You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by AffiverseMedia.com. The chapter and verse of everything you need to know about running a successful affiliate program for your business. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies and matec providers who operate, support or manage affiliate marketing programs around the globe. If you want to launch, scale, and grow a successful affiliate marketing program, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is constantly changing. And tune in to industry experts who are getting behind our mic to share tactical insights and practical knowledge to help your affiliate program grow. Here you'll discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing, how to run your affiliate program successfully and gain industry insights from experts and practitioners from around the globe. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. Now here's your award-winning affiliate and performance marketing host, an industry veteran, your affiliate marketing guide and the founder of Affiverse, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_03Welcome everybody back to this week's episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast with me, your host, Leanne Johnston. Today I'm super excited because I've got somebody that I very much respect and have wanted to get on the other end of my mic for a long time and finally managed to get it done. Joining me today is Michael McNurney, the founder of Martech Records. Mike, it is a pleasure to have you on this podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me, Liam. I'm excited to chat with you and uh happy Friday.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, happy Friday. Although this will be going out on Thursday. But for everybody overseas in America that listens to this podcast, you probably know Michael quite well. But the reason why we're bringing him on this podcast here is because I really want to push Martech Record into the UK marketplace. They're doing some amazing things. But before we get started, I want you to know a little bit about Mike, the man, the legend, and the founder of Martech Records. So, Michael, I usually start this podcast by asking people, how did you get into affiliate marketing? Because that's always the most interesting story to begin with. So give us a little bit of that backstory about how you landed up where you are today.
SPEAKER_00Well, before we got on, you asked me, let's go way back. And if we go way back enough, uh, I lived in the UK as a kid, and enough that I had a little English accent and lost it very quickly when I got to the playground in America when I was about seven years old. This really is bringing me back to my roots, and hopefully somehow that that's the accent and the raising 40 years ago will somehow permeate this podcast and uh you know infect the listeners with something positive. Um but nonetheless, we'll we can fast forward a little bit. I got into affiliate marketing very late, and uh I'm still, I think, pretty new to the uh industry and have quite a bit to learn about affiliate. My background is really in trade publishing. I spent the beginning of my career in advertising. I worked at Ogilvie and May there for the beginning of my career, and it was on big brand stuff, Super Bowl ads, and I really knew nothing about direct and performance marketing. We thought we were very cool because we were working on big stuff. And so I really didn't know much about affiliate or even performance, or at the time what they called direct marketing, which you may remember. And I went to business school, got out of it, and I joined a company that's very familiar in the US, I'm not sure how familiar in the UK, uh, called McGraw Hill. Uh McGraw Hill is a big publicly traded company that's most well known for education. They publish books you use in school, university, whatnot. But they also had a big trade publishing business. So they had a portfolio of titles that were covered big global markets like energy, aviation, design, construction. And we own the most preeminent titles in those markets. So if you were a contractor or you were an energy trader or whatever, our information was vital to you using your job. We published pricing information, we held conferences, and I loved the job because we were important to people and we helped people do their jobs. And I found that was just a compelling career. I could tell that the things we did helped people do their job every day. And it was the least popular part of media, but I thought the most useful uh part of media. So I really enjoyed it. But I like to say I was there. My role was running the digital media group there. And I like to say I was there, I had that job at exactly the wrong time to have that job, right? It was right when digital was really starting to take dollars away from print, but there were or you know, and users, but there weren't really solutions on the digital side, right? Like the best thing you could do at the time was make the banner ad bigger and pray. Like that was it. And the reality of my job was it was a lot of shutting down printing plants and and rearranging sales teams, incentives, and whatnot, which was a little sad. And we eventually sold the businesses to private equity, and those private equity teams, of course, dismantled them further. But I looked back at those as like really vital tools in those markets, which disappeared. And so I then joined a series of tech companies in these BD strategy roles, never particularly successfully. It was what I did to find the next role. And I eventually found my way to being recruited by Partnerize, which is a UK affiliate marketing platform. And I had absolutely no idea why they were recruiting me, what they did. And I was at the time working for a consulting company, so I was trying to sell them on my consulting services. And I think we talked for six months before I suddenly realized what they were telling me, and that I started to like look into it and realize that wait a minute, this is an interesting tool to monetize content. And the more I started to understand it, the more I was like, wait a minute, this would have been really useful