Hi, 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's group 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 to the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast with Mimi Ann Johnston. And this week we have somebody really special on the podcast, Brooke Shaf, industry legend, affiliate guru, somebody that I've been looking at and up to for quite a while now. So welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Leah.
SPEAKER_03You're the CEO and founder of FMTC. And a lot of people that I've been speaking to on this side of the pond, they sort of know who you are, but not exactly all the in-depth stuff that you do. So what I want to do is start this podcast today with you telling us a little bit about how you got started in affiliate marketing and also what FMTC is and does.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great. So it's funny, everybody who's in affiliate marketing has families that don't know what they do. And then FMTC is like the affiliate marketing company inside affiliate marketing where nobody quite understands what FMTC does. Uh first to that, and then I'll loop back on my backstory. FMTC distributes uh deal and product fees to enterprise coupon and reward affiliates and some commerce content guys too. So if you're in that space, you need to have good quality content to display to your users. Otherwise, it makes for bad user experience and you have to process the data to clean it. That's what FMTC does. We aggregate, test, normalize, and distribute the this affiliate content data. So any kind of coupon, any kind of deal, buy one, get one off, category sales, and the product data as well.
SPEAKER_03That's huge because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of coupons and codes out there in the wilderness. And keeping up to date with that from a publisher perspective is obviously very, very important.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's exactly why the business exists. We have close to 200,000 deals at a given time. Uh we have, I think, like 146 million products right now across many thousands of brands. By brands, we mean manufacturers. We're integrated with just over 18,000 merchants from the uh major affiliate networks. And merchants is roughly synonymous with advertisers. We use the old-fashioned terminology, affiliate merchant. We sent out a survey last year and figured we'd stay the course on that instead of uh advertiser and publisher, but you know, they're roughly synonyms. And uh it's funny, FMDC got started out. I'm actually the co-founder, it was an old affiliate who saw a lot of competition coming into the space, and she approached me and my brother that were in business together at the time with an agency about launching what became FMDC with her. And her thought was like, look, I can't stop these guys from getting into the space, but I know that it's really hard to handle the inventory, and so I can sell them that inventory. So it was very forward-thinking and it took off right away as a business. So this is FM DC's 15th year in business.
SPEAKER_03Okay. So that just tells you how long you've been in the industry, which is why I'm so excited to have the podcast today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that was actually not my start. We we I started in in 2000. I got a job right out of college at a young post.com, which which later got bought by uh Amazon. It was a big store here in the US that sold shoes, still does, still does. Went to a couple in-house programs. Uh, I went to a rival company, which was shoes.com, which is a very interesting, very educational experience for me, uh a little bit painful. And then to a company that did car research called Edmonds.com, kind of did the affiliate management for all those guys, was like a, you know, took tour like a duck to water, had a weird career detour where my uncle ran for office. He ran for governor of one of the states here here in the US, lost that race, and my brother, who also worked on the campaign, and I were unemployed at the end of it. And so we started an agency. And we had that agency at the time, FMTC got started.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so but there's a rich tapestry of history in which I'm gonna tap into. Now, FMTC, obviously a very interesting business, you know, dealing in the whole coupon space. Um, but coupon and batcher code sites have always had a bit of a bad rap in our industry. And I'm I'm gonna I'm going back since you know years in in memorial. Everybody's always had why should I work with them? You know, whet what value do they bring? Can you share some of the backstory of why this misconception lingers still today and what your thoughts are on that?
SPEAKER_00Honestly, I don't think anybody really knows, Leanne. Uh my guess is that I think there's an emotional trigger there where somebody thinks of themselves sort of going through that. And if they were going to buy, you know, in their mind's eye, if somebody's buying, they're buying anyway, and they they can't stand this idea of paying the commission. And part of that emotionality, I think, is that relationship aspect of affiliate marketing, which is normally very powerful, but sort of here gets turned on its head where they don't mind giving a faceless corporation their money, which is to say like Facebook, Google, which have very high ad costs. But when it's going to uh an affiliate, even if that affiliate itself is a corporation, um, there's something that gets sort of stuck in people's craw. And to be fair, there's it's a complex situation. Uh and what it kind of comes down to, I think, is optimization of the revenue stream and the profitability for the merchant. This is a little bit boring, but it's really important to kind of dive into. But but I think at the heart of it is this issue where people think, oh, basically this transaction would have happened anyway. I don't think the evidence supports that. I mean it does, but I think it's marginal. And I actually have some counterpoints I got written down here to bring it up to you. So this is gonna be my big case for for coupon and voucher sites.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, lean in, lean in and listen now.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so first now uh these these aren't gonna go on forever, but I got some statistics here. Most of these go back to 2021, a couple are from a couple years earlier. And um, you know, from one, two-thirds, 67% of consumers have made a purchase they weren't originally planning to make because they found out of on a coupon or discount. And if you think about yourself in the offline world, you know, odds are pretty good that you wandered by some store shelf that has like discount stuff and made an impulse purchase. You know, we're the same people online. Um so when we see that stuff, it makes us inclined to buy more on that merchant, or very importantly, for other merchants to get to that merchant, which is where these sites create a huge boost.
