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Your guided tour of the world of growth, performance marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth, marketing, and life.
Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and have some fun talking about data-driven growth and lessons learned!
Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and
have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
Hello. Welcome to the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty
DeGrange. I am thrilled today to have Trisha Meyer. She
is a affiliate legend and excited to dive into all things affiliate
PMA, her background. Welcome. Welcome, Tricia. Thank you so much. Thanks for having
me. I'm ready to talk as usual.
There's there's no shortage of things going on in the affiliate industry, and, I'd
love to just maybe kick off a little bit about yourself and your and your background, kind of
current role. I know there's a lot of questions I wanna ask you because you've been in the space longer,
and have been involved in some really pivotal moments in performance marketing. And maybe just maybe start off
with what you're working on right now and focus on at the moment. Sure. So I actually started as
a lawyer. I went to law school, took the bar in Indiana, and luckily
passed on the first try. Became an attorney and was working for LexisNexis,
which is, like, legal news and information, and it was at a really pivotal
time in legal research because it was going from the old school of having to go to the library and
look up everything in a book to being able to go on this thing called the Internet and put in a
search and be able to just search whatever you want. So it was really it was a
completely new time for legal research, and for me, it meant learning how to do everything I'd learned in law
school, how to do it on the computer, which then kind of led to, oh, well, if I can do legal research on the research
on the computer, what else can I do on the computer? And then from there, it was just a weird kind of
slide into affiliate marketing. Started off, I had just had my kids, and so they were, like,
two and four maybe at the time, and I was looking for things to do while they were at home. And
so I started a blog. It was before, I think, WordPress even existed, so I was just, like, hand
coding HTML back then, that was just called helping moms connect. And I was
looking around at all these other mom sites, and they had all these great brand
names on them, like, sponsored by Target. And I was like, how does this little bitty
blog with almost no following, how did they get sponsored by Target? So I
started going to, like, local places around me asking if they wanted to sponsor this website of
mine, and they're all like, no. We're why would we wanna do that? Everybody that reads your blog lives
in another city or another country, So why would we wanna sponsor you? And so I thought, okay.
I'm clearly missing something here because these other people who also have little bobs like
mine are getting sponsored by these huge companies. So my husband is in IT, and
he helped me install a little tracker where I could click on all these people's links
and then see what happened to them between the time I clicked on the link and I got to Target or
Walmart or whatever. And lo and behold, I found be free network. And then it was like, oh, and then there's
CJ, and then there's, you know, all of these other link share. And I started finding all these networks,
and it was like, oh, affiliate marketing. Okay. I have no idea what that
means. So, of course, no one really knew what affiliate marketing was.
A history of affiliate marketing. Yeah. And so I ended up just stumbling in.
Like, I I found those links and I started searching, like, what does that mean? What does affiliate marketing
mean? And I found the BestWeb forum, and that was, like, being thrown into the
fire, to learn affiliate marketing. And then I went to an affiliate summit because they told me that's
what I should do. And within, oh, six months of going to my first affiliate summit,
I quit my job as a lawyer and just started doing affiliate marketing full time. So I've
never really looked back except that I always missed the law. And so
after doing just kind of straight, really, affiliate marketing for 10:12 years on the
publisher side, I started getting involved with the PMA, fifteen years ago when it first
started, and then that gave me a chance to start looking at, well, how does my
legal knowledge overlap with what I do as an affiliate? And it turned out that there's really a lot of that
because there's so many regulatory and compliance issues, and there are so few affiliate
marketers that understand those things. And, you know, we as lawyers tend to talk legal jargon.
I've kinda found my space trying to bridge that gap between the people that do affiliate marketing all the
time. I just wanna know how does this apply to me and the legal side of it, which is a little bit more
technical and tricky. Wow. That that's amazing. What what maybe an interesting
question is kind of like, what's a legal area that people in affiliate marketing get
wrong? What's a legal area that's, like, underutilized or
underrated to be focused on it? And something people need to be really mindful of. I mean, for me
right now, the biggest legal issue is obviously the FTC disclosure stuff.
That's kind of the place where we know that there are clear laws,
and now we've been given clear guidelines, but still people don't quite understand on a day to
day basis how it applies to them. And it's the thing from a legal standpoint
that kind of applies to all of us equally that we all need to understand. Yeah.
