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SPEAKER_01You'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 ma tech 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_02Welcome to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, where we're breaking form and doing a breakout session this week. You may have noticed that I am not Leanne. My name is Leanna Klein, Director of Agency Services here at Affiverse. After a very busy year, Leanne is taking some time away from her desk for the seasonal holidays. But we didn't want to leave you hanging. So tune in as I put Todd Crawford from Impact.com and Leanne Johnstone, founder of Affiverse, through their paces discussing one of the hottest topics in affiliate marketing, tracking. So welcome to our fireside chat. Today we're here with Leanne Johnstone, Affiverse Founder, and Todd Crawford, founder of Impact.com. They're both behind the mic with me today to talk about a really big topic, and that is tackling tracking and inefficients in affiliate program management. I don't know if you guys want to introduce yourselves briefly. Um, Leanne.
SPEAKER_03Hi, my name is Leanne Johnston. As Leanna said, I am the founder of affiverse.com, and I'm joining her behind the mic today for once to talk about this very important topic. Thanks for having me, Leanna.
SPEAKER_00I'm Todd Crawford, co-founder at Impact.com, and I'm also very excited any chance I get to talk about the industry, I'm very happy about. So looking forward to this.
SPEAKER_02Let's jump right into some questions here. I'll actually direct this first one to you, Todd, just to get us started. I know this is a huge topic, tracking inefficiencies, but let's talk a little bit about networks. They've become such a big player in their clients' affiliate programs. And a lot of them are actually engaging now in agency services and publisher recruitment. A lot of clients definitely opt for this all-in-one service, but why is that something that impact.com has seems to absteer clear from?
SPEAKER_00That's a good question. Do you want the long historical answer or the not in-depth answer?
SPEAKER_02I think give us as much information as you want to share because I think it's a very interesting um question.
SPEAKER_00I was part of the team that co-founded CJ. So I understand how at the time when we started that in '98, we didn't have managed services. But our business model was an override model, which means if our clients made more money, we made more money. And we would see that our clients weren't making as much money as we thought they could make, which was impacting our revenues. And we would give them advice and either they didn't take it or didn't have time, or for whatever reason, they weren't growing their programs to the level that we thought they could be. So initially we we took five of our top clients and we just started helping them, actually managing the program for them, and we saw great results. And so we said, hey, we can not only grow our revenues by providing the services we can charge for. And that was really the beginning of managed services. And I think at the time, Linkshare and Beefree were also doing managed services, probably for some of the same reasons. Um it wasn't that there was a lot of demand. And frankly, there wasn't a lot of expertise in managing affiliate programs back then. It was all very new. And as we started to productize service, technology took a backseat. And a lot of the capabilities that we needed to manage programs, we kind of built off to the side. So it wasn't productized, meaning the same person trying to manage a program themselves didn't have access to the same data and tools that the program managers did. And the easiest way to manage a program is to take the top 10 affiliates and just do a lot of spend with them, talk to them all the time. And you can hit clients' goals pretty easily, but it creates a very top-heavy and doesn't become very diversified. And back then there wasn't a lot of diversification anyway. So that's how it started. And the idea that there's a conflict of interest there is something that I think the networks don't see it as overtly. But if I'm a program manager and I'm supposed to manage your program, I have revenue goals for every client in my portfolio. I'm gonna try to hit those numbers and I have a limited amount of time to work on each account. So I'm gonna focus on the largest partners and maybe not the ones that are driving the most value. And back then, value and driving value and incrementality didn't exist. Regardless, it's still the same and mental model. I'm gonna try to do the least amount of work to drive be the most effective at my job across the vast number of clients that I'm managing. And so when we sold CJ in 2004, I think, walked away for a few years, and then we kind of started talking again to the team that ended up co-founding impact.com. And we had all these ideas. And a lot of it was around creating a technology-focused platform that really delivered data, great data, and great capabilities and efficiencies. And I kind of look at managing a program as there's two things you're doing: revenue generating tasks and administrative tasks. So approving applications, recruiting affiliates, even creating new contracts, uploading product feeds and ads, things like that, which don't really generate revenue in and of themselves, but you have to do them. And so the idea is to minimize that to maybe 80-20 or 90-10 through automation and just efficient workflows, and then free up as much time for really what is the role of a program manager agency to manage revenue and the partnerships and recruit really good new partnerships. And so when we did that, we were going to do services. And part of the problem with doing services is you have a large services organization that they're paid very well and it's a lot of revenue that you have to spend. And again, the conflict of interest, we felt, look, let's just be the tech and let the brands choose the services that they want. They can work with themselves, they can hire an internal team, they can work with an agency to help them, or they can outsource it completely to an agency. And at the time, and this is we launched in 2010, in the US, OPMs, as they were called, outsourced program management, were pretty popular. They had some large clients, but they didn't have as many as the networks did. And they had to put their clients in the hands of the networks, which if you look at it, that's their