The Evolution of Affiliate From Underdog to E-Commerce Essential with Adam Weiss

[00:00:00] Jake Fuller: All right. welcome back to the podcast. This week’s topic is the evolution of the affiliate marketing space. Really excited about our guest today. Friend of mine, someone I’ve known in the industry for a few years now, Adam Weiss, welcome to the show.

[00:00:27] Welcome back, I suppose. You probably are here with Jamie in the past, but, first time with me.

[00:00:32] Adam Weiss: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jake. It’s good to be back.

[00:00:35] JF: It’s good to see you. And I know the last time you were on our podcast and just as recent as earlier this year, some changes in your career and where you are at here in our channel have changed. So do you want to update the listeners on, where you’ve been and where you’re at now?

[00:00:49] AW: Yeah. Happy to. Yeah. I think I was, I think I was the episode, season one, episode one.

[00:00:55] JF: You might’ve been.

[00:00:56] AW: Correctly with, with my good friend, our good friend, Jamie. yeah. my name’s Adam Weiss. I’ve been in the affiliate space for over 20 years. and earlier this year, about six months ago, I joined AWIN as the president of their North American, affiliate business.

[00:01:22] Prior to that, I spent the majority of my career, at Rakuten. Did a variety of things there, a little over 14 years there. And then I actually, when I was on the podcast last with Jamie, I had, I had just started, a consulting business, which actually ran up about. Did that for a little over five years as well, where I was strategically helping publishers and technology partners specifically in the affiliate space with revenue generating strategies, how to get themselves into the affiliate ecosystem. But then at the end of, last year, I, got a very long story short. I got a phone call from Adam Ross, the CEO of AWIN, and one thing led to another, and, it’s been a smooth sailing ever since.

[00:02:16] I’m really excited to be on board here, and back in the network business.

[00:02:21] JF: And I’ve followed you since, and I will say at some of the conferences when I’m running into an Adam, and you’re there with Adam Ross, it’s always, which one are we meeting with today? Got to get your Adams straight when you’re at the conferences, but no, it’s been great to see what you guys have been doing, what you guys have been pushing out at AWIN. Obviously we run clients on every network, so we’re very familiar with some of the changes that have been happening there.

[00:02:44] And, on today’s topic, in terms of the evolution, I think it’s, a bit full circle, so a lot of listeners won’t know this, but when you were running your consulting business, we here at JEBCommerce actually worked with you for a short time to go over really this specific topic, how we’re seeing some blurry lines when it comes to different marketing channels, like PR and influencer and content creation and how that’s starting to blur more and more into affiliate.

[00:03:11] What’s that, what does that do into the channel and how do you stay ahead of that? We’ve had conversations like this in the past on this very topic. I want to start generally speaking on this topic. Affiliates really changed in the last 20 years. And one of the general things that I’m seeing, I think there’s still a lot of misconceptions in our space, but we really went from being overlooked and misunderstood, Jamie used to like the term redheaded stepchild, no offense to redheaded stepchildren out there. I feel like it’s become a bit more mainstream and it’s become large enough and noticeable enough where it can’t necessarily be ignored by large brands anymore.

[00:03:50] Do you feel like that evolution has started to really take place or are we still overlooked and misunderstood?

[00:03:57] AW: I think it’s, I don’t think we’re overlooked, maybe misunderstood or maybe misutilized, in some cases. I think we’ve come from a place where, with the maturity of any type of business, people need to grasp it. Get an understanding of it, figure out what are the right levers within the business, and how do you move the needle appropriately based on, what you’re trying to do for your particular business.

[00:04:28] And I say that as I kick this off saying, I’ve been in this for over 20 years, so I remember it being the proverbial wild west and I’ve spoken about this before. And over time, you start to really understand who the publishers are in the space and that it’s not… I’d like to say this isn’t a channel, right? This is a sort of multifaceted platform, multidimensional platform where we could leverage strategic partners to drive different business goals throughout an entire organization.

