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Always Be Testing explores the experiments, insights, and growth stories shaping the future of affiliate and partner marketing in B2B SaaS. Hosted by industry veterans, the show dives deep into real-world lessons from the people driving measurable impact at companies like Google, HubSpot, Ramp, Webflow, G2, and beyond.
Each episode uncovers what happens when today's most innovative marketers challenge assumptions, run smarter experiments, and build programs that scale revenue through meaningful partnerships. If you’re in affiliate, partnerships, or SaaS growth — this is your front-row seat to how the best do it (and what they’ve learned along the way
(upbeat music)
Hello, hello, hello.
Welcome to another episode
of Always the Testing Podcast.
I'm your host, Ty DeGrange,
and I'm really
excited to have Dave Yavano,
CEO of ImpactOn.
Dave, how you doing, man?
Great, Ty, how are you?
Thanks for having me.
It's always enjoy our conversations
and always really
appreciate you coming on the show
and sharing what you're
seeing out there with us.
Love it.
Always love chopping it up, talking shop.
So really looking
forward to your conversation.
Thank you, man, thank you, I love that.
And it sounds like
you're seeing the seasons
changing a little bit where you're at.
What's going on in your world?
Yeah, made a move full
time to the East Coast
a couple of years ago, after 25 years
in Southern California.
So find it to be a much easier time zone
to operate globally as a business.
We've got like 20
offices around the world,
pretty much, I guess, in every time zone.
Amazing.
I am enjoying, I have to
say, at this stage of my life,
being in East Coast Bay,
spent a lot of time in New York.
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah, as a long time
Northern California guy,
spent time in Southern California,
we shared overlapping time at ValueClick.
I miss parts of my West
Coast life and history,
but I find Austin, Texas
for me is also nice in a way
because I can, we have
people remote in the US,
smaller scale at impact.com,
but I can zip over to
the East Coast, West Coast,
reasonably easy, I don't
have to do those larger flights,
which is nice.
It's great.
For those of you who don't know,
David Givano is a champion legend
in digital marketing,
performance marketing,
and certainly partner marketing,
CEO of impact.com,
a leading partner marketing platform
for partner marketing,
one that my team utilizes quite a lot.
We've had a lot of
history in collaborating
with your teammates
and your organization,
and software and all the exciting things
you guys are doing.
So, and they've seen a lot in the space.
So I think we're in for a treat today
and really glad to be able
to chop it up, as you said.
For those that maybe are
less familiar with impact.com
and your whole story,
what kind of brought you
into the partner marketing world
and what's like your belief
around how it's kind of
bigger than affiliate?
I'd love to kind of share
this and talked about it a bit,
but I'd love to get
your thoughts on that.
Yeah, I'd like to think
that I joined impact.com
because there was some grand
vision of what we've become,
but that's not it.
I think typically that's not the case.
In fact, for anyone
listening for career advice,
what I would say is like,
as you're looking at
your next opportunity,
I would rate pretty highly
who you're getting in
bed with essentially,
and just kind of
doing your due diligence.
So when I choose a new opportunity,
I look pretty closely,
and I've learned to look very closely at,
it's more about who and
then what essentially,
in my experience.
So in this case, I was
with, as you mentioned,
Ty, we worked together
back in the day, ValleyClick.
We can maybe talk
about that at some point
in the conversation,
but during my time at ValleyClick,
we acquired a business
called Commission Junction.
As most folks know,
it was like one of the
very early affiliate networks
out there, and that was 2003, 2004.
Somebody can fact check me on that,
but we acquired that business,
had a chance to work
together with folks like,
Para Pederson, Roger, our CTO,
Ty Crawford, Wade Crane,
and keep going down the list.
But essentially, got the work
together for roughly a year,
and then those folks kind of went on
to do different things outside of
ValleyClick at the time.
What they did though,
was they got the band
back together around 2006,
and kind of came out to market
with what became Impact.com in 2008.