SPEAKER_03I myself just purchased a holiday impromptu, as you know, to Lanzarotti for four days um on the basis of the fact that I saw a nice coupon. So I totally agree with that statistic.
SPEAKER_00Case in point, right? Uh and especially for something like that where you're like, hey, let's don't really care where I go, even my dates are flexible, you know, show me a deal. And so it, you know, if you're the merchant, you should keep in mind there's an endless number of customers out there who are plump for making a purchase, and you want that purchase to come, you know, to you. Four and five feel encouraged to make a first-time purchase, speaks to the exact same point. 69% of millennials will complete a purchase without searching for a deal or an offer. Uh I don't think that means they won't make it, they won't complete it, but there's a really good chance they'll be lost in that process. Uh 63% feel smarter when they use a coupon or discount. You know, I think they feel that there's a sort of a game that they're winning. They're more likely to make a purchase if they get a message about affordable prices.
SPEAKER_03Everybody loves a bargain.
SPEAKER_00Everybody loves a bargain. It's so true. It's so true. And I think there's a corollary to that, right? People hate feeling like they're getting ripped off. You know, coupon is um sort of interesting. It comes from an old French term, and there's sort of like a sense of it, something is parsed out and then made complete later. And I think that speaks to sort of like the sense of emotional completion that we get when we make a purchase. Uh, you know, because we're trading in the dollars for it. And of course, coupons a traditional term also in the financial markets, right? Like you get a coupon related to sort of uh payments on financial instruments. And when we buy that, I think it's more than just the price, it's sort of like this sense of getting that good deal, that deal being like the right one. And we'll still, of course, purchase when we can't get that, but half of people out there or more really look for that very uh avidly. And um uh affluent people, which is also something that people overlook. People think, hey, if you got a lot of money, you're not gonna worry about coupons. And yeah, people with a lot of money will buy luxury products. But uh, according to the statistics I got here, 79% use coupons planning their shopping, 79% of them, and these are athlome customers, say it's exciting, and 64% say a coupon or discount speeds up their decision to make a purchase. So I wanted to go over a couple other points in terms of working with these sites. The first one was people love coupons and seek them out, right? You know, I think that's very clearly borne out in the statistics. And there's other statistics too that show higher household income, more frequent purchases, higher shopping carts. A few other points to keep in mind. One, everybody has shopping cart abandonment, right? And so if you're a merchant from Amazon on down, it's not going to be 100%. And so, how can you minimize that percentage of shopping cart abandonments? And then another point is that Amazon is a likely place, especially in the US, for that abandonment to happen. If you're selling whatever and Amazon is kind of out there selling the same thing and somebody has Amazon Prime, I think Amazon Prime effectively functions as coupon. It brings about that sense of completion, even though there's often no additional discounting, even though Amazon often does not have the best price. With Amazon, pretty much any merchant is facing them as a competitor, at least in sort of like the space of like selling hard goods and stuff. And it's also worth noting that Amazon appreciates its coupon and reward affiliates. Amazon's out there. Now, they don't do reward stuff in the same way. So you'll typically only see that for a couple of subscription services that Amazon itself sells. So that's pretty firm stance that Amazon has, or which seems to work out uh all right for them. Other companies, of course, do very well with rewards and points, uh, their own programs as well as working with reward sites. But Amazon goes so far as to put affiliates on its own site. Now, these are not reward or coupon sites, they're commerce content guys that have like the best of lists, but it shows the appreciation and respect that they have for affiliates. So if you're