And and maybe, like, helping people understand what went down. I know you and I have talked
about it, but what happened, and and what's going on with the FTC's guidelines and rulings lately?
So the FTC, we've always had, like, this law, and that is basically this
you know, you have to tell the truth in advertising. And it's just it's always been, like, a very
specific law without a lot of examples. And over the last, you know, twenty years,
the FTC has given us more and more examples in different ways of how that applies to
affiliate marketing, how it applies to influencer marketing, and we were left kind of piecing some things
together. We were piecing together lawsuits and settlement agreements and frequently
asked questions and Twitter chats with the FTC and kind of, I won't say making up our
own guidelines, but kind of making up our own best practices and saying, well, this is what they said.
This is probably what that means for us. But just recently, the FTC has now come out
and said, okay, we're gonna make this super clear. Affiliates, this applies to you.
Influencers, this applies to you. Affiliate managers, this applies to you. And
so what they've done now is really clearly delineate. It does apply to us.
We're all responsible. We all play a very specific role in it, and there will be
ramifications for those of us who don't do what we're supposed to do. Yeah. It seems like they have upped
the ante on the clarity and the severity of the FTC guidelines from what
it seems. Yeah. They've just made it very clear now. You know, they they had not really used the
words influencer and affiliate before in the guidelines, and now they're using them a lot.
They're giving us very specific examples about if you do a blog, if you, do a
video, if you are promoting as an affiliate, if you're promoting as an influencer. And then they also
started talking about intermediaries, which they don't use our terminology,
but what they explained was affiliate manager, outsource program manager, agency,
those kinds of things. And, you know, what they were saying was that if you are this middleman
between a retailer and a publisher and you play any part in recruiting
these influencers and publishers, giving them links, negotiating the contracts, If
you play any kind of role like that, you're now just as responsible for
the disclosures as what the retailers and the publishers are. Yeah. For those following at
home, affiliates and influencers need to disclose they're getting payment, receiving
a commission from a brand or an advertiser. And what
used to be allowable is is, in some cases, not, and the clarity needs to be
there. And there's a lot of specific legal language and definitions. It
has to be what? Unavoidable. Right? Right. That's their big new thing. In the past, they always said
clear and conspicuous, and people still found a way to get around that. They would say, well,
it was clear and conspicuous. You just had to read to the bottom of the post in order to see it. Well, that
doesn't count because people don't read to the bottom of the post. People don't watch till the very end of the video.
People don't click to read all of the comments on videos. So they said, okay. We're gonna change it. We're gonna
say unavoidable. Unavoidable means just that. You cannot watch a video. You
can't read a review. You can't look at a sponsored image Yeah. Without seeing that disclosure.
And maybe jumping to kind of the next phase of this. Right? So where everyone's
making sense of it. They're getting counsel from you. They're getting counsel from legal experts. They're getting
counsel from affiliate leaders. Where do you think we're gonna land on the
FTC ruling? Like, you've written up some really clear, helpful
material. How do you think it really, like, just materially impacts the the
advertiser or the agency, the influencer? I think we're gonna see more procedures
put into place by the retailers and by the agencies where there's a lot
more documentation going on, you know, whether it's using databases or spreadsheets or
whatever it takes for them to be able to start documenting. This is the education that we gave
the influencers. This is what we include in all of our standard contracts. This is how we
monitored. We probably will see some letters coming out from the
FTC before too long of people that are not in compliance. They'll probably go after a few big
guys just to say, hey. We put out these guidelines for a reason. Yeah. And now we're gonna
send you some letters, and then they will publish that stuff on their website. And then all the rest of us will go and read that,
And we'll say, okay. Well, now we know that this really is happening, and there's money at stake here
and legal fees and things like that. So I think it's just a matter of time. I think they're giving everybody
just a little bit of time to get used to the new guidelines, but, you know, they wouldn't
have put them in place if they didn't think there were problems. Yeah. Absolutely. And then
maybe looking back over time with the FTC and disclosure for affiliates and
with influencers, How's it like, maybe just cutting to the chase of, like, how severe
has it gotten? Like, what are some of the penalties have you seen in this space where big brands have
had their, you know, their wrist slapped and they've had to make corrections or they've been fined? Like,
what kind of things can happen if you're out of compliance in your legal and affiliate
experience? I mean, just from the start, you're gonna have to hire an attorney. So you're gonna be out your legal fees.
