You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers who want to launch, scale, and grow successful affiliate and performance marketing programs. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is constantly changing. Get behind-the-scenes access to a variety of digital and affiliate marketing experts. Access hours of value bombs and tried and tested tactics. Learn what's new and trending in affiliate marketing. And much more.com thought leader, the drum digital's top 50 UK agency owner, affiliate manager, industry motivator, and your affiliate marketing guide, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to the affiliate marketing podcast with me, your host, Leanne Johnston. And today I'm super excited to have Trisha Mayer, the founder of Sunshine Rewards and the Executive Director of the Performance Marketing Association joining me. Hey Tricia, how are you doing? Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm super excited because I've been reading a lot of the papers and the things that uh the PMA delivers with keen interest. And recently I've just been nominated as part of the board of executives. So I'm really excited to get involved in the organization. And I thought, what better way to do that than to bring you onto the podcast and share a little bit about what the PMA does? So before we get started, I want to dig a little bit deeper into one of the founding partners of this association. I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into affiliate marketing, because I think that's always an interesting story. And then how you ended up leading the PMA as the executive director. Sure.
SPEAKER_02So by trade, I'm actually an attorney. So I started off working for Lexus Nexus right at the time where they were moving from using books for research to using this thing called the internet. And I was a part of the team that was helping put together all of the internet resources as the lawyers were all starting to come online to start doing their research. So I was already doing a lot online back in the early 2000s. And I kind of stumbled into affiliate marketing by having what is now considered a blog, but back then was just me with a front page license and putting up websites about mom stuff. So I had this site called Helping Moms Connect. And I saw other sites similar to mine that had all these great advertisers like Target and Walmart. And I was like, how in the world are these little websites getting these huge advertisers? So of course, you know, I try to go to the advertisers and they're like, we don't even know what you're talking about. So I then found a link tracer that helped me trace the links that I clicked on. And as I watched the links trace, I started finding affiliate networks. And so it was just a short amount of time where I started kind of monetizing the blog. And then the further that I got into that, the more I enjoyed being an affiliate marketer and the less I enjoyed being an attorney. And so um it was just, it was a great time to be getting into affiliate marketing, just in terms of what was going on in affiliate marketing at the time, but then also because I had two little kids and being able to do this and that at the same time was great. And so, in terms of the PMA, I was kind of close to a lot of the people that were, you know, founding it in the beginning, the people who were already really established in the industry, like Missy Ward and Brian Littleton. And they kind of took me under their wing just as, you know, first a member of the PMA and then a member of councils and then a member of the board. And then after a little while, um, as they were looking for an executive director, we kind of figured out that I could bring my two things that I do together. So as executive director, part of what I do is understanding affiliate marketing and actually being an affiliate, knowing how to use the networks, how you know how cookies work, all those kind of things, but also the legalities of being in the affiliate marketing industry. So things like FTC disclosure and taxation and things like that. So that's kind of how I end up as the executive director. They just looked at me as someone who could take both the legal sides of affiliate marketing, which are really complex, and then also um just the more day-to-day aspects of it and put that together.
SPEAKER_01So let's talk a little bit about what the PMA stands for and who you seek to really serve in this partnership economy that we're working in now, because then till now, you you know you've obviously had quite a lot of experience. The industry has changed quite a lot, even in the last 10 years. Um, so what does the PMA stand for? And and what are you looking to actually um support in this industry as it grows moving forward?