And so when I was looking
for my next opportunity,
this was a 2016 timeframe.
Had reconnected with
Para Ped, reached out,
he had saw that, had left me on software,
and just said, "Look, we
think we've got something
"going on here that you
can probably help with."
Spent a number of months kind of
workshopping with him
before joining
full-time in February of 2017.
That's hard to believe,
it's almost 10 years ago.
But what led me to this space,
just to answer your question directly,
was just a strong belief in two things.
One, I rated very highly
the technical capabilities
of the founders, namely
Para and Roger, to start with.
And the second thing that
was most important to me
was a company that leads with products,
like leads with technology, right?
So, it's still going on at that time.
You had companies that
were still kind of selling
on PowerPoints and stuff like that.
And that's not what it took
at that space at that time
to be relevant to buyers.
You had to have a strong platform,
you had to have a strong tech,
and be a product-like company also.
That was really important to me.
So, when you look at
the strength of weighting
of those two things, great
respect for the founders,
great respect for the
technology and the product position
that the company
already had in the space,
that's really what drew me to it.
And maybe just to jump to it,
because I could tell
you just how far off I was
on my analysis, to be honest.
I thought it was a
traditional affiliate marketing,
because I was very
familiar with that, obviously.
And the ValueClick days,
because we actually had
first acquired BeFree,
for those who remember that.
That was, this is back in the day where,
we can go into this if you want,
but like, you have the
dot-com, boom, that bust.
And so, I lived through all of that.
And on the bust side of it,
we were one of the last companies,
ValueClick, to kind
of make it out public.
And so, it was like early 2000.
So, I joined ValueClick from late 99.
I was still kind of at the
tail end of the boom phase.
And then, early 2000 was the bust phase.
But we had already made it out public.
And we had some good leadership that was,
did not get over their
keys and burn a lot of cash,
and some other things.
But what we were able
to do is get in there
and basically purchase fire sales.
BeFree was a fire sale.
They had 120, I think
they had 125 million in cash.
And we bought it for like 128 million,
something like that.
And they were just burning
a lot of cash every month.
And so, they could see
where that was going.
And we were able to come in
with a lot more financial
discipline and things like that.
Anyway, that got us familiar
with the traditional affiliate space.
BeFree was a little different
because it was an
on-prem sort of solution.
And we really liked the business.
And then, found an opportunity
to acquire a commission
junction a few years later.
So, I obviously had familiarity
with traditional affiliate marketing.
But when I joined, I thought,
maybe this is,
because what was happening,
2008 timeframe, as you remember,
we were like DMPs, DSPs, SSPs.
These were like platform
technology led sort of solutions
in traditional ad tech.
And my-
They were hot at the time.
Yeah.
And my feeling was like,
this was like a similar take
applied to
traditional affiliate marketing.
So, when I joined,
I did what you would typically expect.
So, I joined a CEO in February, 2017.
And I did what you would expect,
just meeting with everybody.
We had 200 employees at the time.
I think we were 25 million in revenue.
Talking to customers,
talking to partners,
talking to employees,
looking at the data.
I remember sitting with Wade Crane,
one of our co-founders.
And I'm like, explain this to me.
Like, what is Ticketmaster doing with,
you know, these partners
of theirs, their affiliates?
I remember I'm leaning back in his chair
and he's like, huh,
yeah, that's interesting.
I have no idea.
You have to go talk to them.
You go talk to like
customer success person.
We weren't that big and matured.
We were running like
real deep engagement models
and stuff with customers.
They were mostly just, you know,
using the platform and
we're just doing what we could
to support them sort of thing.
So, I reached out to Michael Chua,
who actually just saw
LinkedIn as a message.
He just left it here.
But I reached out to Michael.
I said, Michael, I'm the new guy here.
You gotta explain this to me.
Like, what are you guys doing?
I'm looking at the data.
And, you know, I see you
have affiliate partnerships
with people like
Ticketmaster and Spotify and Pandora,
YouTube and all these guys.