You know, probably even if you did nothing wrong or if you were in the gray area, you're gonna have to hire an attorney for
that. Then you could be sanctioned, so there could be tens of thousands of dollars in fees
that you have to pay per occurrence. So if you're a retailer and you worked with
twenty five influencers and none of them did their disclosures, you're gonna get fined for every one of those. If you're
an influencer who repeatedly does it, you could get fined for every one of those. And,
also, you know, we've seen, like, with with a lawsuit with Legacy Learning Systems, which was a retailer
that was paying affiliates and the affiliate wasn't disclosing it. There was also just a lot of
red tape put into place then for the retailer saying, you know, well, going forward, you are gonna
have to do this, this, this. You're gonna have to comply with this. You're gonna have to start keeping all these records. You're gonna
have to notify us of any changes of address with your company. You're gonna have to notify us of other things.
So, you know, once you get in trouble, then they're also watching you more closely going forward, a
lot more scrutiny, and just a lot more administrative work for you to do as well. Yeah. Have
you got a sense that brand rarity and impact and other technologies that are already
monitoring can are thinking about this or may have some
type of solutions in place to address some of this stuff? I think that they're trying to make
it a little bit easier. I've seen a number of solutions technological solutions where they're trying to
make it easier if people are using specific terminology. So they
are able to look for certain words. I've seen somewhere they can read images in
case you're using images for your disclosure that they can also read the text on that image to make sure that you're
disclosing properly. So I think those kind of technical tools are
going to be necessary, especially for big brands that work with a lot
of different types of endorsers. When they say endorsers, I mean, they're talking about everything. They're talking about
the influencers on social media. They're talking about the bloggers that are doing,
top ten list of things. They're talking about the product review and comparison sites. They're talking about this
whole realm. So, you know, it's not just so easy to say, well, we just won't work with influencers anymore.
Well, we just won't work with, you know, the this type of affiliates. That's not gonna help because you'd be
missing out on so many opportunities. Anyone who's getting compensated. Exactly.
Yeah. So it applies to, you know, it applies to all media. They're just giving us more specific
examples now because we are a newer medium, and so they're giving us,
you know, some more specific examples. And in the scenario where
an advertiser and agency documents coaches, provides the get
counsel. Just throwing out a hypothetical here. And let's say ten
percent of your influencers and affiliates don't comply with
that or five percent of them do. You know, I don't think we know the
exact answer of what would happen or if the FTC is gonna smack the risk of
a ten million dollar a year e d two c econ brand. But what do you think
plays out in that scenario? And in this case, the legal area, it sounds like all three are still
in the same boat and and at risk. And what are you seeing and what how does that, like,
scenario play out? So they're looking for kind of a reasonable
nest. And so I think, you know, if you're a retailer Mhmm. Who has signed a contract with
an agency and part of that agreement says that the agency is going to monitor the
disclosure. And then the agency is working with the influencers and affiliates, and they've put a system in
place. Mhmm. If the FCC FCC comes along and says, oh, look. We saw these TikToks that were not
disclosed, or we see this, review site that's not disclosing, and they go to everybody in that
chain, the retailer's gonna say, okay. Here's the contract we have with the agency where they are
taking responsibility as the experts for this. The agency comes in and says, you're absolutely
right. Here is the email that we send whenever somebody joins the program explaining to them the
FTC disclosure. Here's the monthly newsletter that we sent out reminding them of the disclosures, and here's
our spreadsheet that shows that we've been monitoring ten percent on a rotating basis
auditing this stuff periodically. The FTC is likely gonna come in and say, okay.
