You're listening to the affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by OffivotMedia.com. The chapter on both 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 people 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 Influenty, Liam Johnston.
SPEAKER_00Welcome everybody back to this week's episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And today I'm thrilled to have really special guests with me, Raman Keasen from BrandSwamp. He's the founder of Brand Swamp, and he's going to be talking to us a little bit about what he does and how he sees the affiliate industry moving forward. Welcome, Raman. It's a pleasure to have you on this podcast today.
SPEAKER_02Hi Ilian, it's great to be here too as well. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. Awesome.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so tell us a little bit about how you got into affiliate marketing. And I always start the question there because everybody I've ever met in this industry has got a super interesting backstory. And tell us what led you to build brands as well.
SPEAKER_02Cool. So initially, I actually my background was e-commerce, not affiliate. So I had an agency, an e-commerce agency, which I sold many years back and worked with lots of like big UK retailers. And then actually was building an online to offline platform for brands like PMG and Unilever. And I came across Simon, who's at the time he was at Sulu. And we sort of just got chatting really about various ideas. And we built a personalization business in the future, which is an e-commerce personalization business called Revlifter. And I got working with people like Walmart, Samscore, ASOS, so lots of like really big retailers. And I became really interested in personalization. So I think that's an area of focus and how it was quite new in the affiliate industry. And it seemed at the time as well that the affiliate industry was booming through all these new technology partners which are really becoming publishers and making it very exciting by speech. So I just felt that the affiliate industry was suddenly probably a really exciting place, and there was a lot of new partnerships there and a lot of growth. So I think for me it felt like the right time to get into it as well. And so we built Revlifter, we got to a decent sort of size for 70 people, raised 10 million, and now I'm actually really active as an investor, host Revlifter, and I'm working with lots of different startups. And to cut a long story short, towards the end of the year, I just got talking to a few of the networks that were trying to do more and more brand-to-brand partnerships. And everybody said this is a great idea. This is something we want to do. We can really see the value on both sides of the partnership. However, technically it's just a little bit challenging, and often there's lots of different moving parts. So, how do we actually make it easier? And I thought to myself, there's a real problem to be solved here. Everybody wants to do it, but it's actually quite hard to do it. So I guess that's where I decided that I wanted to create something that would just make it a lot easier and a lot quicker. And at that time as well, my one of my former Christian Ramsoy was available, and he was a fantastic guy, and I knew he had the experience with a lot of machine learning, the AI, and deep kind of tech experience to build what I thought brand-to-brand partnerships could be. And that's the way brand swap came about. So quite a lot of moving parts there, but I had the team in place to build it, and it felt like there was a need. And also all the networks now have these fantastic tags that you can go inside, which really speed up adoption and make it a lot easier for the retailers and the advertisers to participate really quickly. So it felt to me like the right time and the right place. And added to that as well, retail media is just, as everybody knows, is booming. It's going to grow, you know, 60-7% over the next three or four years. And for me, I feel that a lot of the affiliate networks are almost like sleeping retail media networks. And I mean I mean that because they're at the kind of junction of the transaction and the consumer and the advertiser and the retailer. So super interesting place, I think, for any advertiser to participate because there's different sides of the value chain now. So I feel like it's almost like the perfect time, really, you know, for the affiliate industry to actually look at doing this because it's just got all the ingredients of success.
SPEAKER_00And people have been talking about partnerships quite a lot in the last 18 months. I mean, if I think about the hot topics that are happening in our space, brand-to-brand partnerships are coming to the fore because there's a lot of crossover in terms of who the customer is with some businesses, and they're spending a lot of advertising media, performance, marketing media budgets to go and acquire the same customers. So tell us what brand swap is on a mission to do because you spoke a little bit about trying to make partnerships easier, but explain exactly what brand swap does to make that happen.