[00:05:05] Meaning that for a brand, affiliate performance isn’t limited to this box within your organization. It could be used for many things, conversion, which can mean selling products, new customers, et cetera, but could also be for brand, for an extension of your product marketing efforts.

[00:05:27] There’s just a lot of different ways that affiliate can really be leveraged as a tool set throughout a brand or retailer’s organization. I think we’re getting to that point now that people are understanding it and hopefully realizing they can utilize it in that way.

[00:05:42] JF: You bring up a… you almost answered a question I had written down for this interview, but is affiliate the proper term in our channel these days? Cause I was, Recently having a conversation with a prospect brand that we’re looking at bringing on here at JEB. And as we dove into the affiliate landscape, their experience was fairly limited.

[00:06:03] So they put affiliate in a box more traditionally speaking, and as we really got into the different types of partnerships, the different types of integrations and ways that we can leverage the channel through strategic partners, there was a whole lot more they didn’t know that could be done that we could start tapping into and how it integrates with other channels.

[00:06:22] I think that speaks to the evolution of affiliate. It is come out of that box now, and there’s so many different ways that I’m still learning. There’s times I turn around and go, I was speaking to someone recently and I said, “yeah, no, I have a partner that can run CTV ads and we can report that back out of network in a network”, and all these different, wild things that a few years ago, or even more recently, I didn’t realize we had partners that could do that and there’s always something new popping up. Again, affiliate, does that put us too much in a box? It’s hard for me to come up with a better descriptor.

[00:06:55] A lot of people use partner marketing or the partnership ecosystem as maybe a tagline. Do you feel like we need to change our marketing efforts ourselves to, to how we brand this channel?

[00:07:06] AW: I don’t know. I’m torn on this one, Jake. I honestly feel like… over the last few years, it seems like we spent almost too much time discussing it, it is what it is, right? It’s more about the utilization of affiliate as a technology to support a brand or retailer’s growth, to support revenue for a publisher.

[00:07:33] I feel like from what I’ve seen, the discussion on what we call ourselves, it’s almost call what you want at the end of the day, and you want to work with publishers A, B, C, and D, and these are the economics that I want to set up, and the way I want to structure a partnership with them, and the value prop I know that I’m going to get.

[00:07:53] That’s what the most important thing is. At the end of the day, I’ve been calling an affiliate for so long, I feel rebranding the entire industry. I don’t…

[00:08:03] JF: I don’t think that’ll ever stick. That’s for sure. and I agree. I think a lot of the conversations we have, it comes down to just specifically looking at the economics, what the partnership looks like and how it’s going to amplify what the brand’s trying to achieve, and then it’s a yes or no.

[00:08:19] AW: Yeah, and at the end of the day, I think about the Affiliate Summit itself, right? How many people show up to Las Vegas every year? Thousands of people show up, and it’s called the Affiliate Summit, so I think everyone knows, what it is, what goes on, and how they should be thinking about it.

[00:08:39] JF: Yeah, agreed. So going back to, I want to talk about publishers specifically and partners in there again, affiliates, publishers, partners. There’s different names we can utilize and we all kind of use those interchangeably, but in terms of evolution, and I had just mentioned like the CTV partner that we, we work with now and, some different categories that, weren’t, to my knowledge, available a handful of years ago.

[00:09:05] And when we were speaking a few years back from a consulting standpoint, I think there was, it wasn’t like it just happened overnight, but there was this notice that more and more brands are starting to realize and more PR publications, whether it’s Forbes or Buzzfeed or, whoever it was in the last couple of years, bleeding into hiring for e commerce teams and bleeding the lines between this paid and or earned PR efforts, which was purely editorial in the past.

[00:09:34] Then now there’s a lot of effort to work with brands on a commerce side and look at, and again, they fit to the affiliate space. And that was one topic where it was just specifically around PR, publications, et cetera, and that’s bled into content creators and influencers and all of these different categories.

[00:09:53] So do you feel like affiliate’s in a much better place now that we have such a diverse category mix? Is it easier for people to jump in and create their own, affiliate program and find publishers or become a publisher themselves? Do you find that easier today than it was 10 years ago?

