Shifting the Landscape: Exploring Affiliate Trends with Cary Pierce

[00:00:48] Jamie: Hello and welcome to the Profitable Performance Marketing podcast. I’m Jamie Birch, your host and founder of JEBCommerce, your award winning affiliate management agency. We have a really great guest today. It’s actually one of our returning guests. We have Cary Pierce. He’s the Director of Agency Services at Rakuten Advertising. We have a great conversation.

[00:01:10] Before I tell you more about that, let’s just talk about a little news from JEBCommerce. We are excited to announce the official launch of our new service and pricing tiers. These are designed to properly support brands and affiliate programs at any size and budget level.

[00:01:28] So basically it’s really common in our industry to lack upfront transparency around pricing, services provided, and the resources allocated from an affiliate agency partner. And JEB was no different until now. Our new CEO, Jake Fuller, he’s come in his first area was to focus on this and clarify the work that we do in the price for those services.

[00:01:49] So whether you need essentials in your affiliate marketing, and that’s all you need, our bronze package, or you need an award winning strategic partnership in our platinum. Now we have the tiers to offer you that. So you can go to JEBCommerce.com/elements and read more about our new pricing tiers and new products. So there you go.

[00:02:11] We are talking with Cary Pierce today, and we’re going to talk about a new technology that Rakuten has out there right now that allows for some pretty incredible real time audience-focused advertising. We also talk about all these other things coming into the space, trends, and things that you need to look out for.

[00:02:32] Cary and I have known each other for at least a decade, his entire time there. He and his team have delivered some of the best reports that an agency could ask for, and really been essential in driving revenue for our clients. He is phenomenal to talk to. It’s always a pleasure, and I think you’ll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

[00:02:52] So I’ll just get out of the way so you can listen to my conversation with Cary Pierce.

[00:02:58] All right, Cary Pierce, welcome back and again to the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast. It’s great to have you, man.

[00:03:06] Cary: Man, it’s great to be back. I enjoyed it. Had a good time last time, and I anticipate we’ll do the same this time as well.

[00:03:12] Jamie: Yeah. And in honor of you, I wore my best kind of Hawaiian shirt today.

[00:03:17] Cary: I was picking up on that. I was picking up on the trend, the vibe that you were putting out there. And I appreciate it, Jamie. Greatly, greatly touched.

[00:03:24] Jamie: We were talking about personal brands on our prep call and I thought well, you have one and it’s very chill, very Hawaiian shirt and we all love you for it. So I thought, why not? I’ll break out one of mine. And it is probably my least loud Hawaiian shirt.

[00:03:42] Cary: That is your least … That is saying something right there, if that’s the least loud. I’m more intrigued of what is left in the closet that I haven’t seen yet.

[00:03:48] Jamie: We’ll do that on the third episode that we bring you on.

[00:03:52] Cary: Something to, something for us to enjoy. I like it. I like it very much.

[00:03:55] Jamie: Awesome. Cary, for those who haven’t listened to your podcast and they may not know you, give us a quick introduction, who you are, where you’ve been. What you’re doing now.

[00:04:05] Cary: Sure. I’ll try and make it quick. I’ll make the abbreviated version. Short of the long is that Cary Pierce, I am the Director for Agency Services for Rakuten Advertising, and really what that means is help lead the teams that work with our agency partners, managing affiliate programs across our network that is currently in the United States.

[00:04:25] It is also in Europe, headquartered in the UK office. And then we also have APAC office as well have team that’s down there. Three different teams in three different parts of the country. And we might be expanding even more so into another locations that we have next year. That’s to be determined. Not going to spoil that now. We’ll save that for the last time.

[00:04:42] But where I came to this with Rakuten prior to this, I was actually working on the display side within Rakuten before it was part of Rakuten. That was a Media Forge, and then before that was AffiliateManager.com. So that was really where… prior to that, I had my own business and was doing a little bit of publisher stuff.

[00:04:59] So I was on the affiliate side and also was hosting websites and building out websites and e-commerce for other companies which got me into affiliates. Before that I did economic gardening, which is economic development county, but and I’ll stop going I’ll I just that was there’s a lot more before that, and before that, before that.

[00:05:15] So we’ll stop.

[00:05:16] Jamie: I feel like economic gardening could be a podcast on its own.

[00:05:20] Cary: Man, I love it. I think it’s really, really cool. It was something that Florida, the state of Florida was doing it and something that had gotten that Denver and outside of Denver, I want to say Bowling Green is not right, but it was in Colorado where they had come up with that concept of economic gardening, which is helping the businesses in your backyard.

[00:05:40] To be successful with a little, with small to mid sized, smaller to mid sized businesses, get over the hurdles of expansion is a better way, more cost effective way to invest, as opposed to trying to recruit big giant companies in to bring a bunch of jobs, give away taxes, give away all this stuff, give, give away, give away, hoping that they’ll drive something, right?

[00:06:02] That’s what, that’s essentially it. That’s what economic gardening is. And that’s what steered me towards e commerce and affiliate market and other things through that

[00:06:10] Jamie: And also it ties into serving others, helping other people be successful, which is a theme through your career and kind of what you’re doing now, helping the agencies you work with be…

[00:06:21] Cary: yeah.

[00:06:21] Jamie: on the Rakuten…

[00:06:22] Cary: You’re exactly right. It is that foundation, the basis that kind of steered me towards making agency services, what it is within Rakuten and what the goal with it is and maintaining that focus with it. Cause there’s always been so much just sitting there to assist and it really is just a matter of… it’s not even so much education, it’s information.

[00:06:41] It’s just providing agencies the information that they need, right? Because, when you’re working across multiple networks and you’re doing multiple things and you have multiple brands you have multiple requirements and multiple responsibilities and multiple inquiry, all that’s coming at you at one time.

[00:06:56] It’s not a lack of capability. It’s just a matter of “I tried two times and I can’t figure it out right away. What am I missing?” And that’s all it is. It’s really nine times out of ten, any of our email responses is “oh, you’re just looking to do this over here.”

[00:07:10] “Thanks. Great. You’re amazing. Fantastic.” And we have… that whole back end exists, right? All the search articles are there all the help articles all the training it’s all sitting there, but to weave your way to find, I just need this one answer. Just, I just need this one. That’s it. And it’s, it feels… you’re right.

[00:07:26] It’s great to be able to do that, ’cause they have the experience, they have the know-how, they’ve been doing this. It’s just this one little thing somewhere that they get stuck on and just need a little help. And they go, “ah, great.”

[00:07:37] Jamie: Yeah.

[00:07:37] Cary: It’s that teaching to fish, Jamie. I love, I love teaching to fish.