biggest competitor. If I'm a network and I'm trying to sell a large enterprise brand, I'm not talking about anything but my services. I'm not saying, or you could work with one of our great agency partners. It's never the conversation. And if I'm an agency and I bring a client to a network, there is a chance that client could end up having managed services over time through the network and leave me. So when we talk to these OPMs and we said, look, you're working with your competitor, you're putting all your business in your competitor's hands. We're not going to do that. That really resonated with at least two of the largest ones in the U.S. at first. And they got on board with that. And we started a really great partnership where we would go to win an account. They wanted services. We would introduce them to a couple agencies to evaluate. And it really became that proverbial win solution. And it wasn't easy. Our sales organization would have deals where customers would say, I want services and tech from the same provider. We addressed that by contracting to provide those services, but still outsourcing them through. And OPM was very transparent. We weren't hiding that, but that's how we did it. So they didn't have to onboard another vendor as an agency. They were dealing with one point of contact. So it was a struggle because our, you know, we got some pushback internally, but we've fought that. Not fought it, but we've held the line and really focused on being the best at the tech and really partnering with the best service providers. And if you look at since 2010 to now, a lot of these OPMs have some of the largest accounts in their portfolio because they've been able to grow their business and have such marquee accounts and they have medium-sized accounts as well, as we all do. There's been a lot of investment into these agencies, acquisition, consolidation, which is great. The industry has grown because of it. So I feel like we helped play a role in that. I'm always proud of changing the industry for the better. And I feel like that has been a change for the better because it gives brands more choices. And yeah, so that's our stance on services. We feel like we just want to be the tech. And it's similar to Google. You can't have Google manager AdWords campaign. You have to use an agency.
SPEAKER_02Actually, Leanne, what are your thoughts on the subject? Because as an agency owner, you have some unique and interesting insights. Um, how do you work with SaaS and networks alike to kind of uh meet your clients' needs?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think a lot of what Todd said was true. You know, there comes a point where a network has to decide are they the service provider or are they the technology solution provider? And some clients, there's a time and a place for everything, and there's a price point for everything too. So depending on where you are in your kind of affiliate program lifecycle and the resources that you have internally as a business in order to invest in this channel, I think you're going to make decisions based on different kind of metrics that are at your disposal at that time. So whilst I don't think that there's a a problem with networks offering services, because obviously they want their clients to be successful. I don't think that you'll ever get the depth of services from a network, and maybe I'm putting myself out there that you would from a specialist OPM agency, which is this is what we do every single day, and we do it across multiple different platforms, across multiple different clients, across multiple different industries, and across multiple publisher networks. So, you know, when you're working in one ecosystem, you can sometimes only see what that ecosystem provides to you. And I think you're missing out on opportunities to find different traffic sources, different ways of working with different partners, which an OPM would see because they work in with the same partners in multiple programs across multiple different platforms doing different types of things. So I think you should never discount taking services from one provider if it's cost efficient and it's right for your business to do that. But I also think you should think about if you can afford to get specialist services in, leverage the depth and breadth of experience that an agency, you know, an OPM provider, even a consultant can bring to you because what have you got to lose? You don't have to just exist in one ecosystem right now. You can work across multiple social channels, you can take different types of traffic sources. And I think, you know, that's something that the networks are doing quite well, is that they're actually opening up their back ends to plug into other ecosystems, which is, I think, something that you do quite well at Impact. You know, you can recruit from outside of the network, you can recruit within the network, you can plug other networks in as sub-affiliates or however you want to kind of call that jargon. But I think it's more about making sure that your program is positioned with the right technology solution to help you to scale, not only today, but in 10 years' time. So picking your tracking provider that provides the tracking solutions that you specifically need, and then partnering with either the account management team or the publisher team or an agency or consultant, however, you want to kind of split revenues that you have at your disposal to do the best job. And I think if you just think about it and keep it really simple, as you grow in your journey, you know, when you're starting out, you don't need everything very complex because you just need to make sure that the tracking does what it does, that the partners are easily accessible, that you've got resources to support them and actually get them going and engaged in your program. And as you get a little bit bigger and you maybe expand to new markets or you add different products into your portfolio, whatever it is, that's when you start needing more complex things. And a lot of what I'm seeing, because I know impact and Todd, I'll kind of push this back to you, but you've got like a light version of Impact as well to help the smaller clients get into the ecosystem that you offer and actually get them familiar with the technology as well. So I don't know if that was part of your kind of planning to take the technologies one step further, but actually engage more customers. Like, what was your thought process on that?