SPEAKER_02So um Performance Marketing Association, and we kind of envelop all of performance marketing. And that's a tough thing because you know, people say, why isn't the affiliate marketing association? Don't you do affiliate marketing? Why not influencer? And so we look at it as performance marketing is just kind of enveloping all of these different things. So, you know, it's interesting who we're seeking to serve, it's almost everybody that touches an internet or any kind of online transaction at all, because we're looking at the consumers and putting out things like, you know, how to have good coupon practices for the consumers. But then we're also looking at the merchants and trying to help them understand, you know, why they should have an affiliate program and why it's beneficial to them. We're talking to the agencies, the affiliate managers, and talking about best practices in managing their programs, how to recruit affiliates. We're working with the affiliates and helping them understand best practices, what different types of technologies are out there for them. And then, of course, to work with the networks. They're kind of um sit at the top of our of our pyramid, a smaller number of them, but that we work really closely with because we're helping them work on technologies and legal issues, helping them recruit merchants, helping them recruit affiliates. So pretty much top to bottom, anybody that is touching any type of e-commerce, we're trying to help them.
SPEAKER_01And is that only in the US? Or are you kind of expanding your global organization? Well, thanks to you and Chris, we are now definitely expanding.
SPEAKER_02Um, we started in the US and you know, the the companies were all basically US companies. But over time, not only did we start having companies outside the US join, but a lot of our companies in the US were globalizing. So on this now, this week becomes the first time that we have two members of our board of directors out of 13 that are outside of the US. So percentage-wise, you know, that really is kind of big for us, especially since we didn't have any, say, four years ago. Um, so it is definitely something that we're we're working on a lot more because so many of our members are saying, help. You know, we want to market to other countries, but we have no idea where to even get started with that. And so we do little things like, you know, talking about affiliate recruitment and talking about how do you work with affiliates in other countries. You put your time zone and your signature of your email profile, just little things like that that help you. But then also the really big things, like what are the overseas conferences you might want to go to? What are the laws? We have a whole page of regulations in other countries that we're starting to develop that says, you know, if you want to work in this country, here are the things that you need to understand.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because that was one thing that I found quite interesting. I was over in Florida a couple of weeks ago at the Link Unit conference chatting to some phenomenal women in the industry that I'd never had the privilege to meet until I'd gone over to the states. And they were talking about, you know, even the federal laws are different in terms of like customer data and privacy. And I'm sure navigating that as a performance marketing manager must be quite a headache. I mean, there's you know, so many different rules and regulations for all the different states in the US. And then you've got to get your head around what's happening here in Europe with GDPR and all the rules that are associated with that. And it's not just for brands, it's for publishers too, because anybody that's collecting data has to, you know, apply it by the same rules. It doesn't matter whether you're in a brand or an operator or advertiser and a publisher or an affiliate. So I would imagine that you've got a really big task cut out for you guys. Probably for you specifically on the legal front, but it helps to know that there's a place where you can get you know trusted, a trusted source of information that's actually you know backed by veterans and industry experts that are operating across the board. So I think for me it's kind of a no-brainer. Pay for your membership and get access to all of this information. But not only that, you know, the industry needs an association of this kind because it is growing so incredibly fast. Now, how do you make sure that the association is keeping up with all of the changes?
SPEAKER_02In part, we have a lot of really smart members. Um, the collaboration within the organization is just amazing. It's I don't think people outside of the organization understand the extent to which competitors are collaborating behind the scenes in the PMA. Um, so we'll have a network that'll bring an issue to us and say, hey, did you know that New York is now doing this when it comes to taxation? If you're a network that has a presence anywhere in New York, and we'll say, whoa, let's, you know, hit up our other network partners and see if they know this is going on and what's happening, and then put together a quick conference call of all these competitors and say, okay, what is your legal team saying? What's your legal team? You know, is this something that PMA needs to get involved with, or is this something that each of you is individually going to deal with yourselves? There's just so much that goes on behind the scenes in terms of, you know, agencies will come to us and say, Hey, did you hear this new thing? We're hearing this from here. We have attorneys, you know, that are on board. We have attorneys that partner with us and attorneys that are members that will say, This is the newest thing that we're hearing that the FTC is looking at, or this state is now looking at passing a law. Here's some information to share with your members. So we just have a lot of people who are willing to contribute a lot to us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, a lot of people here on the side of the pond, I don't know if you've heard it, they're talking about how do you protect your brand in the metaverse. The metaverse hasn't even launched, like properly launched it. You know, it's like this there's a lot of metaverses. So how do you protect your brand there? And how are you going to make sure that partners are representing your brand properly? So this kind of stuff is happening like day to day and it's changing day to day. So it it, you know, it makes sense that there's a space where you can come and learn and actually collaborate with other people in the industry and hear what they're seeing because it often it's very difficult to find those people because they are they are your competitors. But having and I know you've got a really active Slack community as well. So once you become a member, you get added to the Slack community, which then allows you to connect with people. And I've made some, I mean, I'm I made connection with you and I got invited in. So, you know, it's and it's it's not a lot of money. I mean, um, sorry, I don't actually know, but what is the current membership price? Because we just pay it annually every year and don't even ask questions, but it's not very expensive from what I remember. Right.