[00:10:10] AW: Yeah, I know that’s one of our focuses here at AWIN is like making it easier to be an affiliate, right? Making it easier to run a sophisticated affiliate program. You talked about PR, those types of agencies getting into the business at the end of the day, it gives us a way to track what we’re doing.

[00:10:31] That’s the beautiful thing about it. And it gives you the ability to track at scale as well. And you mentioned also the different types of partners coming into the space. It’s hard not to say channel. I say, I don’t call the channel, but then I go ahead and I say the channel, but.

[00:10:49] JF: Interchangeable, right? Publisher, affiliate, space, channel … for me, it’s interchangeable.

[00:10:54] AW: Yeah, I think that’s the thing, right? When you think about new folks coming on, we talk inside baseball, like we know all the different terminology, not everyone else does. And that probably is what causes or could cause a little bit of confusion. But within the distribution landscape, seeing CTV partners, influencers, editorial partners who are… their traffic is more organic versus those who might do something with more of a paid focus or even the type of editorial evergreen content versus product reviews. And then within product reviews, is it more of a summation that you’ve derived from information you read online? Or are you actually kicking the tires on particular products and have a lab, right?

[00:11:41] So there’s a lot of diversification in the types of partners, which, in my opinion, is really beneficial to the channel and really reflects the maturity of affiliate, because there’s so much more that you can do with these partners to drive whatever your goals are as an advertiser.

[00:12:02] And it’s never binary, right? In my mind, it’s never everyone wants to do X or everyone wants to do Y. There are tens of thousands of advertisers with affiliate programs, all who are trying to achieve different goals, and a lot of times they’re selling different types of products too. So how do I capitalize on all these different types of partners that I have to drive the right actions that I need through an affiliate platform working with the right agency like yourself to make those things happen.

[00:12:35] JF: You touched on a few topics. Technology, we could go into a whole subcategory about how that’s evolved over the years, but the basis is, it is more advanced now we can take these new channels that might not have been more than just a paid media campaign. And then you have to deduce, was that beneficial? Did we see ROI?

[00:12:53] And now you can actually track and put some metrics behind it to see how it’s moving the needle for your brand. And I think one thing we run into, and this is in my opinion, it’s still something that is a big gap in terms of how our channel is presented to one degree or really how that education kind of befalls onto CMOs and executives and other marketing buffs, if you will, that are at these brands who maybe have not tested a whole bunch within affiliate or they come in and they hear some buzzword, whether it’s content creators, influencers, PR, take your pick, but they come in and learn that there’s so many different ways that you can leverage this channel.

[00:13:32] Then it comes down to most of my job is educating them on what is it that you’re looking for? Are you looking for specific awareness plays? Are you looking for just bottom funnel conversions? Because they still come into the channel and go, “great. I want to be on listicles. I want to run with influencers. I want to do X, Y, Z.” And they’re listing things off that are that mid to upper funnel awareness play to drive new consumer.

[00:13:55] And they think, this is affiliate. This is all CPA based, right? Like we’re just going to run a commission. If it converts, that’s great. If it doesn’t, we’ll get some learning from it.

[00:14:05] And yes, you can do that, and over time you might find some traction. But I think one thing to talk about as this channel has evolved and we see these different category of publishers and partners coming into the space, you also have to open up your mind in terms of how you’re commissioning or rewarding those partners.

[00:14:24] So I, for me, I see such a different and more diverse mix of how we strategically pay partners, whether it’s flat fees, commissions, hybrids, CPC, there’s all these different models now that you can play with that we didn’t really tap into before.

[00:14:41] AW: Yeah, absolutely. The sophistication of the platform allows you to do that, and the publishers themselves recognizing the value that they’re adding. That an advertiser can get access to they have to price that appropriately, but it’s pretty simple, to your point.

[00:15:00] The economics could be set up through the technology and the technology, also, you know what I see at AWIN is the reporting that we provide allows us to better inform clients, or clients to inform themselves, when they’re using our dashboard to see, “okay, these types of publishers drive this type of traffic at this point in the funnel, and that allows me now to structure the economics appropriately and also, advocate internally, I think, as an advertiser, for budget that I need based on what I’m seeing these particular publishers drive to hit those goals like we talked about.”