a decade prior in my role at McGraw Hill. That said, I also recognize that there's no way I could have implemented it 10 years ago at McGraw Hill when the division of church and state, meaning editorial and content, were still very much in the kind of 20th century model. And there were cultural and operational challenges that would take, you know, I probably would have been fired if I would say if I suggested it. No, really, I would have been like walked out the door. It took me a year once to get an ad put on the homepage because the editorial team had so much power. And that had worked for McGrath for a century. I understood why. But as I got recruited to partnerized and eventually joined, it became very clear to me that affiliate marketing was something that could be applied to really any content type. And we were in this market where content types were proliferating every day, right? Social is exploding and their TVs going digital and all these things. And it was just very clear that if you were someone who had been in my position at McGraw Hill, you'd be very interested in what affiliate marketing could do, frankly, to help you save your business in a lot of cases. And I got in and I fell in love with it. And for a couple of reasons. One is that it worked. That was the primary reason, is I started to meet people at Condent Nast, right? And other what I would think as early movers in this kind of content industry. And the second is I just like the people. Not to criticize my Ogil V days, but my view of kind of marketing had been very like hoity-toit. You know, it's like we're making big, beautiful ads, and no one can tell us what to do because we have the best designers in the world. And affiliate was a world of like real people doing real work, like figuring out how to drive revenue, making relationships. And to me, that was just very appealing. You know, I just liked the people in the market. And so those two things I think drew me to a market and kept me in it eventually. But very quickly, I realized like this was a market that was perfect for trade publication. And the characteristics that are good for a trade publication are you have a lot of competitors, there's opaqueness around what products, services, pricing, those types of things. And you learn really quickly at affiliate marketing. The best way to learn is to go to affiliate summit and meet people and learn about the market. And that is wonderful, but it's not the best way to grow a market, right? You need some transparency around pricing, right? About what you pay people. You can't rely on flying to Vegas once a year and connecting with people. Um, although those are very valuable uh as well. And so, you know, I was sitting there going, always wanted to start a trade publication, just had didn't know what market to do it in. And so I was sitting there going, what market has a ton of competition from the technology standpoint that drives advertising revenue, opaqueness around kind of key components. And suddenly I was like, it's this market right here. I'm in the middle of that market. And so I founded Martech Record four years ago with the simple idea of how do we provide some clarity around uh the technology options people have, the pricing uh elements, right, salaries, all these just basic things that help you do your job, right? And so far it's round and worked, and that was a long story. You told me to go back to the beginning, and I went all the way back to to London in 1982 or so.
SPEAKER_03That's okay because this is a podcast where we talk about a lot of different stuff. So people are used to hearing long stories and short stories and different opinions. But you touched on quite a few things there. You spoke about church and state, which I am gonna bring you back to because it is very important at the moment in the phase where we're in right now. Like you said, when you worked at McGraw, 10 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to do this because it would have just not been the thing to do. And I think 10 years ago, affiliate marketing was so uh like Wild West and being set up and and organized and structured, and best practices were being learnt on the job that now it's almost impossible to keep up with what's changing in the industry. And we need publications like yours that are delving deep into certain aspects of it, like you mentioned salaries, for example. Affiliate managers aren't like typical job titles, there and they differ from company to company with lots of different requirements in each. At one company you might be expected to do BI and analytics, at another company you might just be expected to do customer relationship management and you know, the admin side of managing a program. So having a space where we can actually start to like input what we think is good and what we think is right, and also learn from other peers in our industry, I think, is one of the most important things that you've done quite successfully with Martech Record. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about you spoke about why you wanted to start Martech Record and you gave us the the way back when story to where you are now. But one of the biggest things that I've seen that's been successful with what you've done is creating the community on Slack. And just the amount of information that gets passed through that. And guys, if you haven't joined the Martech Record Slack group, please can you go and check it out and go and apply to join it? Because it's a really great resource to meet new people in the industry, ask questions of your peers. But what I wanted to ask you about that Slack community is like how well do you think it's gone? Have people adopted it in the industry? Because there's so many different memberships and places where you can go learn information, but it seems to have perpetuated itself. And I'm not sure if that's because it's in the States, based in the States, and people love to talk over there a little bit. And would that actually work here in Europe? But you've got a mix of people from around the world in your community. So what do you think has worked and why do you think that community is so important in this industry?