[00:07:40] I love teach. I don’t fish, but you know what…

[00:07:43] Jamie: No, wait, you don’t fish. You’re in Miami, right? Miami area,

[00:07:46] Cary: Tampa. I’m in Tampa.

[00:07:47] Jamie: Tampa. Sorry.

[00:07:48] Cary: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. No, I have fished, but that’s not what I choose to do with my free time. Yeah, our youngest fishes, he loves it.

[00:07:59] Jamie: I love that, that concept of teaching to fish and helping others. And I definitely, I’ve seen it from a client of yours and our agency and really Rakuten when they were LinkShare, I think they’ve always been focused on data, data delivery, and getting that to the people who need it.

[00:08:17] And the reports that you and your team have provided over the years, and I think you and I’ve known each other probably for a decade, at least now, and those reports are always phenomenal. They’re the best, consistently provided reports that we get from a network and actionable.

[00:08:34] There’s a lot of data in there. There’s a lot of things that we get to just go forward and do stuff with. And so I always appreciate it. I think we talked about that on the last podcast too. They’re phenomenal global data benchmarks and information that we get to use to create our strategies, alter our strategies, real time stuff.

[00:08:53] You can see you in those reports and that willingness to serve, help other people be successful because that comes through in that stuff.

[00:09:02] Cary: Yeah, it started, honestly, it started a situation where the benefit that we have is from Rakuten, the amount of programs that we manage with our internal CS team on behalf of advertisers, that number that’s there, if you’re somebody who’s building a report for someone to use, there’s a lack of disconnect.

[00:09:20] What I mean is, it’s not six steps away. I’m the person, the data scientist, whoever it is, I’m building this report for you guys to use. Like the ones that built some of the, we have different funny names. One is Hippo, which is one that I like. It’s a gap analysis for a program.

[00:09:34] The person who wrote that used to sit in a sit at a table right behind me in the Tampa office. So, when they were building this, “hey, what do you think about this? Is there anything? Oh, yeah, I like that. What about this? Huh!” It’s right there as opposed to I’m going to build a support because I think somebody might have a benefit somewhere down the road somehow. Or I got to schedule a call, we’re going to do a whole thing.

[00:09:54] All that reporting is aided by that. And then now we’ve added in that other area where my team’s having the conversations with your guys and what you guys are needing as well. And when we’re coming up with new types of situations, like with the new benchmarking and the desktop, that stuff that’s being available.

[00:10:10] What do you need? What are you going to use this for? What’s the quick little, real quick that I need the top six and then what do I need to go deep dive into and get into the granular type of stuff with that, right? That has been the next, the additional layer that we’ve added on within the recently is the agency perspective, which pretty much aligns directly with the same CS, right?

[00:10:28] If you know what you’re doing, you’re going to make the same actions off the same insights. It’s just a matter of what the advertiser’s preference is. Where do they want to scale to? What is their optimization strategy? Yep. Yep.

[00:10:39] Jamie: That’s great. So it’s been, I think, almost three years since we talked last on this podcast, and so much has changed since then. Talk to me about the industry’s movement over the last few years. What are you seeing? What’s new? What has changed? What obstacles are we facing?

[00:10:56] Cary: What we had talked about this when we had originally talked right and we were looking at there’s a couple things we had looked at the… with the pandemic and all the advertisers yanked all their budget, just their straight marketing budgets, put all marketing spent on hold.

[00:11:12] Affiliate, you can’t really do that. It’s performance based, but if the performance goes down, that’s fine. But they got gun shy and they pulled all the money away. So what they did is they pulled a bunch of money away from online brands that drive awareness, right? For advertisers.

[00:11:27] And they all moved over into the affiliate space. And so we saw that power dynamic shift a little bit, or greatly, depending on what your goals are with your brand, to where those publishers Now have the capability to almost dictate. “Hey great. You want to you want to get exposure on our site? You want to have this article that you’ve got to release whatever you want to do.”

[00:11:49] ” Yeah, it matches with our subject is for the month or matches what we’re trying to do this month It matches the theme. Fantastic. That’ll be x number of dollars for you to get onto our site And you have to have an affiliate program.” Because they all went to affiliate at that time, right? ” I had to have some kind of revenue coming in I’ve got all this content and all these people come and I can’t just you know have you pay ten thousand dollars to put your brand on my site for a week.”

[00:12:11] Cary: Because they yank that money… and hope something happens. I gotta have something there and that shift happened, and then we’ve seen even more expansion upon that right and some of the things… this is some of the newer things that we’ve been doing. Is you’ve got that power dynamic, right?

[00:12:28] “It’s my audience. I know my audience. I’ll go ahead and partner with you based on some stipulations, conditions, and I have to have an affiliate program.” Based off of that something that we’ve been developing I want to say we’ve got over 12, I hope someone’s not going to yell at me later, publishers that are actively participating in this, where you can find different types of customer status, newer existing, right?

[00:12:49] You can target on new, we can do different types of commissioning based off the customer, based off all kinds of factors. Short of the long, allowing publishers who know their audience, and we give them the capability to understand, is this someone that’s new for this advertiser, or is this someone existing for this advertiser?

[00:13:05] And then, they can target according to that customer status. This is all done real time. So when that customer comes to their site, from that advertiser’s affiliate link, they can be shown an offer that is dynamically matching to that customer based off of what that advertiser’s goal is. Typically, this is new or an existing type of customer.

[00:13:30] So in real time, you go to a site and you’ve never gone through this affiliate link to convert at that advertiser’s site. And they say, Hey, I’ll go ahead and give you a new discount rate of 10%. I’ll give you a new exclusive. Whatever it is, right? All right. That shows up and that can show up on that landing page at that publisher site, and they’ll show that reflectively.

[00:13:55] But if it’s me, who’s a returning customer, I get the returning customer that’s shown up on the publisher site dynamically. So this happens real time and we’ve got over a dozen publishers that are doing this and it’s now giving that much more power. It’s not control, this is more power to let the publishers implement your strategy on your behalf, right? They, they know the customer. They know if they’ve ever converted from you before, if they’ve never converted with you, this is new. They’re coming to that publisher site for a reason.

[00:14:24] They’re looking for something to make them jump over that hurdle to ultimately convert. And if you want to incentivize that publisher and that customer, you can do that dynamically in real time and not even have to have a long window. Now you can do it where you’re using the advertiser can use their data if they want or trust the publisher.

[00:14:41] And it’s backed up empirically by our reporting on the backend, too. The publishers that have that capability and the advertisers that want that capability, we’ve seen some pretty explosive stuff. So that’s like… this is the technology as opposed to from a relationship standpoint.