[00:15:43] JF: And that brings up, one of the questions, do you think that networks or the technologies behind the channel that helped facilitate the relationships between these brands and these publishers, do you think they hold the majority of the responsibility to stay innovative and stay ahead of the curve in which we continue to find ourselves moving around in terms of evolution, innovation. Are they the spear front? Do they need to be the ones responsible to really capitalize on how to utilize technologies, how to track these things, how to create more ease of use for someone to get into this space?

[00:16:18] AW: That’s our job. We are the, I’ve said this before, I think of the networks as the interchange where everything happens in our industry. We are… we talk a lot about scale, right? And I don’t know if I’m going to end up going down a rabbit hole here or not, but, there’s a place for automation that provides scale, right?

[00:16:43] But we, we’re also partnership driven, so there’s a large human component to it. But I do think we provide the ability to create these strategic partnerships at scale. And then how do you manage them at scale as well? And that is the role of the network. That’s what we do as the technology that is the interchange where all of this happens connecting advertisers and publishers, finding new partners activating ones that maybe are dormant partnerships, optimizing ones that should and could be doing more, giving you the reporting to see that, again, like we just talked about, allowing a wide variety of economic relationships to be created, providing the links, the creative, to go on site, and that even could go down to like feeds, product feeds, things like that.

[00:17:42] The payment component to it as well, but most importantly, is the tracking behind all of it as well. And that’s something that, I was, I, probably sound like an advertisement here, but I was really impressed with what I’ve seen at AWIN is, the focus on tracking, the sophistication around tracking, the desire to make sure it is as lossless as possible. Different ways to structure it for brands for retailers as well because that is really at the end of the day what we do.

[00:18:18] So so to your question: yeah, that’s that is what we do. That’s our job in the space and we will continue to innovate it’s incumbent upon us to do that because programs are only going to get more sophisticated to what we’re talking about earlier with all these different partners coming in, so you got to manage them all differently.

[00:18:37] JF: Yeah, there’s times I will run an analysis on a partner we represented 10 years ago, where we have old data on the publisher list on who was driving traffic, what categories, and then I can look at any given program we run today, even for some of our small brands, and there is such a drastic difference in, in the partners that I’m seeing, the types of partners that I’m seeing in these programs, and it is constant sophistication.

[00:19:02] I want to jump into a hypothetical. So I’ve, played with this thought before. It’s more internal and it’s not, it’s a, I’m not recommending brands go shut down every other channel they operate in, cause there’s a few different questions behind this, but if you get a large brand, if for example, we represent a large brand and they’ve got, a specific budget and team that runs email efforts, and then, the paid media, Google ads, they’ve got a whole team that does programmatic. They’ve got a team that does different PR both on an earned and organic standpoint, or a paid standpoint for PR. They’ve got an entire influencer team and then they want to launch affiliate marketing and start realizing we can touch all of those channels.

[00:19:40] Is there hypothetically a thought process where a brand could almost take 90 percent of all of their marketing efforts and funnel it through partnerships and affiliate based marketing budget and an effort.

[00:19:56] AW: You’re asking a guy with a biased response…

[00:19:58] I

[00:19:59] JF: Come put all of it here. we know that’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s, sometimes I see these new partners pop up and I see them interacting and when a brand finally approves it, “they’re like, great, that worked a bit better. And it actually was more cost efficient than us running it in house. So let’s keep working with that partner.”

[00:20:17] And I think, holy crap. Can we do this across the board with a lot of your channels? And it takes a long time to get there, but…

[00:20:23] AW: Think there are instances where you can do that. I think their affiliate provides a great, opportunity for brands to test into things as well. Low risk to test into things, and I think that the publishers really are the experts, right? In terms of, the acquisition that they’re doing, whether it is through email and consumer offers or like we talked about TV or social, creator content, whatever it is.