SPEAKER_02Sure. So brand swap is a plug and play partnerships platform which allows any advertiser or retailer to partner with each other and place rewards and advertisements on each other's checkouts. So we call it checkout marketing, and we're building a marketplace for that to make it really easy for both sides of the value chain to work with each other. And the plug and play thing is really important though, because I think that's the issue that hasn't really been solved, is just making it take five or ten minutes, be really seamless and really quick to find the right partners. But in terms of my mission is plug and play, make it really quick and easy, but also make it more personalized and more relevant as well. So I feel for the consumers that they also need increased relevance and they don't want an awkward brand-to-brand experience that just doesn't feel right or it doesn't feel to have brand parity, and they want it to be you know convenient, a very short journey to purchase. So I think a lot of it is around that the consumer expects relevance and convenience. And so if you can't deliver that with a brand partnership, then I don't think it's gonna work. So my kind of long-term North Star that I'm working towards is through making the brand partnerships incredibly relevant and real-time at scale to the user. You know, you're buying a dishwasher and you get an offer for subscription for dishwasher tablets, something like that. You know, it's all immediate. You're ensuring your pet and yet an offer for a health food subscription. And that's the kind of relevance I think ultimately all advertising is going towards anyway. And I think you won't even know it's there. It's like when it works, it's when it feels that it's almost invisible and there's no joint. So that's my mission is that it feels like that. It feels like it should just happen and it's right.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So for affiliate managers that are tuning in here and that want to perhaps explore partnerships as part of their performance ecosystem, what's the easiest way for them to do this? Because it's sometimes a little bit daunting when you go, Oh, yeah, I need to go build a partnership. Who do you contact? How do you start that conversation? Obviously, brand swap is the platform that will sit between the two parties or the two entities that are going to partner up together. But what's some of the advice that you can give that that you've seen work from some of the successful partnerships that you've maybe broke?
SPEAKER_02Sure. So I think the most successful partnerships, there tends to be a really good charity of brand values. So I think really understanding whether the partners have that have the same values as the is, and I'll give you an example. What we often find is that all the B-Corp people that have ethical or environmental products, you know, do not want to be seen with someone that has any issue of being seen as not B Corp. So essentially their values are the same, and that can happen on many different levels. So I feel that that parity is really strong. The other thing as well is that if they are going to do brand-to-brand partnerships, there has to be a really clear value to the customer and a very strong incentive to the customer to participate. It can't just be an offer that they see anywhere else or you know they see on another publisher or it's business as usual. So I feel like both sides of the partnership need to go a little bit further to give some extra value or reward to the customer. Otherwise, they're slightly missing out on the value exchange. So there's two sides of it. So you're either a host or you're an advertiser. But if you're hosting different advertisers, then thinking really carefully about the value proposition of the advertiser because some advertisers aren't easily understood what they do. So they might be understood within a niche. So let's say you're in a really small niche, then it's fine to offer an advertiser from another niche on your site, a smaller one, because people understand naturally what it does. I think when you're offering advertisers where it's more generic, I think you need a really strong advertiser that has a decent strong brand presence because otherwise they can get a little bit lost, you know, and then you start to interrupt the consumer journey because it's like, what is this brand? What do they do? You know, you try and think about it. So I feel it has to be something that the value proposition is so clear. You know, it's three months of you know, Audible or Disney or something where everybody can know what it stands for can be really strong, unless they're in a niche and they truly understand that value proposition because they're in a certain audience. But in terms of the actual getting the whole thing together, I think strong execution is really good as well. When both of the brands are together, it needs to look really native, really natural and professional, and it so that both brands almost feel like they look, they belong together. I would also say think about different verticals because a lot of people would say, okay, you know, I'm in working in pets, so pets would be a really good thing for me, but actually there might be another vertex that's relevant as a little bit adjacent. So you tend to find in terms of this kind of thing of like where brand partnerships are, you often find that you might find an audience in places that you didn't think where you might what a lot of advertisers say is they're actually looking for new audiences because they've already saturated their own audiences, so they're trying to find, you know, younger families or working people, you know. So they're often very creative about how they're finding that. In terms of getting started, like generally it's been quite difficult because you know you have to get people to go and put something on their site, and then you have to get the dev team to go and do it. And then, you know, retailers and retailers that want something else that's more important because we've always got a million dollars. Yeah, so this is probably like further down there, and then there's the whole putting the tag on the site and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we're we're just trying to make all that a lot easier. So we're trying to use all the network