What is going on here?
He's like, oh yeah, it's easy.
It's actually really cool.
We're having a lot of fun with it.
I can't remember what a
traditional ad network
they came off of, but, you know,
they migrated from a
traditional ad network.
They're like, you guys did a great job
just like cleaning up
all the waste, you know,
and just allowing us to do
some more advanced things
that we had been looking to do.
But then we realized we
had our hands on the tech.
We've got a lot of
other, you know, partnerships.
I think he used the
term partnerships in place
that we thought could be, you know,
just managed on your platform,
biz dev contracts, that sort of thing.
They literally have filing cabinets
of the biz dev contracts.
And so what I realized
that we had done right,
and this is all prior to me joining.
I was just the one
helping to kind of like
discover the story and tell the story.
But what we had done right
was we had put the technology
into the hands of our customers.
And they started, and it
was very capable technology,
and they just started to do
like really interesting things
with it that were far
beyond the original use case.
Now, Parr, our
founder, who he's always had
a pretty broad vision about, you know,
he's always called it like a business
development toolkit.
He's always thought beyond, you know,
your traditional affiliate use case.
But it was like that
moment that we kind of realized
it was happening.
That's the part.
Yeah.
That was really cool,
the kind of experience.
You know, it's like,
when you see something,
oh yeah, we would have never thought
like that would have actually really,
and like some of that stuff,
you're just forcing things,
you believe in something so much.
But when you see it,
it actually manifests.
Man, it's like, yeah,
it's really exciting.
So anyway.
You know, oh, this is the
one use case for affiliate.
Well, you've got, you
know, fast forward now,
we've got career,
we've got brand to brand,
we've got technology integrations,
you've got B2B,
there's like so many
interesting things happening,
reviews, it's this multi-channel,
multi-dimensional tool and platform
in the form of impact.com.
And then there's also all
these other use cases around it.
So it's a beautiful
evolution that, you know,
you've been firsthand
through and you helped Shepherd
and you built and there's
a lot that goes into that,
which is very amazing, very impressive.
Yeah.
So, just a few sort
of messages and losses,
you know, what
attracted me to this industry
was really the people
involved in impact.com.
I had history with
them, I trusted them greatly
in terms of their technical aptitude
and capability and vision, you know,
strategy, just trusted.
I knew we didn't all
have it all figured out,
but really believed in the people
and believed that we had
a strong product first,
you know, technology first momentum
in the company position in the market.
So those are very convincing things.
And then it just got even more exciting
kind of as I dug in
and kind of discovering
the potential there.
And it's just been a lot
of fun trying to, you know,
anytime you got an opportunity to swim
out to a blue ocean,
to find a new category and
really broaden, you know,
an addressable market,
not just for yourself,
but for an entire industry.
It's an incredibly fun project,
but it is very rewarding,
honestly, to see it play out,
you know, over almost a decade.
And, you know, still
lots of headroom for growth.
I totally agree.
I've shared the thought,
and I think you're, you know,
echoing and you're agreeing.
And of course it's like,
there was a moment there
where I think the affiliate partner world
felt like almost this
like, you know, side dish.
Obviously there's still
the power of, you know,
the volume of search and social,
but in the event that the
fact that it's multi-channel,
the fact that you have the
ability to influence GEO,
the fact that you have
the ability to tap creator,
it feels like much
more of a main course now,
and it's really exciting to me.
I have an anecdote
that's kind of interesting
on the side course.
I think it was what you meant by that,
but I remember being in
the field in St. Louis
with a tax brand,
name names, with the VP.
I remember she's
leaning back in her chair.
She's like, "Dave, when is
affiliate gonna stop being
the sand between the rocks?"
This is like my first
six months on a job.
And that really, I'm like, you know,
I knew what she meant,
but I'm like, explain,
like, what do you mean, Sam?
And she's like, "Wow,
my rocks are paid search,
paid social, you know,
as you would expect."