[00:14:56] Right. That has been a bigger, dynamic that we’ve seen that’s been happening recently and…

[00:15:01] Jamie: I have some questions on that before you continue to answer my question. Cause I didn’t know about this and this is something… the commissioning on new versus existing that’s been around for a while. The need to differentiate, especially during times of crisis, like the pandemic becomes even higher.

[00:15:19] Competition increases, and a lot of advertisers use the affiliate channel to broaden their reach and to gain new customers. And so what we have done in the past for listeners who haven’t gone down this road is: you can do it retroactively and look at the publishers at the end of the month and look at your new to file and then change your commissions, change your incentives.

[00:15:41] A lot of platforms like Rakuten will allow you to commission on new to file, but there’s no identification in real time, whether they are new or existing. It’s after the order is placed. And then you look and go, “Oh, I just matched this back to my data warehouse and they have never bought from us before, so this is the commission rate they get.”

[00:16:00] But you’re saying they can recognize that on the inbound click and offer them an offer. Now the, the most detailed way that. I’ve always pushed for and would love to see is, and I learned this at Coldwater Creek 24 years ago, back to a household.

[00:16:15] So someone at this household hasn’t purchased. That’s how they determined new. And one of the things that I want to talk about too, is everyone’s definition of new can be quite dramatically different, right? So they would go back to the household. So tell me like technically this user has never purchased at this advertiser through my affiliate site before. Are they able to say, okay, but if that person bought at a retail location, physical brick and mortar, it wouldn’t pick that…

[00:16:47] Cary: That would not happen exactly right and if I had gone direct to the advertiser direct to the advertiser direct to the advertiser forever and never ever gone through this publisher ever and went to this publisher this one time, the publisher would say it’s new if the advertiser is not providing all that data.

[00:17:03] And that’s the thing, right? The advertiser can provide all that data. We have to put it into where it’s matching, right? You’re going through LiveRamp, you get to do the matching. You put it into format to then send it to the publisher. My whole thing with it is, if I’m going to that publisher, then there’s a reason why I’m not going directly to the advertiser if I’ve been going there for a while.

[00:17:19] There’s some reason. I’m shopping. I’m not now going to get what I want. I am…

[00:17:24] Jamie: I’m not buying, I’m…

[00:17:26] Cary: You’re exactly right. Exactly. And so with that, I want to make sure, Hey, if it’s there and well, somebody could have told him, Oh yeah, you went… oh yeah, I got this deal. I got this bonus. I got this extra. I got this cheaper. Whatever it is. You’ve never got that? I’m gonna go find out, right?

[00:17:47] And so that’s why you want to make sure that is it is still matching that same brand experience for that customer. Because if… if I find out somebody else has been what I’ve been getting for 10 percent cheaper, and I haven’t, now I feel like a rube, I feel like I’ve been taken advantage of, even if it was never the advertiser’s intent, right?

[00:18:04] It’s not, you know what I mean? So I should, I better hope I have the same experience, right? Cause then that puts a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth about what the heck what am I missing out on?

[00:18:13] Jamie: And it’s also, if you’re trying to capture new to file, I’ve always talked about you have to be aligned from top to bottom. So if the top of the organization wants new to file you got to incentivize for that. And the publisher who’s reaching the customer, they have to be incentivized for that, but the customer has to be incentivized.

[00:18:32] So that’s always been one of the big disconnects is being able to offer a new customer offer. And a lot of advertisers refrain from doing that because you couldn’t just offer it to the new customers. You’d have to go through any of the membership cash rewards, or I call them database affiliates, that have data that have members and that you can match back and you can see these are new. Let’s do a big campaign. There’s going to be a paid flat fee. I’m going to spend sometimes pretty extensive, but I know that that message is going out to customers who never shopped with me before, and that’s a big fricking ordeal, but to be able to in real time, at least say through through this affiliate, they’d never got there. That does allow them to segment out their audiences, maybe not perfectly, but a heck of a lot better than we’ve done before.

[00:19:22] Cary: Absolutely.

[00:19:23] Jamie: And never in real time.

[00:19:25] Cary: And it’s in real time. It’s a real time. It’s literally just a matter of, this is what I want to do for this incentive. This is what I want to do for that, right? And there you go. Or to your example, do a lapsed one, which is the most effective I’ve seen from advertiser data with us testing it and the ones that I’ve been partnering with.

[00:19:40] This gets more to your membership, your subscription type of advertisers that are out there or basically subscription. I do protein bars. I have these protein bars, I buy a crap ton of them. They last me for a month and then I go buy a whole bunch of them again, right? Whenever that discount comes.

[00:19:54] If I find somebody that can do it, give me the same return, same thing and get it cheaper and faster, whatever it is, then I’ll jump to the next one as opposed to this one. So that type of thing, shopping, there may be somebody who I haven’t bought from in a year.

[00:20:07] And they know I buy in bulk. I buy for an entire month. That’s a big chunk, right? They can use that same type of thing to target now. “Hey, I want you to get anybody who has not gone through you, Mr. Publisher, and convert it with me. Can you go back and target whatever, if they ever come to your site, ever, and they haven’t converted in the past 12 months?”

[00:20:27] Having that type of capability to do from a targeting standpoint, that’s also included with that as well. So there’s a lot of flexibility you can do within this. And it’s just a matter of aligning what you want to do within your audience. And then let those publishers that have that membership data that had that information. Like I said, we’re doing this with over a dozen publishers who need to have the capability to identify that customer coming through them at some point or other, right?

[00:20:49] They have to have a some signifier that they’ve converted and especially for the last one. There’s those that want new I want my new, or I want you coming every month. If you’re not coming every month, there’s a problem. So I want to incentivize you every 60 days, every 90, whatever, everybody has their own business model.

[00:21:06] So to match your business model with what you need to do to help incentivize, to help make sure that client is still yours coming back, whether it’s a first time or a continual. You can use this however it makes sense, and then use the publishers with their own data, with their own clients, their own customers, and we’re going to try and roll this, obviously globally is the area to roll this out to.

[00:21:27] Jamie: Are you enjoying the show so far? I sure hope so. You know, there’s been an awful lot of discussion over the last few years about the value of coupon affiliates. Maybe even you have doubted whether there’s value or not. Well, we at JEBCommerce wanted to find out, and the good news is the data is out there.

[00:21:48] So we interviewed all the top networks, did our own research, and compiled all the data from many reports already done about these affiliates on whether they add value or not. You see, we wanted to know the truth. And that resulted in an e book that is now available to you at JEBCommerce.com/value.