tags as a way to just make it more accessible, so it's obviously a very easy way to access technology. Um, we're looking at also some e-commerce integrations that we've got coming up soon, which are I will be announcing, which will again make it one click as well. And our focus is on one click. So we have some ways of activating where it can take less than five minutes to do it, so really quick if you want to go that way, or you can do a deeper, more complicated activation. And we also are looking at advertisers can also work with us just by approving us as a publisher as well. So you know, very classic, we're just a publisher, they give us a deal, and then we're away and we go. So I think from the advertiser point of view, I think it's really straightforward. From the host point of view, it's a little bit more to think about because you're going to be potentially interrupting the consumer journey, pre-checkout and post-checkout. We do both sides of it. So just some careful consideration about how you're intercepting the journey and interacting with it. So just making sure that it feels like it's actually helping the conversion rate and it's helping the consumer going towards purchasing rather than you know being obstructive or irrelevant or a distraction. And I think that's the key thing is that just making sure it feels like a really nice part of the journey.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Now, this is a big topic. Okay, so I want to break it down a little bit for the people that are listening. You spoke about what to do to get started in terms of making sure that your brand is relevant, making sure that the user journey is unobstructed. What about the commercial side of brand-to-brand partnerships? Like, what are you seeing as working well in terms of getting those commercial partnerships together? Because is it about sharing the databases only and about seeing if there's incremental uplift, you know, revenue being made on either side? Or is it does it go a little bit deeper? Because I think what I want affiliate managers to think about is what's the KPI? What's the outcome? What's the goal of doing a brand-to-brand partnership? Is it to leverage more sales coming in? Is it to build brand awareness? Because I think it can do many things. It's not just about sales, it's about, you know, get getting visible, it's about entering different niches, which is what you mentioned before. What are some of the ways that you're seeing current advertisers that you have been working with really get success metrics out of this?
SPEAKER_02Sure. So I think the big thing is you just touched upon it before about this idea of accessing niches. So they're almost accessing incremental new customers that they wouldn't normally get before. So I think they find that really interesting that when you think about retail media generally, that a lot of the kind of big marketplaces are becoming really competitive and it's very hard for smaller advertisers to get a look in and you know the prices are really high. Whereas this way they're actually half-finding that they're getting new customers. We've been chatting to Amen a lot about this, and a lot of the data that they're saying is that the kind of customers that a lot of say food subscription boxes are getting for brand-to-brand partnerships tend to be a much higher quality than what you would get sometimes from other channels. And what I mean by that is that their lifetime value of these customers is a lot higher. So typically, when you get trial, they know that there's a certain amount of churn rate. But what they're seeing with brand to brand is that you know people are opting in to get these partnerships, so they're very, very relevant, they're very focused on getting the product. So it's a much higher quality. In terms of the kind of metrics that they're looking for as well, they should measure their own conversion rate as well. So just do split tests, and usually it goes up. So that from our data, you know, all the evidence is showing that the conversion rate can go up, and the AWIN data is kind of saying overall that it's as much as a 5% uplift on conversion rate. So, you know, what I mean by that is obviously you know 5% on top of say 2%, so not 2%. It's still significant on a big retail of a lot of a lot of the revenue, and then there's other kind of use cases that I think have been really good that I've been seeing as well. So not only increasing conversion and customer acquisition, but also winning back customers. So people have been using brand partnerships to actually get lapsed customers. So people have gone to the end of subscription and then they say, Well, why don't you come back and give you a brand partnership and be renewed? So loyalty has actually been a really big part of it. Win bags, churn. So there's loads of different use cases, you know, as well as just finding new customers, which is which is really relevant.
SPEAKER_00And I think you should think about that as well, because we always focused on acquisition because that's our job, right? To bring in new sales and to bring in new partners, they can bring us new sales. But I think affiliates play such a bigger role now. And I use the term affiliate because I'm old school and I know we talk about partners and publishers, and affiliates are actually everywhere all the time, and your customer is everywhere all the time. So leveraging and pulling these different levers, these different types of partnerships that you can do from basic SEO content review and you know, loyalty and voucher code, you need to think of brand-to-brand partnerships as just another part of your strategy and the tools in your arsenal to actually deliver on your company's KPIs and goals. But what about, and you you spoke a little bit about smaller retailers? Because my I I work a lot with kind of entry-level retailers who want to come in and e-commerce brands that come into the market and they look to start affiliate programs to actually begin to scale their gym because they've tapped into, as you said, like the paid media channels, they've like tapped out their niche and they're looking to get other types of customers in. Is it easy for smaller retailers to get into this brand to brand space, or is it still really just bigger brands that you're seeing operate and get these partnerships going?