That's all great. But ten percent isn't really enough. We would really like to see you doing twenty five to
thirty percent, like, whatever those numbers are. In that case, I don't think you're gonna get fined. I think the
FTC is gonna send you a letter back that says, okay. We see that this was reasonable to
you as a small agency or whatever, but we really think you're gonna have to step that up a little bit
more in order to catch more of this. Yeah. That's super informative and awesome and and super
helpful. And switch maybe switching gears a little bit. You know, you when you got into this
space, I I know there's so much happening with the FTC, and then there's lots to talk about there. There's
also a lot of exciting things happening with the PMA. Maybe an interesting segue of all
your work with the PMA, maybe a little bit about the the work being done on the toolbar
and desktop browser data that's happening. I'd love to hear your thoughts on on
that and and kinda what you're working on there. Absolutely. This whole area
of affiliate marketing, it's like Groundhog Day. When I first
started in affiliate marketing, there was so much talk about toolbars, and they're killing the
industry, and they're stealing everyone's commissions, and we hate them, and we're not gonna work with them anymore, and
lawsuits being filed. And then, you know, everybody kind of got together and said, yeah. This is bad. This
isn't happening. Every network said, nope. We're not letting them in our programs. We're putting this in all of our terms.
And it all just kind of played out like that for, you know, maybe a decade or more, but you
really didn't hear anything. And then you started, it was almost like a little whack a mole. Like, every now and
again, you'd see a pop up of, like, oh, does so and so have a toolbar now? Oh, wait. Do they have a
toolbar also? Wait. But they're a really reputable company, so is it a good toolbar? And then, you know, is it started percolating, then it became, you know, okay. Well, if
toolbars are back,
what does that mean for the rest of us? And then that's when the discussions really started
happening because it went from just there are a couple toolbars out there and then, you know, the
network saying, well, maybe we'll let them in if we test them and they meet x y z. Or the retailer saying,
well, maybe we'll work with them, but only on, you know, this kind of basis or that kind of basis. And
then publishers started finding out and saying, woah. Wait a minute. What does that do to my
commissions? Am I losing commissions to them? Am I not? Are the networks monitoring this?
Like, what's going on here? And so that's where the kind of the PMA came in. But a lot of
times, when these complaints start happening, when there are big changes, they start coming to
us and our members start saying, have you heard about this? Have you talked about this? Is the PMA doing
anything about this? And so we started, you know, and luckily, we have a lot of people that have been
here since the first time this all happened. So we could kinda say, okay. We know where we've
come from, and we know what the evolution has been in the industry. Now we just have to
figure out how do we continue that evolution that's good for all of the
players and the consumers and the industry as a whole. And that's
where the problem comes in that those are not all aligned. And so trying to
figure out how do we weight each of those is what is really
difficult right now. Yeah. For sure. For sure. And those not as, you know,
versed in affiliate marketing. You have the brand advertisers footing the bill,
spending the money, wanting to get placement, the partners or influencers or publishers out there
who are promoting those brands, the networks, and the agencies kind of in the middle supporting
and and tracking and promoting those. And for twenty plus years, you've
had some affiliates partners have launched browser plug ins, browser extensions,
toolbars that consumers opt into, hopefully,
to say, hey. I'm okay if I I purchase a pair of pants or a short, you
know, swimsuit or or running shoes. That cashback will be
logged as my in my browser program or my airline miles will be logged
just so those uninitiated, what what Trisha was sharing. So to your point, they're
getting other partners that are promoting maybe higher funnel partners like content
discovery, maybe some elements of search are not our newsletter are not getting credit
in a last click attribution model, whereas the toolbar is getting a
lot of that credit or claiming that credit. Is that is that an accurate way of phrasing the challenge that that
toolbar represents for the industry? Yeah. There's a really big difference between
a consumer who downloads a toolbar that they think is just gonna show them the weather every day,
but it turns out on the back end, it's overwriting every affiliate link that they click on versus
somebody who downloads a toolbar that they know is going to show them the most recent
coupons or show them what the cashback they're gonna get if they make a purchase that is actually
encouraging the sale and that might be helping that sale along or benefiting that retailer. So there
that's the other thing about these, you know, the toolbars and extensions that there's a really big difference in
the value that they provide to the retailer and to the consumer depending
on what type they are. So, you know, there's something to be said for the consumer
part of the journey, which is, you know, I own a cashback site where I don't have a toolbar. And my
husband called me in at Christmas when he was working on my twenty one year old's computer, and he said,
mom's gonna kill you. And she was like, oh, no. What'd I do? And he's like, you're gonna have to tell your
mom what you did. And she was like, what did I do? And he turns the computer to me.