And affiliate is just kind of
like, you know, much smaller,
you know, in terms of importance,
and I've always felt
like traditional affiliates
always had this, you
know, just the geeky kid
and school is off in the corner,
it's just not part of the group.
And then that really
challenged me to kind of like,
how can I overcome
that objection, you know,
as a traditional sales mindset?
But I was already
starting to dig in, I'm like,
"Well, are you doing
this, are you doing that?"
Like, you know, what types of partners
are you working with?
Like, if you're working
with the same cashback,
coupon, loyalty
sites, and sites, you know,
what else can you expect?
But I think what really, you know,
when you talk about how
this industry has evolved,
I think that the biggest
drivers of the transition here
in terms of like why this has become such an important
channel is really just the shift in community, right?
That like 10 to 15 years ago, but it wasn't as popular as it is today.
Even back then, you
know, you had creators
who were almost a
little gun shy to put up
like an affiliate link
for fear of the community
kind of lashing back in the
comments saying, you know,
you're getting paid
for them sort of thing.
I think we are so far
past that, you know,
sort of feeling in terms of, you know,
how creators are doing what they do.
But I remember our very
first impact.com event,
you know, once I kind of learned how
things are being used
and we gotta go tell this
bigger story of the world,
we had our first, I can't
remember if it was 2018,
well, 2018, I think it was 2018,
we had our first impact growth then,
and we put a number of
our customers up on stage
as you would expect,
tell them their story.
And I remember Priest Willis from Lenovo
sitting on his bed just talking about
all the different types of partners
that he had as part of his program,
just organically
naturally on our platform.
Again, we got these
creators that will do these
lengthy unboxing videos
with the white gloves,
the slow, you know, zoom in thing,
they're cutting tape when
they put this new laptop
up on the workbench and
they put it right next
to some other comparison
and they're running
their benchmark checks
and then, you know, audience
like really tunes into that.
This is like highly engaged audience,
20 minute long video of, you know,
what's this new gaming
laptop capable of sort of thing.
And, you know, that's
when it really started
to make sense to me, like,
this isn't just positioning
something for our own benefit,
this is like defining what is in motion.
You've got a community that has like
completely taken over the brand message.
A brand can keep doing
their traditional stuff,
like traditional
advertising is still trying to control
the image and the
voice and the narrative,
but the community's
kind of taken over, right?
And if you're not
aligned with those guys,
much less letting them kind
of take the lead versus you,
which I would advocate for now for brand,
you know, you're just not
relevant to the buyers today.
And so that's been the
single biggest driver, I think,
to our entire industry who created this
much broader
partnership commerce, you know,
sort of partnership
marketing sort of space
that we're all playing in is that
when people find out about something,
it may be through an ad,
but the first thing that they're gonna do
is go check to see what the
community has to say about it.
Find somebody that's
gonna shoot them straight,
go a little deeper, give them
something to compare it with,
but give them your honest opinion,
even if they're getting
compensated in some way for it,
right, because the truth is like
creators, especially,
they've got their
checks and balances, right?
They got the like and the unlike,
they've got their subscribed,
they got their unsubscribed,
which they don't wanna lose,
and they've got comments, right?
Like people are gonna call them out
if they're being a
cheesy salesperson, right?
And so they do keep it even though
they're being compensated.
And I think people getting comfortable
with that being a transaction,
hey, I'm watching a video,
I know that this person
might be compensated for it,
but I still trust them.
And so I think that's
created a huge tailwind
for our industry, really open things up.
I love that.
Yeah, for us, I feel like we've been
singing similar tunes
and educating people about this space,
and there's such a lack of trust
in a lot of areas of our world,
right, Ron, or
indifferent, unfortunately,
it's just kind of been that way over time
with certain pockets.
And then when you think about marketing,
you can get out of
the mode of like a brand
trying to do all the heavy
lifting to reach the customer,
and you let the third
party trusted creators,
reviews do that storytelling.
That's what customers are thriving on,
and that's what they're wanting to see.