SPEAKER_02It's a great, it's a great question. I mean, just before I'm just going to finish off on the last one, which is that I see a lot of advertisers can use rewards to deliver whatever action they want. So just on that whole idea of what you're saying, just income, you can actually use a reward to increase the basket value or to get some to buy another product. So I feel that's really relevant. In terms of the value to the small niche retailer, I mean, it's a really interesting factor because if Amazon is completely dominant, as we know with retail and it's only going to get more and more, and then even more dominating retail media, so selling brand-to-brand partnerships essentially through the whole checkout. What I always say is that all these niche retailers have this incredibly valuable audience because it's so loyal. You know, you think of these kind of specialist sports or health or nutrition or gaming or whatever, they've got an incredibly loyal fan base that doesn't want to go to Amazon, they want to go to a smaller site because it offers them so much value. And so I feel that they're actually even more valuable audience in some ways, and it's less tapped, as you say. So I so I feel they've got an incredibly valuable audience. But for me, I'll come on to this a bit later, but my vision is that really trying to combine all these different audiences together is really, I think collectively they have a great power. And Amazon has had that scale of having that huge audience, but I do feel a lot of these niche retailers have a lot of value. I would say that generally speaking, the smaller ones will work better with other smaller retailers that have a really similar kind of a similar kind of audience, unless it's so obvious the value propositions. So it just might be that a small advertiser has a really strong value proposition that will work anywhere. But generally speaking, I feel that their audiences are are great, but they probably don't have the resource to build you know a brand to brand partnerships platform, which is where we come into because you know we try and make it literally like a five-minute job for them to go and put it on their sites and start getting learnings and seeing how it's working, you know, generating some income and making it super easy. And then they can find out if it works for them, they can get some learnings from it. But I I definitely think I think the smaller ones are really where the on-tap value is at the moment. So I would say like mid to smaller.
SPEAKER_00So retailers that are or e-commerce brands that have got like Shopify or WooCommerce or any of those kinds of platforms, they're perfect to actually do little smaller brand-to-brand partnerships and actually start testing their audience segments against each other.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. I mean, we have we actually have some integrations coming soon in those in those areas, which will make it a lot easier. And also the Shopify merchants as well, it's a deeper integration. So you kind of it's more native, it's a lot more kind of features that you can use within the Shopify platform. I mean, in many ways, Shopify has got like the perfect retail media network, haven't they, really? From all those retailers that are there and a very targeted customer base. So so yeah, I th I think that's where a lot of the growth will be for sure.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So what skills do you need to create a successful B2B partnership in your business? What kind of skill sets do you need to make sure your team has before you start to get into B2B partnerships?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a great question. I would say probably one of the most important ones is communication because I think you've got you know, okay, we can create a platform which will make it easier for everybody and will try and reduce all that, but ultimately does need to be communication between the different parts of it. Great account management, like that will actually take on both sides. Sure. Yeah, account management and building trust as well. So like trusting that you know that partner is the right one to work with another is really important. I think UX and customer journey, I think having an awareness of the customer journey is really important and understand and being able to work with different parts of the team, so it's back to the communication. So making sure that whatever you're introducing to the checkout process or post-checkout, it doesn't interrupt too much and it works with it with the flow and it feels really seamless. I think the other thing is being able to really understand your audience as well. So understand who your customers are and understand how that customer base could be on another site as well. So I think that crossover is really important. It's definitely a networking, networking person, you know, it's someone that's really open to collaboration with other people and you know, creating all these synergies and partnerships. And it's it's creative in a way, isn't it? Because I mean sometimes the partnerships are obvious, but other times they might be less obvious as well. And it's so it's such an exciting new area, and it's really interesting to see all these roles that are being created sometimes in you know, retailers at the moment that are just dedicated to brand partnerships. And it's one thing I see as well. It's a real kind of emerging category and role at the moment, become ever more important, I think, as time goes on.
SPEAKER_00I think they're talking about nearbound now, which is what you know, we had outbound, inbound, and now we're talking about nearbound, so all of these people that work near to one another. I think we do come up with great terminology in this industry, but you spoke a little bit about having kind of UX, UI and you know, development team that can actually help you with the checkout processes and making sure that it feels native. You've spoken about account managers who can brand manage the partnership, you know, both sides, so internally on their side and externally with the partner themselves. What about like data and technical tracking? I mean, you have you built brand swap to actually sit in every network? Because I know you're integrated with AWIN at the moment, but does it matter what technical platforms clients are working on to get the brand partnerships going?