another merchant, I would think twice before thinking you're smarter than Amazon. And then the last point here, which is often overlooked, is the coupon reward sites control huge amounts of traffic. So when people don't work with them, they often think, well, it's just sort of an SEO search, but it's not. Even when that does happen, the SEO search, you want to keep in mind that's the shopping cart abandonment thing again. There's an opportunity for the customer to find somebody else selling at a better price, somewhere at their value add, going back to Amazon, et cetera. And so the coupon helps keep them in your in your cart. In fact, with Amazon's coupons, there's a click to use model, and that's one of the things that sort of gives people a sense of ownership over that. But again, there's communities that are very active. There's there's people that start their shopping searches uh on these sites that very actively use them. Everything from the browser extensions like Honey, Capital One, Rackuton Rewards to the same sites themselves or people very actively look for cash back. In fact, there's a meta-site called Cashback Monitor that looks at the cashback rates all the different sites provide. And so these are huge traffic flows. And if you're if you don't have a strategy to tap into these, you're going to be leaving money on the table that's going to be going to your competitor.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so what I'm hearing now is, and both of us have been in the industry a long, long time. There is this misconception. We don't really know where it's been founded. It's been bandied about the industry for so many years. Most people coming into the industry hear these stories and think, oh, I don't want to work with coupon sites. But you've just given us some really clear, like statistical information that shows why you should be working with these sites. So from the psychology behind the buying behavior to even things like economic environments that we're working. When inflation gets higher, people want more discount codes. They want to find bargains. These are the sites that they look to go to. Not to mention the fact, and this is a very important point, which I actually want to kind of jump ahead on. These coupon and voucher code sites capture thousands of people of information and what they're purchasing on, which is incredibly valuable data, especially now as we're into the age where cookies are going to become non-existent, where cookie deprecation is being spoken about and bandied about in our industry. First party data is becoming way more valuable to work with. So brands are probably going to be looking at, you know, re-engaging these partnerships and looking at how they actually build them. So what do you think about that point? Do you think that there's going to be a surge to start to work more with coupon and batch of code sites? But what strategies should they be engaging in order to work in this complex model?
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_00The programmatic stuff and the end of cookies. And I called it, you know, if programmatic falls, will affiliate inherit the windfall? And I think programmatic advertising is due to some criticism in terms of where those dollars go, how well they're spent. A lot of them come from, you know, this hyper-specific targeting that's much vaunted, but doesn't anybody see the ad? Does it go to a bot farm, et cetera? So affiliate is much, much safer in that regard, especially for retail programs. And so I think to the point that you made, affiliate is in a good position to get more revenue in terms of buys. It might not come through in terms of commissions. A lot of it, I think, might end up being in terms of paid placements because affiliate really proves out. You know, I think affiliate comes under more scrutiny than any other channel for an average merchant in terms of like uh the ROI, because you know, that can be looked at differently. And so I think if affiliate is looked at fairly, then there should be more budget going uh to it. And that's where all you'll also see is something of an overlap between affiliate and the influencer space, where the influencers, you know, typically will be paid placement kind of thing, but they'll take an affiliate tracking link and that kind of often kind of working out to a hybrid deal, sometimes initially, sometimes over time.