[00:20:50] So I definitely think the opportunity is there. Like I said earlier, I think every brand is going to be different in terms of how they structure their marketing departments, their marketing budgets. Align affiliate with marketing. Is it, maybe it’s part of the product organization, maybe it’s part of the brand organization.

[00:21:06] It really depends. But I certainly think affiliate is a great way to test into things, and I think you will find if you do that, that there are partners who really could help in terms of driving specific actions that you’re looking for. And yet you, you might find that you want to move more dollars into affiliate because of the efficiency behind it and the expertise that you find in the partners that you’re working with as well.

[00:21:34] JF: Now I’ll play devil’s advocate to that same question. We’ve also worked with brands and this, these are, a case by case. So I don’t want to make any claims that you shouldn’t jump in and test affiliate. But there’s times where brands that are young, maybe they just launched in the past couple of years.

[00:21:50] They’re very unknown, generate very little traffic to their site. So they’re getting their feet wet. Maybe a mom and pop shop, the guy, maybe they have a great product even. And it’s something that you definitely want to play around with and see if affiliates would have interest.

[00:22:03] You come to find out they’ve never invested into any kind of marketing efforts. They haven’t done Facebook ads, they haven’t run any Google ads. They haven’t done any kind of email marketing. They only have an email list of a thousand people. For example, there’s times where I’ve seen them struggle and they have the concept.

[00:22:20] I’ll start with affiliate. We’ll put this out there as a great product and affiliate will help us take off and grow. And we can dive into these channels and test those, but I find that quite difficult. So do you feel like there’s brands out there that should have set expectations on really when and how to start applying a channel like this to start testing?

[00:22:40] AW: Yeah. I think it’s a balance, right? I think when you asked the previous question, my mind went to enterprise level.

[00:22:47] JF: That level. Yeah.

[00:22:48] AW: Because you said that in the question. So yeah, I think there’s a balance, for sure, but again, There are brands, we’ve seen over the last year, some up and coming DTC brands who’ve really leaned into affiliate and been successful.

[00:23:06] I think it does have to do with, size of the brand. But again, there are partners who potentially can be part of that mix to introduce you. The other thing I think is, important to note or something I’ve always felt about affiliates in general is they are, they provide third party validation.

[00:23:30] They are brands themselves. Think about again, I’m looking at it from the span of over 20 years, where it was like, who are these folks driving sales for us?

[00:23:43] JF: And now they’re huge businesses on their own.

[00:23:47] AW: And so if I’m an upstart brand or retailer, and now I’m showing up on one of these editorial sites or one of these large loyalty sites or even a large coupon site, that to me lends credence to my brand as a brand or advertiser because here’s another big brand who’s essentially promoting me.

[00:24:07] So I think that’s an important component of affiliate that sometimes gets overlooked is that the publishers themselves are large brands, right?

[00:24:18] JF: And they garner their own unique audience because of that.

[00:24:21] AW: And their unique audience and the trust they have that audience, right? And that I think is favorable to the brands that they choose to partner with. We’ve talked, think about all the editorial sites that are out there, review sites, the reputable sites that are there, that are associated with these huge publications.

[00:24:42] And now if my brand, my D2C brand is showing up there, I think that actually lends a lot of validity to me as a, as an…

[00:24:52] JF: As an up and comer. And we have, that’s easily a topic we speak to with brands on a consistent basis. That’s one of those gaps and I think misconceptions that’s pretty common in the space is the, you get brands that can view affiliates as well, but they just categorize them and want to move on.

[00:25:11] And it’s you don’t realize some of these affiliates, they’re massive. They’re eight, they’re 10, 20x the size of you and your product and your brand. And they have a much larger following, and they can get access to some eyeballs that you can’t right now. And sometimes they have to have kind of an aha moment to realize, “Oh, I didn’t realize they were that huge or they had that many, that many followers or monthly readers” or you name it, daily users.

[00:25:36] AW: I’ve, I’ve said this like probably too many times, but it’s… you have publishers who are on NBA basketball jerseys.

[00:25:44] JF: Oh yeah,

[00:25:45] AW: advertising in the Super Bowl, right? Come a long way.