SPEAKER_02We can work with any advertiser pretty much on any network, but if they want to host the office on their site, then they're not if they're not within a major network like AWIN or ShareSale, then they need to use the Google Tag Manager. But we've got some apps coming up soon as well, which will make it a little bit easier. But over you'll see shortly that we'll be in more and more as time goes on, basically. And we'll try and make that easier journey. But technically, the other thing as well is tracking, we've got our own tracking to work out the uplift and incrementality. But the network's great, they provide a lot of the tracking for the actual revenue side of it.
SPEAKER_00And what about discussing when it's the right time? Because smaller retailers and e-commerce brands and SaaS products might be listening into this podcast now, going, yeah, maybe I need to explore, you know, brand-to-brand partnerships. What do they need to do as an internal checklist to say this is the right time for us to do this? Do they need to be at a certain size, a certain threshold of customers? Do they need to have certain things in place in their business? We've spoken about the resources that are required and the skill sets that are required. But what's your advice? Because if somebody's thinking about it, is there five checkpoints that they need to do first before they get going?
SPEAKER_02I'll split into two. So I split into the advertiser and the person hosting that's slightly different. So I think if you're an advertiser, I think it's having a really clear view on the customer that you want to acquire, but also thinking about the customer that you have as well. So I think I'd probably start there and think about the profile of customer that you have, which most, you know, most brands really understand that customer-wise, they're going to be successful. But I do think really carefully considering it and thinking about what is their overlap on different sites. And it might be that the customer that they want is different to the one that they have. So actually just going after Laura's same customer might not be the right strategy for them. It might be better to think about, you know, like I say, where you know younger parents are or you know, different kind of interests and activities. And then the other thing is, I think I wouldn't start this until your brand has some market awareness, even nationally or in its target audience. So I think if you're a completely unknown brand as an advertiser, then unl unless it's, I don't know, so something so clear and obvious, generally speaking, I think it's going to struggle to convert without that kind of brand awareness. And you know, it sounds obvious, but like anybody that advertises on TV or on the tube or has some kind of offline presence, it's definitely going to get a stronger conversion on the brand partnership because people have like a recall as well. So I think Anybody that's doing anything offline or TV or radio is going to have an advantage over somebody else. So yeah, I think those are the main ones for an advertiser for me. And then for a retailer, I would say be careful about doing brand partnerships when your website is immature or you've just freshly launched a website, for example. So I think if you again, I think if you're really new and you're just finding out exactly how your website works, it's probably not a good time. But I think if you're a little bit more mature, then it just means that when you you start to introduce brand partnerships onto your site, you can get a clearer view on the impact that it's having, as opposed to it's something else that's causing the conversion to go up or down or change. So I generally think that people are a bit more mature in terms of being a retailer are more likely to do this as well. And again, it's about knowing the customer as well. So any retailer that really understands their customer can help an advertiser by sharing with them, you know, the data on what their customer looks like, what they do.
SPEAKER_00I mean, the one thing I did want to ask you is what are the typical prices? Like what are the commercial the typical commercials that are happening between brand to brand partnerships? Is it similar to the same amount of money that they would pay to affiliates or are there other types of payment models that are taking place that seem to be working? Just that if people want to enter into brand-to-brand partnerships, then know how to run their budget. Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_02So generally, like we're happy, and most people in the brand to brand space are happy to work on uh on performance. Yeah. So I think that's often the easiest way. So if an advertiser is used to just paying a publisher on performance, then we can work in the same way as well. But then it it just depends on the need of the advertiser and the retail. We get some advertisers that don't want to pay that way, they want to pay in a different way. And our role is just to be as flexible as possible so that people can pay and be paid in the way that they want. Our model's really simple. We just take a share of the success, you know, of the transaction uh in the kind of typical performance way, which is you know the way that I've worked ever since I've been in the affiliate industry. But there are definitely other models emerging, and it's really down to what I think the advertiser or the retailer wants.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so it's really much uh uh there's no kind of hard and fast rules just yet. It's coming together around the table and discussing what makes sense for the host and the advertiser together. What about how many types of partnerships you should be running at any given time? Is it a one-by-one basis and you see how it goes? Or could businesses have two or three different partnerships running at the same time? Or does that impact the client's experience, the customer's like checkout journey and how native it is and where they're placing all of the advertising? Like what has been your experience so far?