SPEAKER_00The Slack community is interesting. I will I'll be totally honest about this, is but prior to my starting this, I really disliked Slack. It was just another announcement that I had to respond to. And I started it because I needed a way for someone to respond to what I was doing. The first thing we did at Smart Tech Record was conduct a survey that surveyed the different platforms. And we do this every year. And we've gone from surveying 50 people to 350 people now. And the reason I started is I needed to give someone something for responding. So I said, You're now part of this exclusive Slack community, which didn't exist until the day before. And beyond that, I have to be honest, Leanne, I don't know the answer to your question. And I think the reason I don't know is because I've never run an affiliate marketing campaign. I I'm an expert in trade publishing. Yeah. And I think the success relies on the fact that I don't get involved very much. I trust the community that they know what to ask. And I get involved when there's a spam or a complaint, or yeah, like I know enough about a community that you don't want people in there just spamming everyone or um, you know, sharing someone's email when they're not supposed to, and those types of things. And so, you know, I try to get involved on the margins, right? And and you know, where it's obvious that we shouldn't have that. And a lot of times it's people pointing things out to me and saying, hey Mike, you should take a look over here. This isn't and then I go, so I rely on the community. So I I'm a little bit I'm asking the same questions you are about why it's possible. And the answer I have, the best answer I have, really, is that one, uh, affiliate remains a relationship business, right? Like that's very 100%. And there's a number of reasons for that we can talk about. And the second is I think you just let it grow itself, right? You don't get too don't think too hard about it, right? Is you let people ask the guys if you want to. Because I'll be honest, there's a number of times people have asked questions where I'm like, I would never ask that, and and I should probably get involved here. And then everyone responds, and it becomes this, and it's taught me that I really don't know what people want, but it's a great resource for me, and by the way, anyone else, you or find out what people are interested in, right? You just listen. And I'm a bit of a talker, so it's taken me some time to realize just shut up and listen to the community, right? Um, because it's a great resource to know what to write about, it's a great resource, you know, for our newsletters. I'm not an expert in affiliate marketing, so I rely on the Slack community to tell me what's interesting. And so I don't know if I answered your question mainly because I'm not sure of the answer, right? I'm not I'm no people tend to think of in the US. I think people think of Martech Record often as the Slack community. Like that's the kind of primary thing to think of.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so they ask me these questions, and I'm like, I don't know. I started a trade publishing business and this thing grew out of it. You guys built it, and I don't have a clue what's going on.
SPEAKER_03That's the one thing that I do want to say though, and I'm actually quite happy that you said you don't actually know why this is working because I think you answered yourself anyway, because I think it's because you're not over-curating things. What we sometimes forget as affiliate managers is that you don't need to micromanage your partners. Let them be free to actually express themselves, tell you the feedback that they're getting from customers when they're promoting your products and services, and let them actually do what they do best. Like you said, what you do best is creating a trade publication. You're not necessarily like the experts on affiliate marketing, but you don't need to be the expert on affiliate marketing because you've built a place where the community can come together and tell you what are the things that they are struggling with or need to delve deeper into to find the information for. And the same principles can actually be applied to your affiliate program too. It's you don't have to curate everybody and force them to communicate in a certain way because by doing that, you're actually missing out on things that you wouldn't normally think of yourself for your program. So I think in that way you kind of answered your own question and you also answered it and made it a little clearer for me.
SPEAKER_00It sounds like good advice for affiliate. We have 3,500 people up there, some hundreds talking every week. Who am I to say what they should be talking about, right? It's yeah, you were saying if anyone wants to join, they're welcome to reach out to me directly and we can put them in the funnel and get them involved. We'd love to have a better UK contingent in there.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and just get the conversation going from around the globe. So let's talk about some of the things that you do see in that Slack community because what do you think some of the big issues are that people are talking about in affiliate marketing that maybe aren't or are being addressed, but obviously because it's in the Slack community, it's not visible to everybody outside of the group.