[00:22:09] In this e book, you’ll find the three categories of coupon affiliates, information from Rakuten’s marketing report on incrementality, data from Google and Comscore, data from LinkConnector on commission stealing, funnel participation, and data on brand perception, and so much more. If you’re struggling with this debate and trying to determine your coupon strategy, you definitely want to download this free ebook. And I want you to have this 100 percent for free.

[00:22:40] Simply for being a listener of our podcast. You can access this free ebook at JEBCommerce.com/value all for free. So thank you for listening. Now back to our show.

[00:22:53] I definitely can see the shift that we talked about before was about control. I’ve built this brand, and now they come to me to shop, and they may shop with you, advertiser, if you’re on my site and I’m promoting you. Now, power is, yeah, ” I can actually promote a specific offer to a type of audience for you on my site that in real time that we have.” That’s super exciting.

[00:23:17] Now you did mention too like… I’ve done a couple of these where similar to the retail catalog world brands would often share catalog lists with their competitors and they would have a third party compare and match and say, “Oh, You wanted a thousand names or 10, 000 names. Here are 10, 000 that they have that you don’t. And here are 10, 000 that they have that you don’t.”

[00:23:38] And so they would do that match. It sounds like you were saying there is the capability to go to that level of like, “Hey, advertiser, I’m sharing with this third party, my customer list affiliate is sharing, and that third party is going to let that affiliate know what’s new and not. Did I hear that correctly?

[00:23:57] Cary: Yeah, you can still do that. If the advertiser really has their data, their core and they wanna leverage that for whatever it is, right? Lapsed customers or if we can match it on yours, then scrub it and just anybody that doesn’t match. If the advertiser really wants to get into that type of capability, they can do that exact same thing as well.

[00:24:14] Right. So it’s just a matter of how do I want to implement this, or can I implement this, right? How many advertisers have that? Or have it to where they can get it into a format, to where we can do the match, everybody’s got different kinds of food. I got bananas over here, you got apples over there, and we gotta try and make this match somehow, and we can’t turn both oranges to make the data match, right?

[00:24:32] Which is, it’s not that hard. That was a horrible analogy. Horrible analogy.

[00:24:36] Jamie: It shouldn’t be that hard. But sometimes it feels… they have apples and I have a brick and we can’t make this match. Right?

[00:24:42] Cary: It does.

[00:24:43] Jamie: We’re literally… I’m recording a solo podcast shortly after this about a client who wants to reach discount minded audiences without risking their full margin shoppers.

[00:24:57] So they don’t want to show the offer to full margin shoppers, but they want to expand and there’s a group of shoppers that won’t buy without a discount. So they want to protect the margin of those shoppers who are very happy doing it that way, but expand out and they don’t want to do any coupon codes.

[00:25:14] So we’re trying to grapple with that. But this seems to be a part… that could be a part of that solution is like, look, no, one’s going to see it unless they fit this criteria.

[00:25:23] Cary: Correct. Correct. And it would be the rare, rare, rare exception if I was to hack the system somehow. I create a whole new account with the publisher and I assume a new identity to sacrifice whatever my membership got me with that publisher, right? I’m trying to game the system. Or, I’m VPN ing every week and I’m from a different country and a different person.

[00:25:43] It’s to that extreme that they would have to do it. Yeah, yeah, it’s to that extreme. I hope your customers aren’t like that. Because that was…

[00:25:51] Jamie: I don’t think many of them would set up a VPN or understand what that is, let alone how to do that. I don’t care what you do, in life, for your business or your work, there’s going to be bad apples that do that.

[00:26:02] Cary: Yeah. And it’s less than 1 percent of what we deal with, right? It’s not even a huge exception. It’s funny, it was just top of my mind, because I got down a path where somebody just did an if then like that, and they started doing these if thens, and if thens, and if thens, and then I just I threw my hands up after the fourth if then and went yes, you won.

[00:26:18] That guy would get an extra 10 percent off. You’re right.

[00:26:21] Jamie: Bob in Cleveland, he’s going to do that. Yeah.

[00:26:24] Cary: He’s gonna do that, you’re right. You’re right. You win.

[00:26:27] Jamie: It’s going to cost you $19 and yeah. That’s fantastic. I didn’t know we were going to go down this road, but I love that real time offer in that changing, that’s a pretty big capability. Do you have insight into how those tests are going? And is it easy for the publisher…

[00:26:42] Cary: This is something, yeah, we started this with Rakuten Rewards. So we had it personalized cashback is what it was called. And that’s where we started it. And originally the whole idea was: advertisers using data and going that way and then we just went well the RAKrewards knows their customers.

[00:26:57] You all remember RAKrewards I’ve gone through there. I have a history of everything I bought. So if this advertiser wants to do an incentive for somebody who’s never bought from them before there it is. RAKrewards even has the capability just from a targeting standpoint, they’ll target me or you or anybody based off of my purchase history on RAKrewards when there is an increase in cash back with a brand that I’ve already done. They do that on behalf of advertisers, advertisers don’t even know it.

[00:27:20] So it’s that same technology that we use to develop. We’ve now expanded this to other publishers. Like I said, we’ve got 12 publishers. We’ve got a lot more that are interested in testing right now to do this to where if that publisher has the capability To identify that customer as someone who has not gone through them and converted before on your site at any time, even before you even had a relationship with them, right?

[00:27:44] They can go through them and buy your product at this location, buy your product over there. This is another thing to get it to where I want to buy them off of my site instead of over at this site. If I’m one of those types of advertisers where my products sold in multiple locations, multiple sites, I want to incentivize them to come to mine.

[00:27:59] That is there. So yeah, it opens up a …

[00:28:01] Jamie: I love that because those usually, the MSAs keep them and their agreements with their resellers, keep them from doing anything specific. But this is a tool that may not be in violation of that MSA.

[00:28:13] Cary: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:28:15] Jamie: That’s fantastic. We are talking about trends we got on to this one and it brings up a question: do you see the trend of affiliates… I’ve seen like everyone and their brother putting a cash back element to what they’re doing. And I think a lot of it is in response to this other person’s doing it, but if you don’t have the data on those users, what do you have? You have traffic from Google, but if you’re not building that data, then you can’t do these things.

[00:28:42] So do you see that as one of the trends of a lot of affiliates moving to some sort of membership, some way to collect data so that they can participate in something like this?

[00:28:51] Cary: Absolutely. If… if that’s your business model, right? I still think the content that gets the content to their site, content is still king. Remember, we still hear that thing. If they’ve got the content, it still is attracting a massive amount of audience for information, for education, or for entertainment purposes, whatever it is, that still has that to where they’re the only game in town.