SPEAKER_02So our experience so far is that people don't want to bombard people with too many partnerships at once because it's just people's natural tension span. So typically the things that like, yeah, one to three is typical, and then really a lot of our focus is more on relevancy. You know, we don't get the opportunity to show tons of different partnerships, so just think about showing the ones that are most relevant at the right time to the right person.
SPEAKER_00So it's more of a considered approach in terms of strategy. It's about finding the right partnerships, testing them out, seeing how that works for you, and maybe doing things at, you know, with different partners at different times of year, depending on what your products are, and then talking about, you know, your budget, obviously, because you know, affiliates is now becoming very broad. Like you've got influencers, you've got content partners, you've got voucher codes, you've got retargeting, you've got all of these people are now working on performance, which does make it a little bit tricky for affiliate managers to plan their strategy because they've only got a finite amount of money where they spend it to get the best results. And so I want to make that clear that while brand-to-brand partnerships is really showing a really great opportunity for you to tap into another niche audience segment, you need to be considered with it. It's not something that you're gonna have, you know, a thousand brand-to-brand partnerships running all at the same time and different time, you know, it's never gonna be like another affiliate program. It's an addition into your existing partnership program and tweaking that and looking at when you run those campaigns is obviously going to be very important in your strap planning.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely. So I think thinking about like when you're gonna do it is really important, but also setting like different measurement and testing is really important too as well. So, like with our platform, you can try out like different campaigns, so you like different combinations, different taglines, different creative, and then just run them and see which one works. And I would say also that there's no kind of hard and fast rule about what appetizers work with what hosts as well. You know, each side of the equation has a unique audience, and when you put it together, you don't, you know, you've got an idea of what's going to happen, but sometimes you can get surprises about you know which advertisers work better than others as well. I think the only way is just to test and learn and look at the data. And we make it really easy for our customers just to in real time, they can see what's working and they can swap things out and change them, and they've got all that kind of control. Or we can do a managed service as well where we think carefully about the sort of right program partnerships that we have. And it might even be that maybe the offer's not working as well. So it might be sometimes you know the offer needs to be strengthened or increased or changed, depending on what that audience wants as well. So there's definitely a lot a lot of tweaking and you know, like with any forget, you know. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's like it just takes some time to actually often you know get it to work and tweak it. You like it.
SPEAKER_00And I think I want affiliate managers to understand that this is new, and you know, if you want to get into like part of our job is to find new trends, new places to find new customers. And that means testing and iterating, and it's never gonna be a one-hit wonder, like you're not gonna hit it right the first time, but start small, do incremental things, keep open, keep lines of communication open because it needs to work for both sides as well, just like you do with your affiliates. You have to have the data and you have to be clear on that. And I think that's where brand swap comes in to help simplify that process for the host and the advertiser. How do you see the future of affiliate marketing in 10 years from now? Because you've obviously got a very different viewpoint to like me, who's on the agency side and some of our advertisers that are tuning in and listening, and even some of the publishers that are listening to this box. So, where do you see the future of affiliate marketing 10 years from now?
SPEAKER_02Obviously, we're slightly um a sort of brand swap hat on. I'll probably see I see retail media, yeah, I see retail media becoming more and more important. But I think for me, there's a gonna be a big convergence, which you're gonna see between retail media, brand, network, advertising, e-commerce, online, offline. I can it's inevitable, I think, that you know, that in a way the kind of traditional media world is becoming a bit more like performance, and you can see that they're learning from each other. So I think that's the obvious thing that's gonna happen. And I think a lot of this massive budgets that all the brands have had that they've been spending on you know, brand advertising, they're gonna want more accountability for it, they're gonna want more performance. And they're also the big thing I see is that you know the unilevers of this world will start to advertise on, let's say, the curries of this world or the AOs and gonna, you know, buying a dishwasher, so they're gonna want to get the dishwasher tablets and all their brands are bought as a package, essentially. And that's the way that I see retail is that if people just buy groups of things together, you don't buy one thing in isolation, and that's where kind of advertising and affiliate will go will make it uh a very immediate experience where you can get what you want when you want, and it's all very accessible. So I think you'll see affiliate marketing will become it'd be hard sometimes to tell the difference between that and mainstream advertising in my world because I think they'll both improve and become better in the same thing. So that's where I see it going. And obviously, AI is going to be absolutely huge. And the the small way where I think it will