So it's been exciting.
As I mentioned that
things have just gotten
more distributed globally, right?
So there, I can't
remember how many stores
are on Shopify, right?
It's over two million, it
might be even five million now,
but just think about that for a minute.
There's literally
millions of stores on Shopify.
Remember when there used to
be just three TV channels?
Yeah.
(laughing)
I'm old enough to remember.
It's like, how do people choose?
Like, is it realistic, the thing,
that a brand can use
traditional media channels
to communicate who they
are, how they're different,
how this product fits in their life?
There's so much choice,
there's so much noise out there.
It's like, I don't think
you have a choice as a brand.
You've got to kind of draw
an alliance with a community
that let trust voice in the community,
a partner, a creator,
trust a voice in the community
to represent you in the right way.
You're not gonna be able to control
everything they say,
but you gotta, to some
extent, let them drive,
grabbing the wheel.
It's like, be okay with
something else driving,
sort of thing, but let
them carry your message
because it's the only
way I think you can relate
to this distributed
audience that we're dealing with.
It has a lot of choices.
You're not gonna be able to
do that in mass media anymore.
I don't care how
personalized, I don't care how targeted
the ad is, I don't think it's doable in
today's environment.
Totally.
Well, and I think you're right.
People are seeking that out.
They're just keen in on it.
And guess what, as you know,
that shows up in the
performance and relatively,
we're seeing so many
clients come forward saying,
this is the best performing channel
outside of brand insert.
This is the best performing channel.
So it's really exciting to see that.
It's not only what's needed,
but there's an efficiency
aspect that's sort of connected
to that, which is super exciting.
Yeah, and as an a tour,
a great performance base.
It's one of the beauties of it.
I mean, you've gotta be
competitive as a brand
because those creators, those publishers,
those other partners you have,
do have choices in who they align with.
You're not paying a
fair wage, if you will,
they're gonna work with somebody else,
maybe in your category.
But by and large, you're the
one kind of setting the terms
versus meta setting the terms
or Google setting the terms, right?
And so, and you bear a
lot of responsibility
for converting somebody ultimately
and keeping that partner long-term,
but yeah, it's a
highly efficient channel.
One of the challenges that
the channel has has been scale.
And because you are,
it does take time to
partner up with somebody,
get them to kind of
understand your brand,
your product, kind of get behind you,
distribute it, promote
it through their channels,
but it's not the Google
machine, is what I was saying.
Like, you put a dollar in
a Google, you click back,
you put a million dollars in, you get a
million clicks back.
This channel is very different.
It does take time and some investment.
And that's honestly one of the roles
that impact.com plays in this ecosystem
is that as a platform,
slowly becoming an
infrastructure layer for this industry,
that's what we're aspiring to do
is like remove the friction
from scaling this type of marketing
to be at the level of paid search,
a paid social sort of thing.
I don't know if you know the stats,
but it's like there's a
trillion dollars a year
that's spent in global advertising.
60% of that goes to what's called
performance marketing.
And the far majority
of that goes to the top
three or four companies, right?
The Metas, the Googles,
the Amazons, et cetera,
TikToks of the world.
The traditional affiliate channel
gets low single digit
percent of all that, right?
So that's when I say
there's headroom to grow
for brands who are trying
to relate today's consumer
in the way that they want
to be related to by a brand,
meaning people are sick of
brands being interrupted,
disrupted with a brand message
that they didn't ask for.
If you can find a way to scale,
not just the efficiency,
but the relatability of it.
Like if I'm a brand, I would
much rather be investing more
in this type of marketing than
traditional marketing
just because of the nature of it.
Like I'd much rather have
somebody else advocate for me
than keep doing all the talking myself,
because we all know that
is not what people prefer
and there's options now.
There didn't used to be options.
That's the thing when it
was a hundred years ago
and radio first
started and then TV started
in that same year,
there were no other options.
Everybody tuned in.
And so brands tightly
controlled the message.