SPEAKER_02It's just it's based on uh membership levels, which is the size of your company. So it's starting, you know, at 149 for a single person, then it goes the whole way up to 5,000 for our very, very top one. But most of our companies are paying between $250 and $1,000 a year, which is minimal.
SPEAKER_01It's very, very little budget to have access to training, to have access to um some of the reports that you put out. And I do want to touch on a little bit the um industry marketing report of 2022 because there were some amazing figures in there and some really great content that you guys shared. And one of the biggest takeaways for me was the growth rate of 47%, which was outlined as the growth from 2018 to 2021. And that's phenomenal considering that that was during a global pandemic. So using that kind of data to manage your budgets, your strategy, to look at how performance is impacting your business, like you can't you have to pay a lot of money to get that kind of um data. You know, you'd and most companies don't have that kind of budget set aside just for white papers. So for $250 once a year, even just that report alone for me is it's like incredibly good value. What were some of the things that you got out of that performance marketing study? Because it was quite in-depth that you thought like maybe changed the way you looked at the performance industry. Like, what were some of the key takeaways that you thought were quite pertinent to share?
SPEAKER_02You know, it's interesting when we do this survey, on the one hand, there are things that I hope to see. And so I think, oh, I'm really expecting this or expecting that and hoping that it turns out. But then on the other hand, I want surprises. I want there to be things that we didn't know were happening and I want to be able to identify trends that we didn't even know were were coming. And, you know, one of those is the rise of subnetworks. And it's something that doesn't get talked about a whole lot, but there really are a lot of different types of subnetworks. Um, and especially with the rise of influencers and with traditional media now getting more into affiliate marketing. And you know, as an affiliate myself, it totally makes sense. I work with a thousand different merchants across 10 different networks, and that's complicated to keep track of all that, the number of emails that are coming in that you're having to monitor. And as a small business or as an influencer, that's a whole lot of information coming at you that you're trying to figure out. Um, so these subnet subnetworks kind of provide an opportunity for an influencer or more traditional network or somebody that just doesn't have the time to belong to all these different networks and understand all of them. It gives them an easy way to get into affiliate marketing and to make some money. Um, but at the same time, it brings a lot of challenges to the retailers and to the agencies that are managing these programs because it's great to have as many affiliates as you can have. But if those are all direct relationships, you've got a lot of monitoring, a lot of compliance that you're having to do. So the subnetworks are great. But on the flip side, you know, what's your contract like with that subnetwork? How do you make sure that they're not letting garbage into your program? How do you make sure that they're monitoring for um things like FTC disclosure guidelines and things like that? So, you know, this rise of subwort subnetworks, it completely makes sense. But at the same time, it is also, you know, bringing a lot of challenges, I think, to the affiliate managers.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I mean, that's that brings me to my next question, which is as an affiliate, what do you think some of the biggest challenges are that publishers are still facing? Because we often talk about everything that the brand needs in performance marketing, but we don't really talk about some of the practical issues that affiliates are experiencing. So take your PMA hat off for a minute and talk about an affiliate. What are some of the big challenges that you're still seeing and experiencing in the affiliate space?