[00:29:14] There’s only so many experts that have an audience that are going to be talking about, I don’t know backyard barbecues, right? Or, that have it from a written standpoint, and now the next evolution is going to be from a video standpoint, from an influential standpoint, right? That’s expanding and we’re getting into all those different areas to be able to work with those partners.

[00:29:32] You’re going to have that area that’s competing for the brand space, because it has to not interrupt so much from the information, the education, or the entertainment, from the content they’re providing. So there’s only gonna be a limited amount of spaces. So theirs is going to be about the audience that they can continue to capture going forward. I don’t think they’re ever going to get to membership data and I think it’s going to be exclusive for you to get on those sites. But conversely I think a lot of publishers are going to get more and more to where it is that membership type of situation or understanding who their customers are getting that sense.

[00:30:07] They’ve been understanding them for a long period of time. They know who’s coming to their site. They know what they like, right? Across all the different types of publisher models. But I do see more and more of them getting into a membership, not so much just from being able to market to them, but also more so of being able to, Give them more of that experience.

[00:30:27] Have them part of this, right? I want you to be a member. I want you to be a partner. I want you to be a whatever that is, understanding that you’re coming here and I’m going to give you value and you giving me your name, your email address, right? Or mailing address or whatever that information. There’s an exchange that’s there in order to get that value, right?

[00:30:46] So that’s going to just expand even more and more and more. Or from a protection standpoint, when it’s coming from anything from cookies or, I’m going to be collecting data, I got to make sure, “Hey, let’s make everything up and up, up and open. Here you go. This is what I’m doing. Give me a consent, sign your name, sign your email address.

[00:31:02] Just from a CYA perspective, a little bit now too the publishers need to make sure that they’re. Getting all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed. So yes, I see that continuing to expand and grow and grow and grow with all this that are, that have that business model, right?

[00:31:17] Jamie: Yeah. And I’ve always thought like they have to, if you’re so reliant on Google for your traffic and you’re not able to directly talk to your consumers you’re going to have a problem and affiliates have done so well at that. It seems to me at times advertisers can get frustrated. Of this power shift and this dynamic kind of changing when I started, it was the advertisers made the rules and affiliates had to deal with it and there wasn’t much they could do.

[00:31:45] But over the last decade, there are some big brands that are equal to large brands nationwide that are publishers. And if you want to be there, you’re secondary. That publisher brand is primary in the consumer eye.

[00:32:00] Cary: Let’s look at it this way. There’s a perfect case. How many publishers had an ad in the super bowl? 20…

[00:32:07] Jamie: yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:09] Cary: Like, right? 10 years ago, five years ago, we were sitting there with the kids, watching the Super Bowl. Hey, that’s one of, that’s one of our publishers. Hey, that’s a publisher. Hey, look, that’s a publisher and doing Super Bowl ads. That is a clear, clear understanding of just the value and power. You’re exactly right. The size and scope that they’ve got.

[00:32:28] Jamie: Yeah. I remember when an affiliate sponsored a single NASCAR during one race of a third tier NASCAR race and how awesome that was. And now seeing multiple publishers on a Superbowl ad… I think I first saw like UPromise years ago, was on a McDonald’s…

[00:32:47] Cary: mm hmm.

[00:32:48] Jamie: … their French fries, and on Chevron at the gas pump. And we’re like, something’s changing here because it’s a different type of brand. Any other trends that you’re seeing over the last couple of years or, or going forward?

[00:33:00] Cary: So some of the things I’ve seen the other one has been the agencies that are coming in, brands that are coming in, everybody’s… I don’t see any apprehension to affiliate. Like we used to have, right? I don’t know about this thing, this affiliate thing. No, there’s no apprehension now. I can’t use the redheaded stepchild analogy anymore. I can’t use a black sheep analogy anymore because it’s not the case. There’s still a little bit of that with some individuals or some…

[00:33:25] Jamie: I think the people who have known about this space for a really long time may still harbor that, but I think you’re right. It’s really good to hear.

[00:33:33] Cary: Yeah, the apprehension seems to be gone. It’s just a matter of does it match my strategy or not to do this. That’s purely it there is still new to it the education. It still has that “oh, this is amazing. I only pay if they sell? Great, I’ll pay a million dollars. Get me 17 million in sales.”

[00:33:50] That’s not how it works, that’s not how it works

[00:33:53] Jamie: It’s a lever. Let me pull the lever.

[00:33:56] Cary: There I go! It’s on. That still doesn’t that still happens from new business going in but that the other shift that’s been happening. Honestly has been on the back end that I’ve seen that I had to deal with is just the sheer volume of agencies that are now in the space that are managing programs on behalf of advertisers and that publishers now have to work with, right?

[00:34:19] Publishers, because, it’s about the relationships. And this is a tougher thing to understand. It’s not a lever that you just turn. It’s not just, “hey, I just want to do this strategy. Let me just get over to this person. Hey, I just want to be, I got somebody who emailed me this morning.”

[00:34:32] “How do I get on the site that does all those periodicals that has the content that I want my website on? It’s an affiliate. Just put me on it.” That’s not how it works. Like, I know that’s what you want, but…

[00:34:44] Jamie: Where do I submit my link? And it’ll just go on, right?

[00:34:47] Cary: Exactly. So, we’ve had this fantastic adoption. Lots of agencies that have been in e commerce, that have been doing display, or been paid search are now trying to get Into affiliate they’re rolling to affiliate some of them are having success, some of them are not, some of them are trying to revisit this, right?

[00:35:03] Because that has been the biggest shift is everyone has some type of exposure in it. So we’re going to have, just like we had before, we’re going to have this massive explosion, and then it’s all going to settle back down as far as the sheer number of agencies that we’re working with and what they can do.

[00:35:19] Because of that whole thing, there just cannot be 500 agencies in North America doing affiliate competently. That’s just, it’s just a massive amount of agencies, right?

[00:35:29] Jamie: Yeah. There’s a scalability issue. It’s hard to scale relationships. It’s always been difficult doing that.

[00:35:36] Cary: Exactly. And so that’s the whole thing is, yeah, I can get it, I can get you within the top hundred. Everybody can invite them to come in, the top hundred publishers. They’ll get in, they’ll, depending on the size and scope and sale, the ones you can target, that’s it.

[00:35:49] And that gets you about 60, 70 percent of the way there. The rest of it is more dependent upon your vertical. It’s more dependent on the publishers, what their audience is. It’s more dependent upon the availability they have and to get over that hump to get in there because you’re one of a hundred, 200, a thousand other advertisers reaching out to have that conversation or trying to, right?

