're trying to get into the app store, you're trying to make money, are you trying to, you know, what's what's the deal? Are you trying to just like make make an impact? And we can go back and say, we think this should be the installed price, we think we should work there, this is the volume we could drive for you, you know. Um, and if you don't work with us, it's fine, but if we just want that information, that's fine as well. You know, just to because there's a lot of that really is on the app side, you realize that there's not a huge amount of information out there about how it works.
SPEAKER_03So it's just kind of happening in the background, and every so now and again it pops up and it becomes popular and something.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, which is crazy, right? Because it's everyone uses apps all the time, you know, and like you say, wherever you go, I find I have apps of German taxi firms because you know, and they they sit there and it is amazing.
SPEAKER_03It's like people like us that need to go and educate those brands about how they monetize their apps. So I think there's probably a marketplace. I mean, oh, maybe maybe we should start a new business, a little side hustle where we go and find all the apps that are sitting there on thousands of people's phones and start monetizing them and turning those people into affiliates.
SPEAKER_01There is definitely that angle as well, right? Um, and this is really important. Some of our best publisher sources, traffic sources, are the app owners themselves. But it can be quite difficult for you to serve your own ads. Obviously, you have to have certain technologies in there, but there are ways that you can. And it works the same. If you if you buy media and you buy across the run of a network and you buy the banner space, it's roughly the same. You know, it's the same kind of deal. But yeah, absolutely, there's there's a ton of those. But also the the media buying aspect is something that's not really understood. With our media buyer who used to do the neutra and mobile subscription slightly in the gray, and you know, off of that side is now buying across, you know, the Xero Parks, the outbrain, the tabula, you know, and it it you can test really cheaply and know if something's gonna work. It's a real opportunity for for media buyers out there as well to to try it. And that's what we say to them as well. We have old ones that, you know, are traditionally doing things that have been desktop-based and saying, look, try it. You know, we can give you some advice of what's working. It's not gonna cost you. You can you can spend 20 bucks and know if you're gonna like make some money, you know, which is great.
SPEAKER_03And how many channels can say that, you know, you can spend 500 or a thousand bucks and actually see if there's something there? Whereas most small media buyers start at about five to ten grand before you actually get any kind of results. So low impact, relatively quick results compared to other channels. Kind of like a no-brainer. That's what I'm hearing here. So talk to us a little bit about some of the success stories that you've seen in this in this space. Are there any brands or people that are really killing it right now by by looking at this space with different eyes and actually really getting innovative in the way that they're doing marketing?
SPEAKER_01What we've found is that we don't have a huge sales team, right? Basically, it's me and and a couple of others.
SPEAKER_03So you might have a big influx of inquiries after this process.
SPEAKER_01I I hope, I really hope so. But um the success stories that we we found is we're we're German-based, right? I'm in New York, I'm English, I'm in New York, I've been here for a while, but most of my team is in Germany. My fellow founders, we do a lot of work with some of the outdoor agencies, right, that don't understand digital. So they work with all the big brands, and those brands do have digital spending money quite a lot. And we go to them when we absolutely I was gonna say position, but we don't. We are, we are able to deliver and give them the knowledge of their app. So we work with a lot of partners through that, and that's what we're trying to introduce to those big IPG matter kind over here are really making there's lots of if you look at people being employed, it's a lot of affiliate and partnership people going into agencies. And the like I said before, the affiliate is slightly different in terms of what it means. It's more the influencer and the content side, but it's definitely going that way. There's much more performance knowledge within agencies which hasn't been there before. So those are the big opportunities I think in the moment. You know, we work with a couple of big agencies, and we have our big brands, and we've worked with them for a long time, and we do programmatic and we do media buying. We don't really touch the partner network with that. But again, it comes and it depends. You want to impress who you're working with, because you know agencies obviously have access to lots of big brands, but those conversations don't happen within agencies a huge amount, especially when they're the huge ones. But that's really the trend that we're taking anyway, and that's education. The same as we've talked about before. It's going to them saying, look, we can do this, just give us a try, and now we're delivering 10 times what we were delivering six months ago. And we have plans to do the same kind of growth now because now they understand it. Now they've looked, now they've seen the growth, now they've seen the incremental sales, now they've seen the revenue, and they've gone, wow, this is actually something that we didn't know before, and now we do, and it's six months later, and now we're gonna, you know, really put our internal sales and business development into it.
SPEAKER_03So the moral of that story for anybody listening is get in quick because before the big brands buy up all the traffic and inventory, you can still spend a little bit of your dollars and maybe even increase your sales and elevate them a little bit. So nice piece of advice there from Jason, who's been in the industry 20 odd years. Listen in, tune in and listen to that, and and maybe come and talk to him after this podcast. The last thing I want to ask you before we um end this session is where do you see the feature of affiliate marketing as we move into a more fragmented marketplace and the partner economy across all these channels? So we've got mobile, we've got social, we've got influencers, we've got traditional partners. Like, where do you see the trends moving as as we move forward and compare to where we've come from?