SPEAKER_02You know, it's interesting. I'm I am about halfway through a blog post right now that starts out with how my daughter broke my heart over Christmas break. Um, and that's because my husband told me that she had a coupon toolbar extension installed in her browser. And as someone who has, you know, used their cashback and coupon site to pay for their daughter's education, it's heartbreaking when you hear that she uses your competitor because it's easier for her. And so, yeah, but it makes you take a step back and think, okay, if my own daughter thinks it's easier to use another site than my own, what should I be doing differently? And that's kind of you know a crossroads that I've seen a lot of my affiliate friends at lately. So it's like, what's good for our customers? You know, it might be buy now, pay later. It might be some kind of toolbar that shows them coupons. But then what's best for me? I'm because I'm not that type of publisher. I'm a different type of publisher, I'm more content. So, you know, there's with all these different opportunities, these different technologies that are great for the consumers and, you know, new opportunities for merchants to work with more companies. It also means that those of us on the other side, we have to figure out where we live now in this ecosystem and how we maintain profitability. And I think it's possible because we've all been doing it for almost 20 years. Every time something else new and shiny comes along in affiliate marketing, everyone kind of throws up their hands and says, oh, and then we all somehow figure it out. So I think it's just one of those times, again, where we are seeing toolbars and extensions popping up within the PMA. We're hearing a lot about it, lots, and we're doing a lot of research, pros and cons, webinars, you know, things like that. And that's going to continue because the bottom line is these toolbars and extensions are good for consumers.
SPEAKER_01They are. So it is actually a report that I read that you guys have delivered already. I didn't um I think I read it in December. Was it in December when you launched it? And it was quite interesting because it covered quite a few different viewpoints about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing and how to actually manage it from a from a brand perspective so that it's ethical and that it actually works. So I love the fact that the PMA is getting involved in kind of curating what potential best practices could be in lots of different segments of the of the industry because we do need to have that discussion. You know, there are a lot of new things that are coming to market and there are a lot of ways that you can grow your program. But at some point we need to kind of take a step back and go, well, is this good for the consumer? Is it good for the partner? Is it good for the brand? Because everybody's involved in this ecosystem and we all have to work symbiotically together in order to make it work. So I think that's a really key part, another reason why membership is important, because you're not going to get this data anywhere else. Right. Right. So, you know, for a small fee, you're actually getting really relevant content pushed into your inbox, which helps keep you up to date with what's happening in the industry.
SPEAKER_02And here in just those other perspectives, you know, I listen to especially the agencies and affiliate managers talk a lot because they tend to be the majority of the members of all of our councils. So, you know, when I hear them saying, oh, we really like to work with this type of affiliate because we get this out of it, we really like to work with that type of affiliate because we get that out of it. So, you know, I have to take that step back and look at my business model and just say, okay, I understand why the agencies are giving them higher commissions than me or why they're giving them increased placements over what I have. And I understand that because I hear what they're saying about how it's growing, you know, the business for the merchants, how it's helping the agencies. So then how do I become better? How do I, you know, pull in some of those things that they find valuable from those other types of affiliates? How do I try to bring that same kind of value or a unique type of value? So, you know, I think hearing what your competitors are doing, seeing how they're being successful is super important in how you stay successful in the industry.