He goes, she has the Honey toolbar installed? And she was like, yeah. I get coupons. I'm like, yeah. But
that's what Sunshine Rewards does. And she's like, yeah. But they don't pop up and remind me. And I'm like,
what? Like, you train I remind you every day. Great. You train
her. Like, it's one of the same rules. For you to go to college, and yet you don't use it. But
that for me was a real moment of, like, this is some a kid who understands
affiliate marketing because her mom's been doing it in front of her face all these years. She has a blog where she puts an affiliate link.
She gets it, but she's a consumer, and she is the target demographic
of consumer for a lot of the online shopping now. And so, you know, to
hear her say, yeah. I love Sunshine Rewards, but I just don't remember to go there. I don't remember to
go back. They don't give me as good a coupons. They don't always, you know, have what I'm looking for. Like,
I hear that and I think, yeah, I can't tell her not to use that. So if I can't expect my own daughter
not to use these toolbars when I know that it's saving money and helping her, how can I say, well, for the good
of the industry, we need to get rid of these toolbars? Because I, you know, I see it firsthand.
Yeah. So but then, you know, I own content sites. So I own content sites that I know are
losing commissions because at the end, somebody will have that pop up and and that toolbar will
end up being that commission. So, you know, I feel like I'm sitting right in the middle of it, and I
can see it all around me and I can see every perspective. But until we get, like,
the really smart people together and start taking the data that we
can glean from all different perspectives and the different opinions and putting everybody
into the same room to try to figure this thing out. I don't think we're gonna come up with a
solution that makes everyone happy. Yeah. Is the problem and trying to kind of
summarize it for the audience. It sounds like it's a problem of there's
unclear standards. There's claims both real and probably unreal
of certain partners, affiliates, toolbars are taking credit where maybe they shouldn't
be, and that could apply to other partners. There's a whole spectrum of toolbar
types that go from the nefarious that you alluded to earlier to the super
helpful for the user and, like, fully, you know, incremental, we'll say, is the
most extreme, assessment. Like, how would you kind of summarize the
challenge that you're trying to tackle with with the elevation of this issue within the PMA that we're all
working towards? Because I think it's an interest interesting one of, like, there's the what's the end goal solution,
but how would you kind of summarize the the problem for those, especially uninitiated
to toolbars and affiliate marketing? There's too much anecdotal evidence
and not enough data to support anybody's belief. There's
anecdotal evidence I know they are probably overriding. I know that that is probably
a returning user and not a new user. Like, there's too much anecdotal evidence that we all
rely on in our arguments, and we're not seeing enough actual
data driven results to be able to make decisions that are
going to be best for everyone. And that's brilliant. Why do you think we're lacking that
data and it's more emotion and opinion and hypothesis based? Some of it is
just no one's pushing for the data yet. If no one is requiring a toolbar to
differentiate between their toolbar traffic and their on-site traffic and their newsletter traffic, if
no one's requiring that, why would the toolbar offer that up? Why would they
come to the network or the retailer or the PMA and say, oh, yeah. Seventy percent of our
traffic comes from the toolbar and only thirty percent from all of our other sources. Why would they offer that up if they didn't have
to? Until we give everybody a reason to actually start measuring
all these things and sharing it, most people aren't just gonna voluntarily, number one, take on
the cost of figuring out how to measure these different things. And number two, share anything
that's not in their own best interest. Yeah. I love that. And I I think that
it seems to be a movement over time of this industry Because
when a entity says, I'm not gonna because
when a entity says, I'm not gonna share you the full transparency,
I would imagine that might lend itself to, oh, I hypothesize that this is happening. I'm worried about this
happening. I I claim this is happening. When in fact, we don't we need to find and see
that data and have it be more transparent. And the more competitive that things
get, in the industry, the more that everyone
needs every nickel and dime. You know, in those days where we were in the heyday of affiliate marketing and all you
had to do was put up a website with ten coupons and you could stay at home with your kids and not have to
have another job, like, that was the heyday. You didn't care so much if you were losing twenty percent of
your, commissions to toolbars or whatever else because you were making enough money and
you didn't care. And then now that's different. It is very competitive. You don't just