SPEAKER_00SaaS companies have this thing called product-led growth. And that's basically where clients can sell onboard. So I can see that you have this. So it's really around a lot of the e-commerce platforms like a Shopify, WooCommerce, all these large e-commerce platforms. We've created partnerships with them and plugins so that if you're on Shopify and you want to do just affiliate, you can click on that. It's very low entry price, automatic the tracking and the product feeds and the returns, and they can get started very quickly. And there's really no interaction with us. Whereas when you onboard an enterprise client, it can take weeks of back and forth to get the tech in and all everything set up. So the idea was after we kind of went for the enterprise and mid-market accounts to start going into the SB space through commerce platforms.
SPEAKER_02So considering everything that we've just all opened up a broader question for both of you, where do you see the future of affiliate marketing? What do you see coming up?
SPEAKER_00We just launched our impact.com slash creator solution, which came through an acquisition of an influencer platform called Activate. So we acquired that. And what we did is we ported all of that functionality into our platform natively. The future of affiliate is really expanding what types of partnerships you can manage. So I think the partnerships team is highly skilled. I mean, they're they're not buying me, they're plugging in, you know, just an interface. Here's the money I want to spend, here's some data, change my spend, look at a report. Partnerships, they're real humans that you're dealing with, and you're having conversations, and you're coming up with interesting commercial terms and objectives, and you're able to measure that. Both sides are measuring the results, right? Google doesn't measure the results of your spent. Just keep putting money in the machine, right? They don't they don't care how well or how poorly you're doing. So partnerships is really the the this ability to expand beyond what has traditionally always stayed as affiliate, and certainly the types of affiliates have expanded, and and influencers, traders have always been part of that mix, like a YouTuber or someone doing product reviews. There's more platforms and it's more complex. You know, you can run on an affiliate network is kind of an always-on influencer program. Like if you're an influencer, you know, get links, find products you want to review or talk about and promote them on a revenue share. But if you work on social platforms, it's a little harder to do that solely on a Rev share just because of the way that you can manifest a link in the post or the the way that these content creators need to be paid for creating content, first and foremost. So YouTubers, in my opinion. So there needs to be more of a hybrid, like a post, paper post plus. And so we built that functionality. And running campaigns is a whole nother workflow, right? Like I have to create a brief to let either go out and recruit the influencers I want for that campaign, or go through some applications and figure out, okay, this is the team, these are the creators I want to work with. Then there's deadlines, there's post content review and approval, there's monitoring afterwards. There's a lot more workflows. And I think the simplest way to think about it is you wouldn't go to an influencer platform and go, we're going to use this to run affiliates on. And likewise, I don't think you would go to an affiliate network to say, we want to run our influencer strategy, our creators on it. Not that you can't do a little on both, but they're really completely different workflows and technology. So we've launched that now. And I think giving the either the affiliate or partnerships team the ability to start running influencers, I think it's really smart. But also just if there is an influencer team and they're both using our platform, there's a little bit of crossover, knowledge sharing, cooperation, because oftentimes the creators are the same, are working with the affiliate teams and they know. The creator team doesn't know. And so there might be some duplicate efforts and payments. So to me, I think the future is really expanding the types of partnerships. Creators are a great one to start with, obviously, but a brand is huge, and I think that that hasn't gotten the traction that it should. There's so much revenue to be found there. And I think that's another thing that's gonna hopefully start to scale more. Um, there's always early adopters, tip of the iceberg, but the tip of the iceberg was, you know, 10% and 90% is still there. So I think there's just a lot of opportunity to expand in the partnership space. And and I keep saying this for the last five years. I've never been more excited about the partnership uh industry economy because it's just got so much potential now compared to when it started or when I started. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I mean, 25 years is a long time.
SPEAKER_00It's almost 25 years. It's almost 25 years to the day.