Nine out of 10 doctors
say it's okay to smoke.
It's like there's new social platforms,
put them accountable.
No one was commenting that BS.
Exactly.
And so like the
genie's out of the bottle.
The community's kind of taking over now
and that's where
consumers are spending their time
and that's where
they're making decisions.
I guess I don't think
brands have a choice today.
Exactly.
And I think for certain business bottles,
like in the SaaS world especially,
it's like partnerships can
make up way bigger emphasis
and percentage which
is super exciting too.
So I think some of
them goes back to that,
like Sand Between the Rocks,
appetizer versus main course.
It's starting to kind
of swing back around,
I think in a lot of ways.
And people are using it to like,
hey, take this
influencer or review content
and put it into your paid social budget.
So those lines are
starting to blur a little bit too.
And I think the partner
is benefiting in that way.
If the AI stuff coming,
obviously that's a huge
conversation for everyone.
It comes into every conversation.
How do you kind of counsel
people on how to handle it
and how you think about it in our world
of being a disruption
versus being an opportunity?
Yeah, there's so many levels to AI
and we can look at it from
each of those perspectives.
I think just personally, it's awesome.
Like, I mean, how lucky am I,
my career that I get to
see the internet come online.
Like I remember when I
was graduating grad school
in the 90s, the internet happened, right?
See my first hour.
So freaking cool.
I designed my graduate
program's first website.
Like I was so into it.
I was gearing up for a
more traditional job.
I didn't think internet
jobs were gonna be a thing.
I was gearing up to do healthcare
administration, right?
That's literally, I'd say that back then.
I'm 55, and then mobile happened, right?
Whoever thought we'd be
walking around with them,
that was kind of cool.
But this AI
advancement is just mind blowing.
I am so fascinated
and I'm just blown away.
And there's just so many opportunities
personally and professionally.
And if you're a geek,
I would consider
myself somewhat of a geek.
It's like, it's just a lot of fun.
The first thing I was--
Curiosity, intellectual interest, yeah.
Get past that.
Like if you're kind of a geek,
you're probably already into it and
seeing the opportunity,
but I would expect
people to just be curious.
Like, I keep talking about the genie
out of the bottle with the community,
but like genie's out
of the bottle with AI.
Like you're not gonna stop
AI and where it's gonna go.
And so I would really encourage folks
who are holding back
for one reason or another
just to invest some time and understand
how it can enhance your life.
Because I think if you
engage with it in the right way,
it's super interesting, it's fascinating,
it can be extremely
helpful on a number of levels.
And then obviously at the business level,
the table stakes is
just how you can apply
this new technology just to help yourself
operate the business with higher quality,
better product, better
customer experiences,
things like that, and also do things a
lot more efficiently.
And so Impact.com,
like a lot of companies,
I don't think we're unique in that,
just making great strides in
terms of how this technology
can be applied in engineering, of course,
but across literally every
function of the business.
The way that we're set up at Impact.com
is that we've got a
chief productivity officer
who's named Stuur, he's
based in Cape Town, South Africa,
former Amazon CTO profile.
He runs our biz apps
group, business applications.
So basically any
software we license is a company
which we have hundreds of
licenses as you can imagine.
He kind of oversees the company's AI use.
Essentially he's got an
AI dev team under him,
that team is basically mapped
to each functional area of our company.
So you'll have champions in marketing,
champions in finance,
champions in HR for AI
that have a AI developer
kind of mapped to them.
And every quarter, we've got two to three
transformative projects
that these guys are taking on
that will kind of
enhance both the quality
and the efficiency of key
functions within their teams.
But like I said, I
think a lot of companies
are probably thinking that same way.
So I don't think
we're unique in that way.
But I think when you look at it,
how it's applied to the product,
companies, I would describe
Impact.com as a marketplace.
Technically it's a market network.
A lot of people don't know what that is,
but we're a marketplace.
We've got a lot of
actors in our ecosystem.
We've got a partner side.