have some coupon sites and some blogs. You have influencers. You have all those different social
media. You have technology. You have cart technology that are affiliates. You have, you know, basically every
part of the consumer journey, there's an affiliate somewhere in there. And within each of those,
there are, you know, maybe fifty or a hundred or ten thousand affiliates of that certain type. So
the more competitive that it gets to split up that affiliate pie, the more we're all gonna kinda be at
each other for, you know, what we each think we deserve. Yeah. That's such an
interesting point. And it sounds like there's been a lot of con good conversation with
PMA. Maybe maybe, I feel like people are starting to come out of the woodwork
sharing information about the survey that you put out asking for information, like, how important
this is to you. Maybe kind of wrapping up the thought of that exercise,
like, what was your reaction to some of the response from the industry, maybe
initially, and then maybe where do you think where do you think we're heading with that? So I love
that initially, everyone wanted to take the survey and give us their opinions and kinda tell us what
they were doing. But then I didn't love, even though I expected, that when we actually got on
the calls with everyone, everyone said, yeah. But we're not actually gonna give you any data because it's either
proprietary or we don't feel confident enough in it to share it or it can't be measured across different
agencies anyway. So what's the use? Like, basically, everyone wants to be a part of this. Everyone
wants to try to help, but no one really wants to share their data. So we're just gonna
have to keep going at it and find different ways to get it. And it's gonna mean having
more conversations. It's gonna mean talking to the networks and saying, you know, what is it that you do have, and is
there anything additional that you're willing to put into place? It's gonna be case studies where maybe we
don't get all of the data that an agency has, but they're willing to do a case study on one
particular merchant or one particular toolbar or something like that. So, you know, we may not be able to
get all the data that we were looking for, but knowing that so many people want to be a part of
this and want to help make a change in this area, I think there will be people
that are out there thinking right now creatively about what they can contribute and
ways that they can figure out a way to be able to get this data and share it.
Yeah. That's super interesting. I've I've had some recent conversations around, you know, various
partner types and the challenge of incrementality, which opens up a
whole another question and a whole another can of worms, which is similar but very different
to the attribution challenge and the crediting and the multistage of how
that have you seen anything interesting or valuable to kind
of try to unlock? Was this partner bringing incremental value in in our my
definition being, like, if this was removed, then this channel or level or partner was
removed that that advertiser would have gotten that sale anyway. So in the absence of
it, is it truly incremental? Is it bringing value to to the advertiser as a new
Udolphile customer or a purchase? And so, we haven't talked about this a ton, but I'm so
curious because it does kind of dovetail off of the concept of toolbar
incrementality. There's so many questions that advertisers and folks outside of it looking in sometimes
go, why would I want that? And so there's this balance of trying to look at the data
to determine. Have you seen anything you find interesting in helping determine and educate that
and saying, hey. This is bringing value. This is not. I think at the start,
people define incrementality differently. And so you first have to start by looking
at your business and what your business needs are because you might be the type of
business that doesn't get repeat customers very often. You sell funeral home caskets.
How many times is somebody gonna come buy buy and buy one of those same things from you? Hopefully, not very
many. But, you know, you sell tennis shoes, you want them to come back and buy them every two to three months.
So depending on the type of stuff that you're selling, are you a subscription service,
or are you a stand alone product? Do you something that people is something that people buy regularly or something that's a
once in a lifetime purchase for them? You know, those types of things is very different what someone might
consider to be incremental value. Then you're talking about, you know, is the customer is it
incremental? Then when you're looking at the sales Mhmm. There's a difference there too. Is this a person who you
just want to come back and buy over and over and over again because you're something like a Shein
where you're selling, you know, very low price stuff, but you want them to buy something new every single month?
Or are you somebody or your customer somebody who might only make a purchase once a year, but
when they do, you want it to be an eight hundred dollar purchase instead of a four hundred dollar purchase.