SPEAKER_01The partner stuff is really interesting, and I think it's it's the way you define it. The partnerships has been really come of, you know, impact was one of the big starters of it, and it's been a while. But back then I remember going to impact events and they didn't really know what to do with a lot of it. They didn't really know what to do with influences yet. It was kind of like, how do we do it? But it makes a lot of sense, right? These partnerships for brands, as there are different changes and privacy for like Apple and the iOS operating system, anyone who knows their audience is going to be really important, right? And be super important for brands. So those influencers and those content and those. I remember back in like all the all the affiliates back at Ladbrooks were the great little review sites, you know, the poker review sites that that drove amazing. People are just getting much more savvy, and and for me, fragmented means there's opportunity because there's there seems to be less entry, but in terms of what that means, actually getting a foothold, it's probably even more difficult. We went through through the the pandemic here of all those those five, 10 minute delivery, the apps just came up. I'm not sure if it I think it happened in UK as well, but in in New York, there were suddenly like 20 of them, and a lot were gone in two or three months. And I think that's a a difference between some of them trying to grab space as quickly as possible, and maybe even more, some of them just wanting to be bought by DoorDash or Grab Hub or someone, you know, and and make some money, which is also fine. But there's opportunities there, but a partner economy for me is is partnering with people who for us, it's partnering with agencies, right? Who need what we want to do. For you, it will be something different, right? And and I think it's not defining it too narrowly because for me, I can be a partner to an agency, but not in the partnerships that someone else can be, not an influencer or a content team, but I can deliver just as well. And I can deliver stuff that they've not really, they don't know about or they haven't sort of they've heard about, but they're not sure about, or they're a little bit scared about. And those partnerships, though, just make total sense. Anyone who has a niche or a uh a real understanding of their vertical is even more important in the in the coming years because I think the the privacy things are just gonna, you know, quite rightly. You know, if people don't want to be followed around, I think all these things are uh absolutely needed and very important. You know, they're gonna be even more important. So it's a real chance for those affiliates for sure.
SPEAKER_03I mean, I love that because one of the things that I think is gonna happen is more collaboration in our industry. You know, agencies have always wanted to do everything for everyone. And we're not that kind of agency. Like I'm when I started Affiliate Insider, I made very sure that we only focus on what Lanehouse is, which is affiliate marketing. We don't do people's social media, we don't do SEO, we don't write content, we don't do translations. Like we're not a full service digital agency because I believe in this day and age, full service digital cannot actually exist successfully. Each and every one of these verticals that we're working in becomes a specialism. And so there's gonna be more partner collaboration, which is what you're talking about. And I'm thrilled for that because I want to stay very much in my warehouse being the expert on affiliate marketing. I don't want to be taking on people's mobile app stuff. However, I'm very happy to pass that on to you. So I think we are headed towards a a kind of more collaborative way of working with one another. There's gonna be less competitive and more uh, you know, innovation as we do open up and start to work with one another and not be so secretive about what we're doing. Because ultimately what we need to do is make sure that the client is happy and that and that KPIs are being met, because that's what partnership marketing is all about.
SPEAKER_01Totally. And the only real trend I would kind of end on is if you look at the the use of mobile phones, uh it's just going in one direction. So I would say to anyone who's really thinking about it, like you said earlier, I would make the move now, you know, and and again, just reach out and chat to to me or someone who works in a company just to have a talk about it. That education is more important than the winning the business, you know. We'll give you the information that we can, we'll point you in the right direction. But you know, it it's 30, 40% year on year, everything seems to go up. So, you know, I I would focus if you have an app or if you're thinking about doing it, I can put you in touch with the right people to get it done. And then, you know, you can really start thinking about how you can use that channel and use traffic that you haven't really had access to before, which is exciting.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. All right, Jason, I'm gonna cut you loose. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast with me today. It's a full circle episode because we have literally come full circle from my first day when I enter the industry to now where I'm here on my podcast. Um, and that's the beauty of this industry is that you know you can have a really long career and still connect with people 20 years later. So thank you so much for sharing your insights on mobile and the app marketplace and the opportunity that exists there. I think everybody listening to this podcast is going to take away some really good nuggets of advice.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you, and I look forward to seeing you in person, hopefully, very soon.
SPEAKER_02And that's a wrap for this week's affiliate affiliate marketing podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in this series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribe to our podcast channel so you never miss another entitled episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing internet and traffic driving tips, tricks, and strategies to keep your digital marketing fresh and your affiliate program driving consistent sales. Making a high quality podcast like this takes a lot of work. That's a fact. But not when you high-code. With our Michael of Experience, we handle everything for you. From guest outreach all the way through to publishing and promotion. We handle it all. You show up to hold great interviews and build relationships with your guests, and we take care of everything else. Podcasting is not just about the audience. Every podcast interview is the start of a new relationship. With a weekly podcast, you would build relationships with 52 ideal product through your podcast interviews over the next 12 months. Do you believe that 52 new relationships would grow your business? We do. Contact Jason at coastkop.com and let's talk.