SPEAKER_03And talking about influencers, I mean, one of the other things that I wanted to kind of get your thoughts on today in today's podcast was this shoppable social content that we're seeing, this shoppability in social media and all the different channels that are allowing you to actually add links in. How does the coupon and batcher code community kind of look at those microinfluencers in terms of you know enabling them and managing them? Is that just a whole nother like sector that's gonna open up on top of the layer of stuff that you already manage and service for clients and publishers together? Or do you think that that's still a little bit away?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I, you know, from where I'm sitting right now, it looks like a channel competitor. You know, those guys like bonsai with the with shopping cart enablement would effectively be the equivalent of resellers. Uh it could be very good business. I think it's it's it's pretty interesting enough. For the merchant, it's a little bit of a challenge because you've got to manage the inventory, uh, which I think was where Instagram got stuck a little bit. You know, Instagram announced the affiliate program last, I think I guess it was last year, uh, was much bollyhood, but it was a bit different than what people think of as a regular affiliate program because Instagram is the publisher, Instagram is the tracking provider, and then the influencer on Instagram is sort of like just this, just this agent, sending them to the shopping cart, which is also the merchant of record, which is also Instagram. And so I think some merchants can kind of easily go for that. You know, if you're selling info products, uh makeup seems to be able to do that pretty well, a couple other uh categories. But for other merchants, I think it's it's that's pretty tricky because there's a whole you know fulfillment issue on the back end. And so I'm very kind of curious to see how that plays out. I think that those guys might end up taking traffic uh from affiliate that could work out well for the merchant, but you know, they're certainly that kind of thing that we've seen before. Overall, I think that we're probably looking at an expansion opportunity because those guys, some of them will play around with that stuff, maybe they don't like it, maybe it's not a fit for their audience. But as affiliate grows, they'll find that that is more of a fit for their audience. And FMDC in theory could distribute uh deals to those guys uh as well. Um we'll sort of see how that plays out as it grows out. We don't do that currently.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I think that's I think that's a really interesting space to watch. The other thing that I've seen recently that is quite interesting that I wanted you to sort of comment on because you've got so many years of experience in this particular space is the MA that's been happening in the past few months with companies like Klana buying out Piggy and now also Price Runner, which which was announced last week. Why do you think that that's happening? And and what do these brands see in the potential of these coupon code and price comparison sites that maybe other brands haven't yet in terms of the potential?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great question, right? And then you also had a few years ago now uh PayPal's acquisition of Honey for over $4 billion, which I think was the probably the all-time biggest one ever in affiliate marketing. And there's a lot to say here. You know, one thing is they're gonna they're getting the technology, another thing is they're getting the user base. And so those are both big plays with Honey and the other companies that you mentioned, like Price Runner, especially if they're doing product product management stuff. But something that I think gets mentioned less often that's very important is the relationships with the merchants. You know, you can't go to from zero to, for example, 18,000 relationships that we have. You can't even go from zero to a thousand very easily. The big guys in the US and the UK markets and other markets around the world are gonna be very slow to make you to their programs. They've been burned a lot by fraudulent affiliates. So even if it's a popular uh company that's really kind of up and coming, like a big buy now, pay it later brand, that's gonna take time. It could be short, right? It could be a couple months, maybe even weeks, but it could be a year or longer uh for those companies. There could be advanced negotiations, contractual roadline. So that's a very big deal to get access to all those merchants. I'm actually surprised there's not honestly something of like an aftermarket for kind of older sites that are struggling now, you know, their their traffic's dropped or something like that, but they still have all these relationships to sort of like resell. And then one other thing to mention too is they got the teams, right? Because the teams have the expertise in the affiliate space.
SPEAKER_03And that's something that's still quite difficult to find. I mean, we're going through a hiring process here and finding good people that have good skills in affiliate marketing is kind of like hens teeth still. Um, you know, I don't know if it's the same in the US, but you know, everybody calls themselves an affiliate account manager, but they have very little of the tactical knowledge that needs to go behind building strategies. So we're finding it's still quite difficult to hire people into this industry. And and part of my movement or part of part of the reason why we've started affiliate inside is to upskill and and get that next generation in. Because people like you and I, we've been in it for, you know, almost two decades. Where is this knowledge being captured other than on this podcast right now? It's not like there's a school of affiliate marketing that we can go to. So I think it's it's really important that, you know, we're getting people to tell the backstory of where we've come from, why sometimes these misconceptions have happened because of, you know, fortunate traffic or things that happened in the past that was just really bad behavior as we were learning the industry. But actually that talk about the strategic side of working with coupons and and voucher codes and the value that it has in that customer buyer journey. And I think that's why I wanted to get you on the podcast today was just really to kind of tap into that knowledge base that you have. And since we're talking about affiliate marketing in the trenches, which is part of our season. What's the big trend that you're seeing from your trench right now within like really within this space? I mean, as you said, you've got thousands of contacts of you know, merchants aro uh around the globe that are using your your products and your services. What's the big trend that you're seeing right now in this particular vehicle?