[00:25:50] JF: Yeah, very long way. What I love about that topic too, speaking about how large some of those are in the audience. I think one thing I like to always bring up: there’s always up and coming brands, but on the flip side, there’s always up and coming publishers. There’s a publisher or somebody going, “Hey, there’s something new in the market” and they’re trying to figure it out and they jump in and find success.

[00:26:10] And they start to grow within that affiliate space. And there’s a lot of times where you got to be careful. There’s bad apples out there. We all know this, right? And, whether it’s the network helping with vetting and making sure they’ve got legitimate signups from an affiliate standpoint or utilizing agencies where there’s not a single partner that joins a program or works on a program that we haven’t vetted ourselves.

[00:26:33] That really helps mitigate, poor traffic, fraudulent traffic, or any activity we’re not looking for. On the flip side, brands, a lot of the times we’ll look at affiliate and go “great. They’re only driving one or two conversions a month. The traffic is low, but we can tell this is a great fit” and they almost want to turn them off.

[00:26:51] And I think just talking about the evolution of the space and how things change and how publishers overnight can seemingly go from your random little one conversion a month affiliate to your top producer in three years is we have to give it time. This is not a flip a switch channel. You’ve got to kind of test play and continually look at recruitment and building new relationships across both sides of the table, because you don’t know when, something’s going to change and when a new category is going to take off and become one of your top categories in your channel.

[00:27:22] AW: Or Google’s going to turn a dime or a knob and someone else is going to, drop and someone else is going to go up.

[00:27:31] JF: It’s been a fun summer, hasn’t it?

[00:27:33] AW: That’s the state of play, unfortunately, right now but, again, it’s low risk in a way. And what I always, like to talk to folks about.

[00:27:43] And, when I think about what you’re talking about, the folks who drive one or two sales that could become big, wouldn’t it be great. If you integrated with them now, rather than when they’re huge and now you’re in line with 500 other people that want to get integrated. And now there’s an integration fee as well.

[00:28:03] And you have to hit certain criteria versus be the one that says, I’ll test it out because it’s low risk, but they drive one sale, you’re paying for that one sale.

[00:28:13] JF: Yeah, I will say some of my favorite meetings where I don’t expect them or their ad hoc meetings when I go to conferences, I’ll meet publishers I’ve never heard of, and they do something similar, but have a unique spinoff from one of our large partners. And again, I love coming home from those meetings and bringing that to my team because it’s a publisher that maybe sits in a CLO category or a loyalty category, but they’ve got something unique about them.

[00:28:40] They’re not big enough yet to charge us integration fees or placements. And they’ll do more for us, if we can get brands to test, than we’ll get from anybody else. Like they want to give more, they want to do more, they want to prove themselves. And there’s a lot of value you can find with those young affiliates.

[00:28:56] AW: And I think a lot of times those are folks who are trying to solve a problem from an e commerce perspective that they’ve encountered, and as a startup, they have the ability to innovate, right? And then through that innovation, they bring that to the channel, and hence we have more diversified partners.

[00:29:19] So I agree with you. When I was consulting back in the day, that was always the fun part too, was folks who would call me up and say, “I’ve got this idea, or I’m starting something new, or I’m trying to reach this particular customer base that no one else is, or I’ve got this type of technology, and we want to use affiliate as a way to partner with brands and to generate revenue,” and I think I couldn’t agree with you more.

[00:29:42] Those are the fun conversations to have. Not all of them are going to hit.

[00:29:47] JF: No.

[00:29:48] AW: But usually those are the people who even if the first idea doesn’t hit the second or third one does. They stay at it, but it really helps give some perspective on some of the challenges that people are trying to solve from an ecom perspective.

[00:30:03] And then if you think about it from the perspective of large retailers, large brands, they’ve got a lot of priorities. A lot of competing technical priorities. How do I solve some of these problems in an efficient, fast, lower risk way? The affiliate channel could do that for you. And again, here’s my another commercial for AWIN, I hope you don’t mind.