[00:36:10] If you can find someone has a relationship, which would be an agency that has some competency or a network who has is managing it. Whomever is managing it, you got to have some competency behind that. And by competency I mean they’ve been there done that or they know where they can go to find out, right? You know, there has to be that relationship that’s in there and experience within it and even at that it still might not happen the publisher might be “Yep. I’m at bandwidth I don’t have the space. I’m sorry. It sounds great, but…”

[00:36:35] Jamie: I can’t return your email. Even, even to that perspective, I simply cannot…

[00:36:39] Cary: I literally I just have to turn it off. I’m just trying to keep what I got going If something breaks then i’ll come back in and i’ll look again, right? And I’ll revisit if something happens, an advertiser fails, or they pull out, or they start changing their commissions on me all of a sudden and I find this out then…

[00:36:55] Jamie: Yeah.

[00:36:56] Cary: Hey, yeah.

[00:36:57] Jamie: Yeah. And we work with a couple of PR agencies to help with this. And one of the things that I’ve noticed, and I came up through search engine marketing, that was my first four years in digital marketing. What I’ve seen is their adoption and understanding about relationships is much more rapid comprehension than the more technical minded SEO and ad spend because they are focused on relationships from the beginning is very similar, but the other areas, it’s very lever-oriented, looking at the data, not a whole lot of back and forth between another human being. It’s just different.

[00:37:32] Do you get, you find the same thing with these other agencies coming in, similar kind of vibe?

[00:37:37] Cary: Yeah. It just depends on where do they grow from? Cause I’ve got them all. We’ve got some PR, I’ve got a couple PR agencies that are now doing affiliate on their own, right? And they’re managing the affiliate, but they’re still from that content focus.

[00:37:48] And then they bring in the other types of publishers into the business models. It makes sense, but that’s their focus. That’s where they go straight towards, right. And it’s an extension of their PR. Then we’ve got other agencies where it’s more about display from a focus. It’s brand awareness. It’s getting it out there.

[00:38:03] And there’s this not one, it’s the control. We had to have a 30 minute meeting about deep linking. I had a meeting about deep linking, Jamie. When was the last time you had a meeting about deep linking?

[00:38:15] Jamie: Wait 30 minutes about deep linking?

[00:38:17] Cary: I’m not kidding you, because this is an agency that came away from brand building and brand awareness and giving up that control. “Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You want me to let an affiliate write whatever they want and put a link on it? Like, no, I’m not doing that.” And I was like, exactly…

[00:38:34] Jamie: Yeah. ” I want to approve every link and every piece of content and we’ll need three weeks to do it. Cause we got to run it up the chain.” Yeah. That’s a huge structural issue between the two types of agencies.

[00:38:45] Cary: You’re exactly right. So this is… I’ve got all, those that are coming from an e commerce perspective, from a paid search perspective. So everybody’s coming from their own perspective, rolling into this realizing affiliate’s amazing, right?

[00:38:56] And so they’re trying to do this as an extension of what they’re doing, understanding that it’s a performance model, it’s going to help drive awareness, it’s going to help drive conversions. And there’s different advertisers that match to that, right? Your team is not built to go out there and do brand auditing for someone who wants to do an affiliate program.

[00:39:14] You don’t want that. You don’t want, I don’t want to do a three week audit. I don’t want it. That’s not your milieu, but if that’s what that advertiser and that’s what that agency, that’s what they want to do it, fine. It’s your money, it’s your program, run it the way you want, right? Find the publishers that’ll work that way.

[00:39:31] And yeah, exactly. Now this one, that one in specific is probably not that advertised as one I wouldn’t think was as critical for them to do, but there are those, right, that are in that if they have the financial vertical. It is that way. You can only write one of a certain thing, right? Doing with credit cards and doing with bank loans and that type of stuff.

[00:39:54] Jamie: Well and I think also the mass media publishers, they’re used to that sort of cadence. So that works really well, but your traditional affiliates have been around for 22 years. That’s not how they work.

[00:40:06] Cary: It’s against their scale. I need to understand what the customer at this point in my real estate is going if they’re shopping for a specific type of vertical or they’re looking for a specific type of thing.

[00:40:15] I only got so much room for them to peruse, I know how many scrolls they’re going to do and that’s it. And so I just need to get it in there make it fit within that content because that’s what my customer demands. Not what I’m demanding. If I end up bogging this down with a whole bunch of words, a whole bunch of text that makes it harder for them to scroll and find what they’re looking for, they’re going to go to my competitor, right?

[00:40:35] So that’s, I’m protecting myself. You’re exactly right.

[00:40:38] Jamie: A bit of like empathy that needs to be involved in all this from, I think advertisers coming in of like, you need to understand what is that particular affiliates product.

[00:40:47] Cary: Yeah.

[00:40:48] Jamie: And if their product is volume, then you need to work within that to get them what they need. And it doesn’t matter… we keep coming back to remembering, it doesn’t matter what you want when you’re working with this publisher, they have the audience, you have to adapt. Because they have power and a lot of control now.

[00:41:06] Cary: You’re exactly right. When I run across those that have that different perception that it is mine and I have to do this, right? The only way you can do that is if you pay an exorbitant amount of money to make sure you have that control.

[00:41:21] Build a TV ad and go out there and broadcast and build a certain, but even that we’re seeing that from the lack of infrastructure, from the influencers that are now coming from the alternative media, right? That our kids are watching that you and I don’t even know what the heck it is.

[00:41:35] Jamie: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:36] Cary: There is influence happening there. There is barely any control, right? I remember seeing this for the first time where somebody would negatively promote a brand. They’re like, what the heck? And it would give the brand awareness.

[00:41:48] I can’t even imagine what brands now to get to that audience, so that person does what they do to that brand, right? There’s some extreme weird. So that is another example of even more and moreso this is going to be the case. You need to build your brand yourself, but to get exposure, you’re going to have to let go of the reins a little bit and let them do it fantastically in our industry. With the publishers that we work with in affiliate, there’s not a lot that get very far with destroying a brand’s image. That’s not how they work, right? It’s just like, it’s just a totally different mindset.

[00:42:23] Jamie: Yeah. They destroy the brand and they’re not going to get paid in the end.

[00:42:27] Cary: And no other brand is going to go, “wait a minute, you did what to who? I’m not taking that risk.”

[00:42:32] Jamie: Yeah, and if you really want to know your consumers, you should get to know the people that know them best. And a lot of times that’s the publisher because they are the first line online that they’re interacting with, especially as they have built such good brands over the years.

[00:42:46] You talked earlier about the pressure of affiliates exerting on advertisers to, they have to have a pro, “yeah, I’d love to work with you, but you need an affiliate program.”

[00:42:53] Talk to me about that trend.