SPEAKER_03I mean, for me, I think the future of affiliate marketing is that we're definitely heading to affiliate 3.0. With the onset of better tracking solutions and amalgamating all of the partner types together into one platform, I think we're going to be able to get a lot cleverer with how we spend because we'll be able to monitor everything from everywhere all at once. Crack on impact and bring us in, you know, email marketing, bring us in all of these different types of partnerships, paid media, everything else. Because I think this channel is originally disregarded because it's been harder to master, actually. Paid media, you pay your money, you get your clients, and in a tweaking a little bit in terms of content or price points or, you know, matching up look-alike audiences. I think influences are coming into the fore now. And I think that's definitely going to play a big part in what I'm calling affiliate 3.0. And I think we're going to actually look at influences differently. I'm looking at what X is doing right now, slash Twitter, however you want to call them. And I'm looking at the way that they want to monetize the community building, the reach, the creator, you know, platform. And I'm thinking, you know, nano and micro influences are going to become more relevant in affiliate programs. Like everybody that's got a voice that has a community can essentially be an affiliate, a partner. And how do you want to work with all of these people? And then that opens up bigger questions like how do you manage your brand? How do you do compliance? How do you manage fraud? And it all starts with better transparency and better data. And that is basically where we're moving to with tracking for, you know, the industry as a whole. So for me, I think it's very exciting because I want to see the next iteration of what affiliate program strategy looks like in 10 years' time.
SPEAKER_00For better or worse, affiliate is seen as pay for performance only when you get a sale. I think CPC could play a bigger role. And I think obviously pay proposed and I mean, we've always had placement buys, you know, tenancy buys in affiliate. But I think being able to convince marketing, convince the CFO that this channel needs to have a little more leeway in in how it pays partners. And I think there's a plenty of room for CPC, plenty of room for more pay-per-post, especially with the creators, and you know, even just on the revenue or a hybrid, right? Saying I'm gonna pay for clicks or pay-per-post, but also pay on the revenue side.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think I agree. I think we're gonna see a commercial revolution in the way that we actually budget in performance. Um and I'm quite excited because it's boring with CPA and revenue share for the last 15 odd years. So now we're gonna see people get really creative and innovative. And I also think we're gonna see affiliate managers, affiliate program managers start to specialize in different verticals within performance. Because, like it was, you know, 15 years ago, it was impossible to be, after a little while, a full digital, you know, expert across all channels because each channel became more involved. And performance, you're gonna see that happen again. You're gonna have affiliate managers that specialize in brand to brand partnerships, affiliate managers. That specialize in creator and ambassador type programs and affiliates who specialize in SEO and pay-per-click and paid media type affiliates. So I'm quite keen to see how people are going to invest in training as we head forward, because I don't think that that you'll be able to cope with the requirements of this role in managing programs without continued on-the-job educational training and learning.
SPEAKER_00You also touched on the point that, you know, if you're in this industry or forgetting in this industry or we're in this industry and might come back, there's a lot of opportunity ahead here. And you know, someone who has all of that expertise that you just kind of outlined is extremely valuable. Yeah, there's lots to learn.
SPEAKER_02All the time we have for today, and I just want to thank you both for being here with me on the Affiverse Fireside Chat series. Obviously, we have a lot to think about now after the answers that you've provided us when it comes to considering what services, what infrastructure to use, and how to build that into your program and strategy. So thank you so much for providing us with that insight. I hope you enjoyed this short fireside chat episode for your listening pleasure. We hope you enjoyed that fly-on-the-wall conversation that we dug out of the archives to share with you today. We also wanted to wish all of our lovely listeners, clients, and friends from around the globe the warmest seasons greetings to you and yours. We're really looking forward to all of the exciting episodes of the affiliate marketing podcast that we have planned to share with you in the new year. Do remember to tune in for Leanne's New Year message where she reflects on the learnings she's taken forward with her to 2024, as well as her crystal ball moments of what she thinks lies ahead. Thank you all for tuning in to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast each week and coming along to learn with us. We appreciate all of your support. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
SPEAKER_04Looking to launch an affiliate program for your business? Need help to grow your affiliate program? Don't worry, we can help. Book a free 15-minute strategy call with our Afiverse agency team to find out how we can help you grow your affiliate program. We offer a range of affiliate program management services from strategy and consulting to technical setups and complex affiliate program migrations. Our award-winning agency team handles everything from affiliate strategy to affiliate partner discovery and recruitment. We'll also help you explore the competitive landscape and deep dive affiliate program audits to help leverage where you can grow faster than your competitors. But don't take our word for it. Take a look at what our clients say. Affiverse. We're helping the world do affiliate marketing better. Don't waste time struggling to get the right results. Visit affiversemedia.com and click on the agency button to kickstart your program growth today.
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