[00:30:27] But I love them leaning in, or say us leaning in on technology partners, like I was talking about, and the integration with these technology partners on the e commerce back end of, of these retailers, these brands and retailers. So if you want to do things like implement some type of exit traffic monetization or recommended products based on what you have in your basket or a referral program, the list goes on and on.

[00:31:01] You can theoretically plug in real quick. Click of a button per se with these technology partners and now they’re fully integrated into your site through the affiliate platform. And that comes from the innovation that a lot of these publishers, have taken upon themselves to develop.

[00:31:21] JF: The more we see of that, the more adoption we’ll see, right? Because a lot of the times it’s barrier to entry. If that gets lowered, and you’re reducing risk, you’re reducing time, and resources for somebody to test something new, something that they may have been apprehensive towards. It’s a lot easier to get them to adopt it, to test it, to try it out, and then prove concept and move forward.

[00:31:43] I love it whenever I see, and this can go for any network out there or any publisher out there, when I see new technologies or new ways to create truly efficiencies, that’s the key word I would hone in on, I get quite excited because it makes our job easier as well. It makes our job easier as we represent brands and we want to test things out and present that.

[00:32:03] We don’t have to ask them to maybe do a huge technical lift. It’s “Hey guys, we just need approval. Let’s test this out. We can click a button to get this started.” It makes our job easier as well. So we love seeing that.

[00:32:13] Yeah, so I think it’s been a great conversation as a final kickoff question, this is fairly broad: there’s so many topics when we talk about evolution, at least for me, the affiliate channel never gets bored. It’s one reason I love it here. I can wake up next week, and something’s changed again, Google could drop a new compliance rule.

[00:32:31] There could be new FTC guidelines. There could be a whole host of things that change overnight and we all have to adapt and figure it out. But it’s interesting and exciting to see how quick our industry responds and how innovative they can be to push that forward. So we’re naturally part of that evolution consistently.

[00:32:48] Do you ever feel like as a final question, there’s anything that we’re slow to catch up on or we’re slow to figure out and tackle?

[00:32:58] AW: Good question, Jake. I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked me that. Look, I think there’s probably, I don’t have a specific thing that comes to mind, to be honest, but there’s always room for improvement. As an industry, as a business. I think you’re right, though. I think we’re pretty flexible and adaptable industry.

[00:33:17] I think, there are changes to, Google rules and logic, right? And the publishers work to adapt to that, right? There are changes to cookie rules and the network adapts to that and make sure we have the right technology in place. Things get introduced, like the ability to track on mobile and in app and app to app and the industry has adapted to that.

[00:33:45] So I actually think, I think we’re a pretty innovative industry when you look at it like that. And so the whole conversation we just had about all the types of…

[00:33:53] JF: Yeah.

[00:33:54] AW: That is in the space and the types of partners and their ways of thinking about driving traffic, diversified traffic. I actually think we’re pretty adaptable, innovative space. Again, I’m like a real industry advocate. I think I’ve been for a long time, so there’s always room to, to improve, but I’ve always really been impressed and more glass half full is terms of where we are in the space today.

[00:34:23] JF: I would agree. I typically land on that glass half full side, but I like to be devil’s advocate and play the question. Where can we, and it’s all in the name of improvement. So…

[00:34:33] AW: And you’re the interviewer, you’ve got to ask the tough questions.

[00:34:35] JF: You got to ask, right? So if anybody has something like, yeah, we’re really falling behind here, I look at these as opportunities for me to learn.

[00:34:42] Cause one thing that, that is humbling about our space, it doesn’t matter how long I’ve been doing it, and this is a personal note, or how much I think I know, there’s never a day I wake up thinking I am an expert in this space because I can talk to you, I can talk to so many people in this space and there’s something I didn’t know.

[00:35:01] There’s something I just learned yesterday. There’s a category or a partner I didn’t realize we could even integrate into our channel yet that somebody else knew about, right? There’s always something that I’m learning. And as much as I like to share what I do know, it never ceases to amaze me how much I don’t know.