These are publishers,
these are creators, businesses,
customers who are
advocating for the brands
that they have relationships with.
Okay, so that's one side.
You got agencies in the mix.
These are folks that
have separate contracts
with our customers that help them
managing growth programs.
Obviously we've got brands literally
across every industry.
We've got 6,000 brands
on the platform today.
We've got big retailers
that everybody would know.
The Walmarts and the
Targets of the world.
But we've got 60 banks on the platform.
US Bank, USAA, I mean, SoFi,
and some of the MLS, it's pretty amazing.
There's other technology partners,
the MMP, HubSpot and others.
Basically when you think about the data
flowing this platform with
this number of customers,
this number of partners,
and the scale of referrals
that are happening through our platform,
we have visibility into
over a trillion in GMV.
GMV is Gross Merchandise Values,
the sales that customers generate.
But essentially when you come on to the
impact.com platform,
we're tracking all conversion events.
And for most customers,
it's online and offline sales,
depending on how they
implemented our platform.
You kind of need to be in that position
to determine did this sale
come from a partner referral
or did it come from
paid search or paid social,
an email campaign, something else.
And so you need to have 100% visibility
into all conversions in order to say,
yes, this came from partner channel,
came from this particular partner,
according to their contract.
Here's how I'm gonna pay that partner.
Was it a new versus a returning customer?
Did they spend over a
certain dollar amount?
There's infinite ways to kind of
configure your
partnerships on our platform.
And so of the trillion or so in total GMV
that we have visibility into,
the partner refer GMV
is around 200 billion.
And then we also handle payments.
So brands will typically deposit,
I call it once a month,
is probably the most common
frequency into our platform.
And then we serve as
like the clearing house
to pay all of their partners globally.
So all contracts are in
local language contracts,
we're paying out in local currencies.
We support over 100 local currencies.
So Uber, just as an
example, kind of a wild example,
has partners in France,
they have garages, believe it or not,
in France that refer
drivers to the Uber program.
So that garage in France is signing a
local language contract
and they're getting
paid in the local Euro.
And so just trying to
give folks a little insight
in terms of some of the data
that might flow through our platform.
But the point related to AI is,
what is AI feed on data, right?
And so if you've got
this broad set of data
and data at this scale,
you can do really interesting things
with regards to managing
programs, making recommendations,
suggesting payouts based
on certain business targets
and things like that.
And so of course we're continuing to
think about products,
taking advantage of some
of the new technologies
that AI is bringing and
applying it to a platform like ours.
It's a lot of fun, honestly.
I love that.
Yeah, there's-
One last thing, our
product fee is probably
twice the size of Amazon.
We have over 600 million
products in our product feed.
Think about that for a minute.
When partners are looking for links
and products recommend,
they're looking for
inspiration on how to promote it
and things like that.
So for our platform to
kind of step in there
and start assisting to make their
business more successful,
as a partner on the platform,
you can kind of see where this goes.
Absolutely, the data is the
thing that AI feeds off of.
It's a perfect marriage, if you will.
There's so much
innovation, which we'll get to.
I would be remiss if I
didn't bring up the big news
about the Rakuten
partnership announcement
and would love to get your-
There's one more dimension on AI
that we can talk about yet.
And that's just kind
of like the macro shift.
Like how does AI affect
publishers, for example,
and partners and creators?
And is that going to
displace that part of the economy?
What's fascinating is if you look at,
so what's happening with AI from a
consumer usage standpoint
is that we're clearly
shifting from this search era
to this answer era, right?
So the search era,
you're typing into Google
what you're looking
for, and it was like this,
not the most
efficient, best user experience.
You're chasing through
a bunch of blue links
to find something.
And it wasn't the best
user experience quite frankly.
And AI comes online
and people can just ask
a specific question and get an answer.
And it's distilled, it's synthesized
across a number of different sources,
and it's exactly what you
think you need at least.
It may not be really what you need,
but people believe it is.