[00:42:55] Cary: Yeah, that one’s been fantastic. This is probably, you’re seeing this too with the PR agencies, brand awareness agencies, like these agencies that I’m talking about. Some of them have found, “I need to go partner with somebody to help me with this, go to OPMs to do this”, which I think is a smart idea.

[00:43:10] Or I’ll just go hire somebody to do it. Okay. That could work too. Yeah, I hope you hire the person that’s competent and you do a good job and that person’s going to stay with you for a long time. But absolutely we have seen… that is just the example of it, right? To where so many of these, some of the publishers that have that content, that is just a value… you’re just not, you’re that advertiser is not going to get anywhere in that, unless they have that affiliate program.

[00:43:33] So we’ve had advertisers coming in off of that being able to “hey, i’ve got content. It’s great. It’s going to get some and we’re going to put it on five different sites we’re going to do this whole thing over a year but you have to have an affiliate program in order to do it. Yeah, I’m going to pay you a hundred thousand dollars to do this. Great. You got to have an affiliate program to do it. They’re just not even going to entertain it without without the Without the underlying affiliate program.

[00:43:55] And again, that is the trend that we were seeing earlier on and we thought was going to be happening. We started to see evidence of it and that’s what’s brought a lot of the other agencies that are coming in within this space, who are also bringing more advertisers into the space.

[00:44:09] I’m interested to see, those brands that are from a content standpoint, the expansion that they’ve had, where it’s been expansion from an audience perspective, we’re going to continue to see this happening more and more and more and more stuff happening.

[00:44:19] YouTube has had some massive hits with us from doing that and working with advertisers that they’ve been working with from their content, right? That’s been really interesting to see the successes that they’ve had, but they have a scalability issue. Again, it’s. It’s limited real estate. They can’t do every advertiser everywhere yet.

[00:44:38] They’ve got enough content to match with it. I just don’t know how much they’re going to be doing this or looking into it, but that’s another one. So we’re going to see more and more of this alternative content that’s coming into the space, matching all the publishers that have it. They were telling you how to have an affiliate program.

[00:44:52] Now I’ve got everybody have an affiliate program. Now we’re going to have more publishers going, “you know what I should go over here and I should join into affiliate as opposed to just being a paid brand that is in there.” So it’s…

[00:45:04] Jamie: So you see this as we’re still growing. I know there’s several reports come out that show the affiliate space growing pretty significantly over the next five to 10 years. You see it the same way.

[00:45:17] Cary: Absolutely. I do and I’ve seen… Jamie, this i’ve been doing this for a little bit now I’m seeing the same brand name that turned off their affiliate program because it was a waste of time come back.

[00:45:28] Jamie: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:45:30] We’ve seen that too.

[00:45:32] Cary: And more coming back and coming back and coming back. Yeah, that’s been interesting to where that it wasn’t like bouncing, you know around they literally just…

[00:45:41] Jamie: They closed it.

[00:45:43] Cary: And went “Oh, oh, yeah, this is a bad idea” and coming back.

[00:45:47] Jamie: Yeah. That’s super interesting. It bodes well for the industry and something you and I, and a lot of us have been talking about is it’s more than last click cart sniping coupons. And I think again, the consumer is King. The consumer is saying, this is how I want to shop.

[00:46:04] And these types of brands are now my brands. And if you’re there and part of that solution set, you may get my order. If you’re not, you won’t. They’re driving the industry as they always do.

[00:46:17] Cary: Exactly. You’re exactly right, and that’s that is the funniest thing is everything we’re doing, you know with educating the advertisers about the publishers, is you have to partner with them, you have to collaborate with them, you have to let them be, make what you want available to them, truly available to them, and they will reward you by driving you with traffic and conversions and awareness.

[00:46:39] And the whole thing is, they can do this. Because they have a massive amount of customers running through them on a daily basis and they have to cater to them. You need to cater to your publishers who are catering to your customers, ultimately. And that’s it. It’s pretty simple when you look at it that way.

[00:46:59] Jamie: When you go with that flow, life is easy. You’re not fighting upstream. It’s that’s the flow is to the customer, and a lot of times it’s through the publisher.

[00:47:10] Cary: Yeah, it’s getting stuck in the little intricacies and it’s how the word is written as opposed to it’s just the word. It doesn’t matter how you just… this is it. You’re going to have to do this at some point, some way, because they’re doing this, right?

[00:47:23] Just get out of your own way sometimes. But I know they’ve got other pressures and other things, other things coming from above. Somebody telling what? Yeah, yeah.

[00:47:30] Jamie: That may be the podcast episode title. Get out of your way.

[00:47:34] Cary: Get out of your own way. Absolutely.

[00:47:36] Jamie: Move advertiser, get out your way. A little throwback for all the Gen Xers out there. Talk to me about like what areas of publisher growth are we seeing? Where’s the growth coming from?

[00:47:52] Cary: it’s everything. I just had somebody reach out to me because they were looking for… this morning, another agency reached out, they’re looking for travel in the UK and Europe. I was like, ” Oh, geez, I don’t know if we have it. That’s not my homegrown. I was like, I don’t know if I’ve got any that went to the list. I was like, Oh, yeah, we do. Yeah, we do. We sure do.”

[00:48:08] It’s been a growth across… there’s a lot that’s been from, I just mentioned travel, a lot that’s been from travel that has grown, right. Cause the industry has grown focusing more on that. And it may be travel from a discount perspective, maybe travel from a planning perspective. My wife and I went on a little vacation last weekend. Amy found a site that get us some cash back that was doing it. Didn’t even know about this site.

[00:48:29] Jamie: That you didn’t know about this site. I find that every new client we get, there are four or five affiliates I’d never met, and I feel like I’ve been doing this since it started.

[00:48:37] Cary: I know, it’s just continuing, continuing, continuing to evolve and grow. It’s everything. I couldn’t say there’s one that’s more than the other, but definitely I’ve seen the content. There’s been some concentration content under who owns, but there’s just expansion of more and more and more.

[00:48:53] Discount obviously rewards has been It’s just massive amounts of rewards and specializing rewards too and unique types of business propositions to how they want to do the rewards. It’s not just a straight line cashback type of situation. There’s all these new ones that are coming in different verticals and different specialties.

[00:49:10] The other areas that we’ve had a big amount of expansion that I’ve seen has been globally. So APAC, massive amounts of growth, both from publishers and from advertisers, just huge, huge amount of growth.

[00:49:23] Europe is still growing, but APAC has been a really big grower and a lot of brands that are getting exposure, that have multiple brands. As we thought those would be the only ones that are there, US or Canada focused or Europe focused going over to APAC region, I’ve got a ton that are APAC focused that are able to get exposure and have awareness already in the United States or in Europe and are doing affiliate programs.