SPEAKER_01And I mean, what do you think the hot topics for discussion and performance will be this year? Because we're obviously going into quite a tricky year. There's been a lot of layoffs. Um, you know, companies are tightening up their budgets, we're heading into a potential recession, or maybe we are in a recession. I don't know how, you know, how quickly that kind of comes to forward depending on where you are in the world. Right. What do you think are going to be the hot topics of discussion this year in the performance marketing industry?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think obviously the economic issues, um, they kind of feed into that whole what's good for the consumer. And that is with continuing these discussions about toolbars and extensions and the issue of buy now, pay later. It is that it's obviously good for affiliate marketing because we've seen a big rise in that um through our survey. It kind of popped up on to our radar for the first time as a significant amount of the tech money that came through during the survey time. Um, so in terms of how does that benefit the consumer, especially during this time of economic um kind of chaos. But then also, you know, how do we stay profitable as a channel? We know that the return on ad spend is high for affiliate marketing. How do we continue that? How do we increase that? But at the same time, you know, increasing your return on ad spend isn't just as simple as, well, we'll just lower the commission rates for the publishers, because then you're setting yourself up for maybe that publisher decides they're just not going to work with you at all, and then you completely lose all of that revenue. So it's gonna be a fine line for affiliate managers and brands to walk to say, we want to continue this high return on ad spend, but we can't do it just by cutting commissions or just by raising prices. We have to figure out how to get a little bit more creative. And how do we use those creative things like, you know, the free shipping thresholds get increased just a little bit or the, you know, spend $150, get $20 off, kind of raising those average order values as opposed to um, you know, just cutting the commission rates completely for the affiliate. So I think there's a lot of that. Um, and a lot of that is going to come through more technology. It's gonna be technology that helps the consumers, but it's also gonna be the technology that helps the brands and the brand managers, that helps them understand more about the attribution of their commissions, that helps them understand where things are being dropped, things are being lost, um, things like moon poll that are helping everybody kind of expose what's happening in the industry in terms of um privacy issues, cookies getting dropped, commissions not getting paid, and things like that. So I think a lot more um technology, you know, we're gonna be using it to generate more and more data, and affiliate managers and brands are gonna have to know what to do with that data.
SPEAKER_01And I think, I mean, everybody's talking about chat GP at the moment this week seems to be a hot topic about like new year, new ways to do things using artificial intelligence. Like we need to think about how do we what's what are the best practices for that in affiliate programs? You know, is it is a content that is, you know, AI generated and charge the client, you know, a listing fee or whatever the case may be. Like how how are we going to be monitoring this and what are the best practices? What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_02Uh, I'll say as an affiliate, we're already testing it. Um, we've already tested some blog posts that we've been watching to see how fast they can rank. Um, just in the month of December on one of my sites, we saw that a post that was generated by that with just a couple of unique images jumped into our top, I think it was number 35 on our most organic traffic for the month of December, which for one post that we didn't even launch until the second week of December was pretty darn good. So, you know, for affiliates, there are opportunities out there depending on, you know, what you do with that. If you're just running something and then just throwing it up versus going in and then using your SEO skills to optimize those posts with the headers and unique images that Google's never seen before and things like that. Um, it's gonna be interesting to see what the publishers do. And then obviously, you know, for brands, a lot of the things that they have they've relied on customer, on their affiliates to write these posts, you know, to write a post about a specific topic and then put their links in that post. Why doesn't the brand just have that post on their site now? They don't even need the affiliate to be publishing that post. They can have that content on their own site and have that indexed by Google. So, you know, it is it's gonna make things good and bad. Which kind of seems to be the way everything in affiliate marketing is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but you know what this is gonna do? It's gonna separate like the serious players from the ca from the casual ones. Because yes, you can create a piece of content that STO is great, but it's not authentic. It's not it's gonna be called right team. And and cuss I'm s I'm a huge believer, and and if you read any any of my content, if you look at any of my podcasts, everything you see is made by me. It is not made by you know, I might get an idea. I might I mean I have actually played with uh ChatGP today and I used it to ask it questions to see what it's sent back, and it is good as an idea generation tool. So, you know, like if you've if you're struggling to find like what to write, you can ask it a question and say, you know, what can I write about this product? And it'll give you six or seven different ideas or blog topics, which I think is great because it saves you a lot of time. Because a lot of the thinking and the curation of content is where the time comes in. The actual, you know, bashing out the the the copy sometimes, well, for me it isn't a problem. Other people might struggle with that, or they'll hire content writers, you know, it's a skill, it really is a skill. But I think ultimately people are gonna know the difference when they read it. They're gonna know that this wasn't actually created by a human because it doesn't feel authentic and it never will because it's made by a machine and it's not you. So I think, yes, there are ways that it can be used to save time, to save money, to you know, get more efficient in the way that you run your affiliate business or the way that you run your affiliate program. But I think ultimately you mustn't take your eyes off the ball and not become unauthentic in what you put out into the marketplace because customers, I I think they're savvy enough to see through that. I really do.