So is it the average order value that is incremental to you, or is it
the number of purchases, the number of times that person comes back that's incremental to you? And, again,
there's no real agreement because everyone has, different business purposes and what's
profitable to their businesses or not. Yeah. I I think it's such an interesting point, and I
come I make that point often myself, I feel like, because it's I think it's
easy and it's natural for us as humans to kind of try to develop rules and pattern matching
and we and the concept of benchmarking, I mean, it's often things like
that can actually get people into a lot of a trouble when there's crowd or group think involved,
and it's like, oh, well, coupon and deal doesn't work or cashback doesn't work or I need
that three to one LTV ratio or I'm not gonna pay for return customers. Like, there's all these myths
that come along with our performance marketing role. It's like, are you really looking at the data
objectively? Going back to your point earlier. Or are you coming in with some
bias that needs to be tempered in your measurement of the experiment, in your
measurement of the campaign, in your measurement of the channel? That's super interesting. I was looking
for discounts for, a Broadway show that I wanna take my mom to when we go for
affiliate summit. And I went to a coupon site to look for discounts. I kinda Googled it, clicked
on the link, and then they didn't have any coupons for that particular
Broadway seller, but instead they said, here are coupons for all of their
competitors where you might also be able to get tickets on sale because that merchant doesn't
have an affiliate program or doesn't allow affiliates into their or allow coupon sites into their
program. So instead, there's a website now with your brand on it and then
coupons to all of your competitors. And so when you say, like, I don't wanna work with coupons. I don't wanna work with
cashback. How many sales did you just lose because somebody has put up a site
and is now sending your traffic to your competitors. Again, it goes back to, you know,
what in the end is what are you looking for and what are you gonna lose if you don't work with
certain affiliates? I love that. Yeah. Maybe that's a maybe a good segue
to kind of wrap up and think about, like, I love what you were able to do with your
blog, you you know, helping moms connect. I love what you've done with Sunshine Rewards.
You're a true affiliate marketing leader and entrepreneur. You're leading and educating a lot of
people in the space that are that are steeped in it, but also getting to know it for the first time,
which there's a lot of folks that are still, unaware. What are some cool stories
or maybe, like, a a an interesting takeaway that you found from that from the blogging and the Sunshine
Rewards experience. I'd love to hear maybe some, like, ahas or takeaways that you've had over the years
through that. I think I would never encourage anybody to start a
cash back site because they're so much work and they're so involved. And yet,
owning the cashback site was what has allowed me to get to know the industry so well.
Because when you have to work with every single network and every agency and
thousands of different merchants, and you have to know how to, append sub IDs for every
network, which is different for every network, and you have to know which ones have coupon feeds and APIs and
which ones don't. And you have to understand transaction reversals and cookie
links and, you know, the payment cycle of every different network. As a cashback
owner, you have to know all that minutiae about the industry. So, like, I
wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy to own a cashback site, but at the same
time, you know, if you're gonna if you're gonna learn everything, sometimes it is
just in affiliate marketing, it is just doing the hard things and having to kind of
go through it and do the hard things and learn it all and then decide, you know, okay. I'd like
this part and I don't like that part and that's not for me. And then you, you know, you have a better idea
of where you wanna end up here because there's so many different directions to go. You could just be doing
social. You could just be blogging. You could move into the agency side. You could move to work for network. There's so many different
directions to go. So I think, you know, for me, it was just doing the hardest worst
thing first. And then from there, I was able to figure out the stuff I actually like.
That's awesome. What's your hope for the industry and affiliate marketing over the in the future? What are
you what are you hoping it gets to? What are your maybe some goals with the PMA? I
hope that there will no longer be a negative stigma
attached with affiliate marketing just because there are bad players. I hope
that if you've had a bad experience in affiliate marketing because you worked with the wrong agency
or you were on the wrong network or whatever, but that doesn't keep you from coming back either as
a publisher or a retailer. I hope that, you know, eventually, every retailer will
wanna have an affiliate program. Will they work with every single affiliate? No. But there will at least be
that possibility out there because the more retailers we have in the industry, then
the more entrepreneurialism we'll be able to have with the affiliates because there are
more opportunities for everyone to make money in different ways. I love it. Here's to the entrepreneurial
spirit. Here's to affiliate marketing as an industry and and continuing to make it better. I
think that's what this is all about and really appreciate the insights, Trisha. This is awesome.
Thank you so much. Thank you.