SPEAKER_00It's a good question. Like, what are the big issues in affiliate marketing? And I'm I'm better at the big issues than the little issues, right? The big thing I think right now for me is affiliate marketing. There's there's there's a positive and a negative in this, right? Is affiliate marketing is being adopted by basically any content type that's out there, right? So if a new content type affiliate can be applied to it. And that was not true a decade ago, right? Affiliate was very much uh a discount channel, right? It was effective at that. And now it is uh a means of monetizing any type of content with just about any objective, by the way, right? And that that expands the reach of the affiliate marketing tactic, right? I'll use the word tactic rather than channel, because I think really anyone who's a publisher or anyone who's an advertiser and has budget can blend in affiliate marketing, right? And that creates massive opportunity for the tactic, right? The challenge, I think, for affiliate marketers who are my audience, right, is that anyone can use this tactic, right? And there is, I don't want to say a threat, but if affiliate marketers are good at collaborating, working cross-channel, figuring out how to take the measurements they use and affiliate and apply them to branding, for example, they're gonna be relegated back to uh, hey, discount, we'll put it over here, right? Yeah. On the other side, they have this huge opportunity to start leading, right? Because I'll talk about my days at this is when I think back to Ogilby, right? It's like we didn't know anything about performance and we didn't care about it, and we thought we were above all that stuff, right? And so you have this great opportunity to take some share, right, from people who are ignoring this space. Because I know that some of my former colleagues still think like that, right? And it's obviously the wrong way to think, because I think most budgets are going to be blended in the near future, right? Like people are have to think through this, and that's because the publishers themselves, and when I say the publishers, anyone who's producing content now has sales teams that work together, right? That figure out how to blend a performance budget along with a branding budget. And so the big thing to think about long-term to me is how those things get blended together and how the really smart people in affiliate lead that moving forward. Because people in affiliate, the smart people in affiliate are smart in a really different way than the smart people in these other channels. And they can use the way they think to really be leaders in the overall marketing space.
SPEAKER_03Very few people see it that way still, because there's still very much a perception that an affiliate manager is a junior person, like some of the lowest grade marketers, they're not as learned or studious as a social media manager or a SEO or PP or paid advertiser. It's almost like I still feel, and this is 20 years into the industry, that affiliate managers are still in the shroom room in most bigger organizations and they're just sort of left out to silo.
SPEAKER_00I think that's the fault of a lot of affiliate managers who like being there, right? There's a lot of people who like being ignored. They make money, they drive their channel, they're successful, right? And I don't think that's going to be an option moving forward. But I'm here to tell you look, I spent all of my career outside of affiliate marketing. I got into it, and there's no lack of brain power in the industry. Like that, I can tell you. I can't tell you the number of times I've met someone, asked them a question in affiliate, and learned so much, right? And been like, oh my God, like that is a totally different way of thinking. And so if you're an affiliate manager out there and think you don't have the brain power to compete with, like, forget that right away, right? Get in there and teach them what you know, right? And be a leader across channels, right? And if you do that, the senior marketing people, the CMO, are gonna see that, right? They're gonna go, okay, there's someone who can put the pieces together, right? And that's a leader, right? And the example I'll use is on the publishing side of things, right? And I think the publishing side of things has been a leader in the affiliate space. If you look at uh Wirecutter and Vox and CNN, and I'm I'm missing there's a ton of them. The people who are the most senior, you can go into my subscriber list and just see the titles, are the leaders at big publishing companies who've had to go into the C team and say, hey, I have a new way of making money, right? Yeah, it conflicts with a century of business model, right? And I want you to give me some power to be able to build this thing out, hire sales teams, put together different processes, right? Uh, challenge a century of church and state. And those people are now very senior, very well compensated, very much in demand uh in the market, right? And I think that the advertiser side has lagged a little bit, right? But they're gonna have to move that direction. And the people in the marketing organization that step up and say, I want to work with a brand team, and I'm gonna show you how to do this and show you how to blend these budgets are are going to be promoted in these organizations.
SPEAKER_03What are some of the big things that we can look out for in Martech Record in the coming months? What have you got planned to actually take us forward into 2024?