[00:49:47] So that has been honestly from the growth that’s been our biggest growth. It’s been APAC of seeing those that are there and it’s not just within that and that’s been the other thing when we opened up the entire network across so any publisher can work with any advertiser anywhere and any advertiser can work with any publisher anywhere advertisers billing’s done with whatever their currency is, where their location is.

[00:50:07] Publisher gets paid in their currency where they have, wherever they are. That has opened up. Anybody can work, but you still have it to where if my audience is in APAC, I’m probably just going to be looking at advertisers that are on the APAC network because that’s where their audience is. Makes more sense.

[00:50:22] It’s really going to be hard for me as a publisher at APAC to go sign up into a U. S. based program with a US audience. Why would I, why would I do

[00:50:31] Jamie: Could you use the technology we talked about earlier and recognize, “Oh, this is someone coming from the US I’ll give them a U US offer as opposed to an APAC offer.”

[00:50:40] Cary: That would be… I guess you could from a technology standpoint. There’s no, I think you can. I, you probably could. I just don’t know of anybody that’s done it. Cause that’s still the limitation is the awareness. Having a US program that has an audience in, now US to Canada for neighbors, that’s not as tough.

[00:50:57] Canada to US, very tough. Canada is Canada. It doesn’t cross south as much as we cross north. So to that end, if that’s where that publisher is, it’s gonna be hard for you to not get a partnership with them unless you’re also showing that you are established within that region and you have an audience for that region that’s specialized for that region, right?

[00:51:16] You’ve got to have the right site. It’s got to be the right currency when you’re doing it from a checkout perspective. Remember, it’s the publisher’s audience. It’s their audience. My audience expected to be in my native language, not yours,

[00:51:29] Jamie: Exactly. And, the advertisers I’m promoting to be in my native currency.

[00:51:33] Cary: Correct. Exactly right. Exactly right.

[00:51:36] Jamie: Cary, this has been fantastic from the beginning to the end. Great conversation, lots of outstanding stuff. I really appreciate every time you and I get to chat and the things that we talked about today and really some new technology that… any idea when that will be pushed out to everyone?

[00:51:53] Cary: So it is available now with the publishers that we’ve got. So it’s a matter of if you’ve got those publishers in your program, you can work with it. So anybody right now, if you’re working with the publishers there, you could do this today. So you can start doing this for the day. We just done it as a huge, huge, massive, massive rollout announcing it to everybody and everything.

[00:52:12] That will probably be, I’m probably jumping the gun right now, and it’s supposed to be. But a different calendar year, I’m guessing, is when that’s probably going to…

[00:52:20] Jamie: We may need to edit this part out.

[00:52:24] Cary: No.

[00:52:24] Jamie: We’ll see what the powers that be say.

[00:52:28] Cary: Hopefully I won’t get my hand slapped. No…

[00:52:29] Jamie: Promises, this is available to everyone by November 1st.

[00:52:33] Cary: As soon as I say, if there’s a Help Center article in the back end of the dashboard and there’s training on it, it’s out there.

[00:52:39] Jamie: Ready to go. Yeah.

[00:52:40] Cary: People are using it today. Like, your brands could use it today.

[00:52:43] Everybody that’s live on it could use it today. But we are going to do a full official type of announcement with it I think next year. Yeah.

[00:52:50] Jamie: Awesome. When that happens, we will be sure to share that with our clients and the world, but Cary, thank you again. I’ll include all the contact information you gave last time. So if anyone wants to follow you, reach out to you they can, but yeah, thank you as always, man. Fantastic conversation.

[00:53:07] Enjoy it and really appreciate you taking the time out again, as we tried to make this happen a few weeks ago and the internets did not want this to happen. But I just put this shirt in the closet and took it back out, we’re…

[00:53:19] Cary: There you go. That’s right. I like that. And yeah, the internet gods were not smiling on us a couple weeks ago, but I’m glad we were able to make this work. I truly enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

[00:53:26] Jamie: Awesome. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you, Cary.

[00:53:28] Cary: You’re welcome.

[00:53:30] Jamie: Well, Cary, thank you so much for that hour of your time and for rearranging your schedule a few times to accommodate accommodate mine and some internet trouble. I really appreciate that conversation. It is always a pleasure to talk with you and spend some time conversing all things affiliate marketing and learning from you.

[00:53:50] For our listeners, thank you for making it this far. Today was a great conversation, I thought. I really enjoyed it, and I learned a whole bunch. We had a great conversation around new customers, but really learning about Rakuten’s new feature audience engine, where you can real time identify a new customer and give them a specific offer that provides a ton of power to the advertiser and the affiliate. Really demonstrates why you as an advertiser need to be working in this space.

[00:54:18] So definitely check that out. We’re going to include some links to the audience engine in the show notes so you can check that out. We talked about content is king, but really the consumer is king and really what they’re doing is what the advertiser should be looking at and their shopping is changing. And that conversation of control and power and how that shifted in the last five years from advertisers to really the affiliates. They now have the brands. They are the brands. And if you want their audience, you’re going to have to do what you need to do to get access to them.

[00:54:53] One of the things we talked about that want to highlight is the difficulty some of the other agencies are having the multi-channel agencies, PR agencies, SEO agencies that they’re having coming into the affiliate marketing space and realizing this is about relationships.

[00:55:09] And if you’re just getting into it and you’re frustrated because you’re not getting on those affiliate sites, you really need to look at building your relationships. And so if you’re an agency trying to make that work, know that JEB works with other agencies, and we can help leverage our 19 years of relationship building, and some of our staff have been doing this for longer. We can leverage that to help get your brands on there as well. So you can reach out to gethelp@jebcommerce.com. We would love to work with you and help you figure that out.

[00:55:39] We’re in season three, but we’re still looking for guests and we’re looking for guests for season four. So if you are someone you thinking, “man, I’d love to be on this podcast.” Come join us, email us at gethelp@jebcommerce.com. If you’ve never been on a podcast, well join the club. Many of our guests are brand new, they’ve never done a podcast before, and I think that really makes our content unique.

[00:56:01] So if you know someone who should be on our podcast or you’d like to be on the podcast, just reach out to gethelp@jebcommerce.com, we’ll get you there right away. And don’t forget to check out our new pricing tiers and product tiers at JEBCommerce.com/elements.

[00:56:17] And if you found value today, share it, share it on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn, send it to someone who you think would benefit from today’s conversation, but really what would help is to go give us a five star review at Apple Podcast, Spotify, whatever podcast player that you use. That goes a long way.

[00:56:36] But anyway, thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you found it valuable and let us know how we did, but anyway, have a great day. Thanks for listening.