SPEAKER_00There's a lot going on in affiliate right now. And I think one trend is everybody's struggling just to tread water because there's so much going on. You know, we keep tabs that with FMDC. We do a weekly news roundup. And also on that note, I think the mission of your business is is very valuable to our industry because there is a dearth of talent. It's a great place to be, it's a great career place. But yeah, there's not a school. I mean, it's worth noting that there are schools, but take any of those with a grain of salt because they tend to be a marketing products that are very often very expensive. Not necessarily bad content, but but they're not gonna, you know, take you from from zero to sixty, as we say in the US.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh bring you up to speed. Um, it really requires a lot more, you know, it's a big space, right? It's it's hard to kind of engage with, especially on the on the affiliate side and on the merchant side, uh, there's not enough talent, which makes it for some pretty interesting economics. So that's kind of its own trend. That's been going on for a while. With other trends, I think what you're seeing is there's a lot more corporate dollars going into the affiliate space. That's kind of one thing that that's of note. You know, uh, this old house sold, I think, last year for $100 million, and they were very tuned into the value that it has a c as a commerce content site. Uh, that was one of the reasons that was attributed to the high-level value. So the real big money never used to be an affiliate, and now it looks pretty seriously at the fiddle. In fact, there's an expectation that it's going to be a they call it the third tent pull sometimes after display advertising and after subscription revenue, or you can do commerce content dollars, which is very meaningful for a lot of sites. And there's, I think, greater appreciation of the coupon reward stuff too, more sort of respect, more sort of awareness. And then a lot more business models are coming into it. You know, there's a company called Linktree. They got announced as a uh unicorn recently over the last couple of months by their most recent valuation. They help you to optimize monetization and other functionality for your one link out on your bio page on Instagram and other social media sites. So, you know, that was kind of a dark course entrepreneurial opportunity they jumped into a few years ago. They have a bunch of competitors as well. What I think the the grand trend is is that really you're you're looking toward way more links online, becoming affiliated. Likes. You know, I wrote a piece last year called uh you know affiliate domination with capital D O M. The idea being that you have all the links in the domain object model become affiliate links with whoever controlled the domain object model. That could be a sub-affiliate model, it could be their own traffic, but it could also help to fund stuff like, you know, uh Pinterest or Slack that has all these free users. You could say, hey, if you're on the free tier and you put in a link to a commercial link or a potentially commercial link, we reserve the right to turn it into a commercial link. Uh Pinterest actually did that years and years ago with the sub affiliate network and they got in trouble for it, but I thought that that was unfair. You know, I thought that was a reasonable thing for them to do if uh they have a user that's doing it for free and they're and there's reasonable disclosure. So I think that that's also been a big change that's that that sort of speaks to this larger trend too is people used to think of affiliate stuff as being almost naughty, and now it's just more, hey, this is an this is acceptable. I don't mean I don't think you're gonna see affiliate links on Wikipedia anytime soon. Reddit has a pretty hardcore policy against them, which you know, some people have workarounds and that's fine, but it's a it's very much a gray, possibly a dark gray area. I think just in terms of like what's in the light, what people are allowed to do, what's encouraged, you're gonna see way more affiliate stuff happen. And so that's great news for FFTC because that means I think there's an opportunity to scale the the working relationships. When we scale the working relationship, that means you're dealing with a lot more link inventory, and that's one of the things that we provide is that link inventory. And we marry it, of course, the deal and the product data. But you know, these are just great times for affiliate marketing. Merchants have always had affiliate programs. I think more and more people on the publishing or the affiliate side are taking it seriously as an opportunity.
SPEAKER_03I'm seeing a lot more people training, a lot more people, you know, supporting to get new publishers on board to take, you know, teach publishers how to drive traffic. I I mean we just didn't have that 15 years ago, you know. It was it just kind of you fell into it by accident. And that's why I like to ask everybody, just how did you get into it for any of the markets? Yeah, yeah. Everybody about that backstory, right? The last thing I wanted to ask you is for what was the one big trend that you wished you'd hopped on way back when? And if you could go back in time, what's the one thing that you're glad has changed since then?
SPEAKER_00So the the thing that the bandwidth would have hopped on would of course have been a coupon site, you know, I should have quit Zappos and and tried that out. That said, you know, is my sort of talent stack well geared toward doing that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Maybe not, which sounds funny because I've been in a Philly so long and I sell sell coupons but were a B2B purveyor of deals. Yeah. So I don't know if I could have pulled it off, but it probably would have been worth trying. Because it was just, you know, such a good run and it still is much more competitive now, of course.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. But doesn't that make it more interesting though? I mean, 'cause maybe if you had done that not uh, you know, way back then, you it wouldn't have led to where you are now. And I think a lot of us that have been in the industry this long, hindsight's an amazing thing, right? Like I would have become an affiliate 15 years ago. Would have been on the other side of the coin driving the traffic. But you know, kind of uh you we are the sum of all of our experiences and we are where we are meant to be. But what about the one thing that's changed since then that you're happy that's actually kind of moved along? Because we were working in the wild, wild west back then.