SPEAKER_00First, let me talk big picture about Martech Record is how I think of the role of Martech Record in the industry. And it's very simple. It's can we connect buyers and sellers and make their jobs a little bit easier? And usually the way we make the job a little bit easier is some layer of trust, right? There's a buyer and a seller are connecting, and maybe they read our buyer's guide and just have a little more information about platforms. And so it makes their decision one day easier, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Maybe they've read our compensation report and they're able to hire. Someone have some confidence that the salary is the right salary. And it makes that decision just that much easier, that much shorter, right? Or maybe an article they read, or maybe they've attended one of our live events or one of our webinars, learned something, and been able to take action in a way they wouldn't have, right? So that's just like how we think of our job. And if I can double down on helping people do their job and providing a layer of information that enables trust, uh, we'll continue to grow. A couple of things just to look forward to. We have a newsletter. It goes out uh three times a month. Uh it has jobs, it has the events, it has news, it has uh our upcoming content. And we're gonna be a little bit more strategic about the newsletters uh because that's what people have wanted from an advertising standpoint. People have you know really responded. So we're launching two new newsletters, uh, one that is opt-in, so you're gonna have to say you want to get it, uh, about new products in the industry. So once a month, we're gonna evaluate new products and send a newsletter saying here's some things to check out. And the second one is events. We're gonna have an events newsletter. And it's funny enough, like it's the one question I get asked all the time, and I'm surprised by. It's like, what events should I attend? And I'm always like, I don't know, you tell me, right? Like so we're gonna have a uh a newsletter that once a month says, here's the events that are upcoming, here's why we like this event. Uh and we're looking for people actually. This is where I love your audience to evaluate events for us and say this was going for so and so and it's gonna be global, so we love a UK feedback on this. Yeah, I don't know which events in the UK are are the right ones to go to, or mine.
SPEAKER_03All of my events are the right ones to go to if you're an affiliate program manager.
SPEAKER_00So those two things are uh big new consumer products that that we've got. Uh on the kind of B2B facing side, we're gonna be launching a few products that help publishers get found. So we have directory businesses for publishers, but also the ability for publishers to publish their media plan and get connected directly to our audience. So we have a private Slack channel of just advertisers that publishers can say, we're gonna be writing reviews about pizza ovens in September. Please send us your oven by this date, right? It has a format you can fill out. So what we found is that content publishers get inundated with uh pitches and they're not very good. And we try to educate them to make them better. But what we're doing is just hey, put it in our Slack channel here, and we will make sure that the way people respond is in a format that is useful to you. And so we'll be launching that. We've we've we've soft launched it already. Um so if people are interested, let us know. And then we're gonna be doing more webinars last next year. Frankly, people really like them. We get a couple more people on every webinar and we discuss interesting topics. Uh, one thing we do, I think that's a little different in the market, is we don't let the advertisers have any say whatsoever in what we talk about. We we produce the webinar and then we tell them we're selling ads around it so that we don't get that conflict of church and state. And that allows us to have really engaging conversations. And the advertisers are incredibly supportive uh of it, right? They, I think, have recognized that this tracks people, it gets people engaged, it gets them talking about a topic, and that is more valuable than putting together a 30-minute ad for whatever new feature is being launched. There's a market for that, it's just not what we do.
SPEAKER_03Sounds awesome. Look, it's been fantastic to hear more about what Martech Record is all about and the gap that you're trying to connect or fill with getting people connecting and talking about all the right things at all the right times and in all the right places. I wish you all the very best with everything that you're doing at Martech Record. I love it, so that's why I've got you on this podcast. Hopefully, other people in my community are gonna love it too. Thanks for coming on the podcast and telling us a little bit about the man behind Mar Tech Record. Yeah, it's been great to have you, Michael.
SPEAKER_00This has been great, and I'd love to do it again. Let's do it again and talk about the trends next quarter because if things are dramatically changing right now.
SPEAKER_03All the time. I mean, it might be great to bring you back in in January after you've done your trend survey if that's one of the things that's coming up. And just dissect that and talk about it. I'd love to have you on the podcast again. So yeah, it's been great having this time speaking with you and finally getting you behind my mic.
SPEAKER_00Always a pleasure, never a shortly end.
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SPEAKER_02That's a wrap for this week's affiliate marketing podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down, why not head over to Apple IT and give us a 5-star review? Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and our YouTube channel so you never miss another insightful episode or one of our free webinars ever again. Tune next week for more digital affiliate marketing insights, and content to keep your affiliate and performance marketing project and your performance driving consistently.