[00:35:19] AW: Yeah, no, it’s a good perspective to have. And I think as you’re saying that, it makes me realize, I think in terms of improvement, I would say, one of the things I see and hear a lot are at the senior levels of particular organizations, the CMO, the CEO, it’s like they know affiliate and a lot of times they’re happy with it, but they’re taking the meeting with Google or Facebook.

[00:35:42] And, how can we get more visibility at that level? So the questions you asked before that the hypothetical around how do we move all that budget over? I think we probably have an opportunity there as an industry to maybe better ourselves in terms of that recognition at the C-suite.

[00:36:03] Y’know you hear that a lot. It could sound a little fluffy, right? But at the end of the day, I think that is important. That is something that I think we need to continue to work towards.

[00:36:12] JF: And at the end of the day, that’s what drives the decisions, the budget and the dollars. That’s where it comes from, right? I can say as an agency, anytime that we have been let go for financial reasons, it’s not our direct contact that made that decision. They were given that directive from a C-suite or a board member.

[00:36:31] And that’s because maybe we didn’t have our seat at that table to really explain and go through data analytics or understand how we were applying this channel for them. And then we lose that, right?

[00:36:44] AW: When you do get that meeting though…

[00:36:46] JF: oh.

[00:36:46] AW: And you explain to them like, “Oh, do you know that partner you’re talking about that’s actually an affiliate, or that we could do that through affiliate, or you could manage additional paid search through affiliate, or you could you know, work with all these content creators through affiliate.”

[00:37:02] JF: One of the most, one of the most eye opening meetings, and this was probably a couple of years ago, some of our managers had brought me on to a call with some executives at one of our brands. They were thinking about letting us go. They had never spoken to this executive. They never spoken to JEBCommerce in the first place.

[00:37:19] So I get on, and again, we have more of an educational 101. I ask a lot of questions. We dive in, we left the meeting. Not only did they not leave. They gave us budget to invest over the next three months into the channel because there was just a huge misconception on what we were doing versus what he thought we were doing, and what he thought we could do versus what we could also do, with budget and the different capabilities we had.

[00:37:45] And it was super eyeopening, not just to me, but to my team. Like you’ve got to be, you’ve got to be speaking and you’ve got to be at that table and understand what they’re thinking and how to get around that and explain what our capabilities look like. So totally agree. That’s an area we always need some improvement on is reaching those. those higher level execs and groups.

[00:38:05] AW: We’ll keep at it man, we’ll keep at it.

[00:38:07] JF: We’ll keep at it. Adam, it’s great to see you. I appreciate you being on the podcast today. I know we’re, we could probably dive into subcategories of this for hours.

[00:38:16] AW: Part 3.

[00:38:17] JF: Yeah, part two, part three, and we can probably figure out how to do that, but it was good to see you. I appreciate you taking the time and jumping in and dropping a little knowledge and shedding some light on, on what AWIN’s been doing.

[00:38:28] I love seeing the updates that come out and how you guys continue to push forward, so…

[00:38:33] AW: Appreciate that, Jake. I appreciate you having me again. It’s always great to talk to them.

[00:38:38] JF: Yeah, we’ll catch up soon. Before we go, for any listeners who like to travel for conferences, your guys’ Think Tank next year is global. You’re going to Portugal.

[00:38:49] AW: We are going to Portugal in May. Super excited about that. All your listeners would love for them to attend, and yeah, any questions, let us know. I’d love to see you there.

[00:39:00] JF: Yeah, I love when I see something different pop up, right? I’m used to Vegas. I’m used to New York, sometimes Chicago or Miami. And you go to those enough and you’re like, “man, where’s there a cool conference going to be?” Not that they’re not cool anyway, but Portugal pop up. It’s… that’s exciting.

[00:39:16] AW: I’m super excited. I’ve actually, I’ve personally never been to Portugal. Really excited. I’m excited to see the sort of global convergence of affiliate marketers from around the world coming together there. I’m really excited about it.

[00:39:28] JF: Yeah, it should be a great conference. I hope to see you there and I’ll see you around. Thanks again for joining us.

[00:39:34] AW: Thanks, Jake. Appreciate it.