SPEAKER_02It's gonna be interesting because I I keep seeing, you know, I've seen because I follow a lot of legal blogs, um, professors that have said that it's just flat wrong. So it depending on the niche that you're in, if some of the things that you could be pulling from it could be just absolutely wrong, not even correct, and you don't want to put that in your site. Um, and then I have two kids in college of which I've been having a lot of discussions about how they should not be using this at all. Um, because you just never know what's gonna happen. Um, but and then on the flip side of it is that this is pulling from our sites, our affiliate sites, our content sites, it's pulling our content. And so what's being pulled from our sites is now being used. And we're not being compensated for that. So, you know, on the flip side then of everything else is what's happening to the people that are generating the unique content, and then this AI is just going out and pulling your content and giving it to somebody else and you know, mixing up the words a little bit. So it is like the there's so many ethical issues with it. There's so many um, you know, what's gonna happen? Is Google gonna be able to understand it? I I don't know.
SPEAKER_01And I would have never checked what is AI generator content because I read some, I don't know where I read it. I read a lot of stuff, but I can never remember where I read it. But on the interweb, somewhere, I found an article that was talking about the fact that um the search engines are already putting measures in place to look at what is AI generated content. And whilst some of the content might be able to slip through the crack and give you a bit of a boost, which is great, it's I think it's also about using everything in moderation. And that is actually the kind of like ethos behind affiliate marketing is everything in moderation. Now you can push the boundaries, you can push the commercials, you can, you know, push the offers, like you said before, but everything has to be done in moderation and it has to make sense and it has to be authentic. And when you've got those three things done, I think you it's very hard not to succeed with performance marketing.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. It's taking the tools that are out there and then figuring out what works for you and your brand. And um, yeah, like you said, being authentic, it has to be, I think they're you can always tell. Like when I go to my competitors' websites, I can always tell the ones that they just have people writing the content versus the ones that it's actually like what I'm talking specifically like about my wine sites. I can tell when they're actually writing content about the wine versus um, you know, if they've actually drank that wine or they had that product in their hands and things like that. So yeah, that's for me. It was an interesting experiment in using it for me just to see what we pulled was like six paragraphs that came out of it. And then we added, I'd say another five and then images to it just to see what would happen. Like, was it worth it as a starting point? And we'll see over time, you know, we had the post, well, it got some traffic, and then we'll see over time is it a post that we like? Is it a post that converts? Because there's a difference between a post that gets traffic and a post that makes money. And so there's that that you have to take into consideration as well.