work within my world will be around more like dynamic creative optimization, you know, size messaging and like brand messaging, brand partnership messaging, I think it'd be really important. And obviously, you know, like machine learning is amazing at chewing through a lot of transactional data, and and that will power a lot of the recommendations that you do for brand to run partnerships. And a lot of the retailers are gonna make that first-party data, and they are making that available through, you know, safe rooms, clean rooms. More and more you'll see of that happening, especially with the deprecation of cookies, where you're gonna use the data. I think these kind of first-party experiences where you can track the conversion are just gonna become so valuable. And and everybody knows that anyway, but you're gonna see that more and more in reality. I think niche-based retailers will get a lot more power as well. So we're talking about this idea that you know the non-Amazon-based retailers, you'll see them grow more and more, and you'll see and this we look at something like Gymshark or something, where there's like a tiny one, and then suddenly it just grows and becomes something like a high-speed chain, and they open up a store, and you're gonna see a lot of these explosive e-commerce growth stories, sort of thing, where a niche can suddenly become a national wood is, and then subscription. I think we all know subscription is growing, but I think subscription businesses are just gonna be every aspect of life, and I can't see that slowing down, it's just gonna increase more and more, and that's why, again, you know, the whole kind of affiliate industry is perfect for it because you just it's just cost per lead, you know, cost per action, it's it's perfectly geared towards track conversion. So I think affiliate is going to become more and more important for that kind of thing. And then I've I've got a bit of equity in this one, but online to offline. So I've tried to build online to offline many years ago, and it's really tough because of a lot of the uh lack of redemption in the retailers. But I can see now that they're actually starting to open up the technology and open up the data, and that there's a lot more openness about data sharing and retailers. But I think you know, the way that an affiliate will start to think is that actually I'm gonna be rewarded for tracking footfall or rewarded for tracking in-store sales as well, because obviously the retailers now are more truly on-channel, so they they say we'll get tracked throughout the whole journey. So I definitely think you'll see a lot more of that. But even now, like it's crazy that you know you don't a lot of the networks can't often track your in-store redemption and you can't get rewarded for as a publisher, but you are probably creating some foot in different ways where people start the journey, you know, on a publisher side and then end up walking into a physical retailer. And that just onto the online to offline thing as well. I think like digital receipts are really gonna be a really interesting growth area as well, like kind of linking the data when someone's physically in store and then they they can be cross-cross-sold to in that um position as well.
SPEAKER_00I see the payments industry coming in and helping to join that because even now, if you're going to shops, you can donate to charities through the payment platform before you actually pay on on you know at the kiosk at the desk. And I I I see a lot of like everything that you said I agree with because we're gonna break down silos. Before we've had to work in different silos of segments of audiences, now there's going to be no silos because and actually brand-to-brand partnerships are enabling that because now you don't have to go do paid advertising to go reach your audience. You can do a partnership with your, you know, with a company next door that has a similar audience to you at probably a fraction of the price of trying to get them direct to your site through paid advertising. So I think a lot of digital mediums are gonna move into performance. In fact, we're seeing it already with content creators now being, you know, requesting performance-based payments for the lifetime of the customer value, offline to online. I think as our technology progresses, we will be able to track this stuff. That's gonna change attribution modeling. So it's a very exciting time, I think, to be coming into the digital industry compared to 20 years ago when I got in. And it's and because I've had 20 years' experience of seeing how the internet has evolved, I can imagine and forward think what the future is gonna look like. And it's really gonna be an interesting place to work, I think, for marketers in general, because there's so much change happening at a faster rate right now than what it was five to ten years back. So I think I'm excited about it. So the next thing I want you to do is I want you to finish this sentence before we close out this podcast, which is brands will need to 2024. So fill the gap.
SPEAKER_02Brands will need to embrace the power not only of brand partnerships in 2024, but they need partnerships which are relevant in real time to their customer based on what they buy, who they are, and what they want.
SPEAKER_00I love it. Super succinct, man of few words, but it's very powerful. So, Ryan, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on this podcast with me this week. Thank you for opening up the doors to brand partnerships and giving us all of this wonderful data about how to do it, where to start, when's the right time, what the pricing is, how to get it right. It's been so insightful having you on this podcast, and I'm really excited to see what BrandSwap does to help retailers you know leverage their data and get more successful in their marketing efforts. So, thanks very much for being here with me today.
SPEAKER_02So, thank you, Leanne. Um, I'm really enjoying it, and I'm also really excited about building the future because it's it's actually happening in real time.
SPEAKER_00It is, it is. It's amazing.
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