SPEAKER_00You know, I think it's that respect issue and acknowledgement of of affiliate. You know, back in the day, I remember going to a presentation and I was like a total cheerleader for affiliate right after I got into it, got what it was, you know, saw it sort of got a glimpse of its future. And it was a sort of a display advertising, sort of like round table that, you know, a few people were talking. I said, Hey, what do you you know, you talked about all this other stuff. What do you think about affiliate? And this one guy, I don't remember who it was, but he said, I think affiliate is garbage. I think that is the bottom of the barrel, you know, the sooner it goes away the better. Uh which hurt my tender little, you know, affiliate market or heart at the time. And I'm pleased to see that that guy was proved quite wrong. You know, I don't think affiliate's gonna overtake programmatic, which is 10 times bigger than affiliate, but I, you know, I think our space can can double and and more than double uh in the future because there's so much more value for us to unlock. And so the fact that larger corporate interest, uh bigger money, sort of to see that now is a huge boon to our space.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I very much appreciate that that has changed. Even if I do miss some of the old Wild West elements back in the day when it was a smaller space.
SPEAKER_03It was in the smaller space and there was a lot of the stuff that we were learning. I mean, the rate of learnings that we went through back in the day to get to where we are now, it was just phenomenal. You know, we I mean, I'm spending millions of pounds of budget with partners and and trying new things, and it didn't matter if it worked or it didn't work, the point was to try it and learn from it. Whereas now I think at marketers entering this space, they are pushed to get as much ROI, squeeze as much ROI as they can out of every dollar that they're allowed to spend. And they end up missing out on the kind of learnings that we had in terms of why we do things the way that we do them nowadays. And that to me is a little bit sad. You know, if I could go back in time, I'd I'd like us to be a little bit less corporate again and allow the younger generation the opportunity to go and learn and to try things and fail. I know it's not good for business, but that is kind of how we were learning, is that we were failing at some stuff, learning from those experiences and then reiterating and doing it better the next time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I I think that's an important point. And in order to kind of get back to that, I think what you actually really need is for the affiliates themselves to demand more transparency because they often really get shorted. You know, so for example, if if a commission rate is 10%, but a new customer is worth a hundred bucks and the merchant knows that because they'll pay it for, you know, Facebook ads or Google ads, and then the equivalent was just much, much lower paid out to the affiliate, that's great for the merchant, but I think it represents network interefficiency, which is actually one of the reasons I think paid placements are so popular, is the merchant merchant could justify them because of the scenario I just described, and then the affiliate knows this should sort of be going for them. So if you had something where some affiliates demanded a certain pass back of information, the kind of stuff that you know Google Ads can get, Facebook can get, the display stuff can get, then I think that you you would see a potential increase, significant increase in commissions, which would be really good because the affiliates will be able to do more with that, they'll draw more people into the space, et cetera. Right now you've got some affiliates that are very good at negotiating those, but others that are not. And if it should be that by those fair metrics, the commission should be lower, hey, that you know, that that's business, those are commercial terms. Um but right now I think that there's additional value to unlock. I I don't know how exactly you get there, but if uh one way would be those those publishers demanding more data uh and then more aggressively sending their traffic to other merchants.
SPEAKER_03Hit the man on the head for the last question, which is what's one thing you'd like to see change in related landscape. Yeah, collaborate. So I absolutely agree. More transparency, you know, better relationship management, and you know, a greater, with that transparency, a greater awareness of creating commercial deals that actually work. Because ultimately that's what affiliate marketing is, right? It's creating a mutually symbiotic relationship that works for both parties and still provides an ROI. Brock, it's been amazing having you on this podcast. I mean, you are just a wealth of knowledge on affiliate marketing and in the coupon and voucher code sector. And I love the things that you are doing at FMTC. Thank you so much for giving me your time and your experience today. I'm sure that our podcast listeners are gonna absolutely love this episode.
SPEAKER_00Well, great. Thank you, Leon. It's been my honor.
SPEAKER_02And that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in the 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 insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights 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 hire co-posts. With our WhiteGuard 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 partners or prospects 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 cofistkovs.com and let's talk.