SPEAKER_01I would love the PMA to do a little survey six months from now about everybody that's used Chat GP and what their experiences were, because it would be very interesting to see the use cases, like how people are actually integrating AI into their businesses and and and leveraging that into the performance space. One of the other things that I wanted to ask you is kind of where do you see the future of affiliate marketing? Because you've obviously been in it for a few iterations and a few cycles now. What do you like? What are your thoughts on the whole Web 3.0 metaverse, the move to beyond? How do you think that's going to come to play? Do you think it's going to be happening sooner, later, 10 years, 10 years from now? What are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_02You know, the one thing that worries me about a lot of the trends that we're seeing is that we're kind of pushing out the smaller players more and more. It used to be a lot easier to be an affiliate. It used to be a lot easier to be a small merchant just launching a program with a handful of publishers that would keep you um sustained and make it worthwhile for you. But that's getting more difficult because the technology is increasingly difficult, um, a little bit more expensive. So back when I started affiliate marketing, I used to hear that perhaps 80 to 90% of affiliates couldn't earn a full-time income. They were either dabbling as a hobby or it was something on the side. It's just a small portion of their business. And I don't think that that has changed. When I look at a lot of, you know, when I look at my rankings within the networks and I know where I am, I don't think that that has changed. I still think it's really only like this kind of top-tier group of affiliates that are really making a full-time income in in the industry. And I think that's fine because affiliate marketing has always been a place for people to have side gigs and to be able to have, you know, a little extra part of their business. And I just hope that that continues. I hope that it doesn't get to be too much. I hope that, you know, having to worry, it's already difficult when you're talking about your brand and having a website. And then you need a Facebook page, you need a Twitter account. Now you need a TikTok account. You need, and then so, you know, just as a brand, you need all of these different places that you need to be. And then all of a sudden, when Twitter is having problems, then there's another 10 places that everybody's saying you need to go register your brand name and maybe get busy just in case. And so, you know, that just makes it makes it harder for the small guys. And I don't want to see that because I think part of why affiliate marketing has always been successful is because it's not just about the money, it's not just about the big companies, the big brands, it's about anybody who has the creativity, who has the um, you know, the the drive to do something new or different or interesting, even if it's part-time, even if it's a side thing. And that's what's kept, you know, the industry interesting and fun.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. So I think it is gonna be interesting to see how the smaller, the smaller publishers survive and and innovate through. And I think that's the key thing is that you are gonna have to get innovative. And if that means using certain tools that you never would have considered using before, maybe that's something that you need to explore. I'm going to be attending affiliate summit rest with you, and I'm going to be on the PMA stand for one hour, one golden hour, and hopefully I'm going to be able to answer every question that I get. But it's the first time I'm going to the show. So please forgive me if you're meeting there live in person. But do come along and say hello because I'd love to meet as many people as possible that I can that are members of the PMA. And also just, you know, hear and see people's thoughts of what's happening on the other side of the pond, because obviously I'm here in the UK. Um, so I'm super excited. I cannot wait to meet you all in person. I cannot wait to be there and experience this event. You know, look after me on the PMA stand and Tricia, I hope I do you justice. I really do.
SPEAKER_02You know, the great thing about having that meet market booth and affiliate summit is kind enough to give that to us, is that we have lots of members that show up and work there all day that all have completely different experiences. They work for different companies, they work in different parts of the industry. So no matter when you show up at the booth, there's somebody else there to talk to about something completely different. And so it's just nice because it's just kind of a hub of perspectives and um people from different places, different companies meeting up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Cannot wait. I'm super excited and super angt. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast and just talking a little bit more about what the PMA is doing and just helping our community to understand why it would be beneficial to actually become a member. And if you are a member, go and download some of the reports that we've spoken about today because I found them interesting and I'm pretty sure all of you will too. If you're not a member, get your business to sign you up because there's a lot of value to be had. And especially in the year that we're facing ahead, I think it it will really help to have a community behind you that you can ask questions from, get support from, and really just start, you know, investing in your learnings and your and your community network development because this industry is still very much based on relationships. And I, for one, I'm looking forward to meeting lots of new people this year. That's probably one of the exciting things that I'm looking forward to. So it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you for your time. Thank you for coming to explain all of these things. And I cannot wait to see you in a couple of weeks' time.
SPEAKER_02Well, I still appreciate you and appreciate you joining the PMA and helping us spread the word. Um, and it's gonna be fun to have you on the board this year. It's gonna be um a new experience to have two of you from the UK. So we're looking forward to just hearing all those other perspectives and the oh, we didn't even think about that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, amazing. All right, thanks so much, Tricia. Have a great day. Thank you to you.
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