So if you look at how LLMs
are generating those answers,
what the part that I find fascinating,
what we should all be excited about in
partnership marketing,
is that they're not citing
what the brand has to say,
they're citing what
the community has to say.
They are citing creators,
they're citing publishers,
they're citing the reviews,
all that affiliate style
content about products,
we call it commerce
content that's sitting out there.
That's what the LLMs are sourcing
and citing in their answers.
Now granted they synthesize it, right?
So they're looking across a
number of different sources
and giving an answer.
So there's a bit of loss,
if you will, in terms of that
deterministic click.
Traditional affiliate is well known
for like last click crediting.
And the truth is, on the
impact.com platform for years,
way before AI, we'd been
moving toward a future proof world
where you can interpret a
number of different signals
on individuals that are engaging
with the sort of content out there
and decide how you wanna credit that
within your program.
Even though the data has been
there for a number of years,
a lot of folks are
doing the style of marketing
in traditional ways by
primarily relying on first click,
last click, some
combination throughout the journey.
And mobile kind of warmed us
up for this as an industry,
honestly, right, where things got harder,
in terms of tracking there.
And then Apple kind of like
took on the privacy battle.
I don't know if you remember
driving into a Lincoln tunnel,
this is a few years back,
there was like a three monkey billboard.
It was like, "No eel here, no eel holes."
Oh yeah.
That's how big of an
issue privacy had become.
And so it became popular to just block
all targeting and
tracking and things like that.
And again, this is years
before AI came on the scene.
So we as a company have been building
towards a future proof model
on how to basically still tie engagement
with commerce content of
a partner recommendation,
let's say, to a sale that happens.
And we've got deep
integrations with social platforms,
CDNs like CloudFlare and others,
and we're able to do both,
essentially have that deterministic click
or code that's used,
and then combine that
with additional signals
and give recommendations
and capabilities for brands
to understand what led to that conversion
and that happening
through the partner channel,
and then tie it into how
they compensate their partners.
What I'm saying is, net
net's moved AI is a tailwind,
honestly, I think, for this industry.
For those that are
concerned about tracking,
obviously it'd be great if
the LM could just add in links
and give partners proper credit.
And we're still looking
forward to the potential
for those conversations.
And we intend to be
the infrastructure layer
that can kind of help support that
as we're doing for a few companies,
one I could probably talk
about today and others soon.
Love that.
It's gonna take some time
for that part to play out,
but the good news is we
don't need it to be successful.
There's so much there, and I think,
I love the fact that we're already seeing
a huge percentage of AI citations,
GTO impact, be made up by
partners in our ecosystem,
partners on impact, partners
that we work with directly.
So it's happening, which is not tailwind,
you speak of, which is super exciting.
We made an investment
in Ebertin last year.
We got a strategic partnership with them
and a strategic integration with them
and what they're doing.
Their GEO, General
Vengeance Optimization, AEO,
is also what it's known for.
But basically it's like brands,
think of what you did as a brand with
regards to SEO, SEM,
like you're trying to figure out
how you're showing up in search results.
Obviously that same
challenge exists now in AI.
Brands are trying to figure out
how they're showing
up in these AI answers.
That's what a company like Ebertin
is setting out to solve for.
And so as you, so I'm
working with our platform
and together with Ebertin,
you can get those insights.
Like here's how you're showing up,
here's how your competitors
are showing up in AI answers.
Here are the citations that
are driving those answers.
These citations have higher weight.
When I say citations, that means a source
or like a creator or
publisher is the citations,
of what generated a
higher weight for that answer.
And if you don't
already have a partnership
with that source, you can activate that
through our platform.
They're already a partner.
You can obviously use that as
insight to do more with them.
But that's a really important strategy.
I would suggest for brands
who aren't heavily engaged
with that, do that.
And there's others, as you would expect,
like Profound and YapO.
We support other GEO
type companies like that
on our platform.
But yeah, I think it's exciting.
I love that.
It's a huge investment for
us, huge visibility piece.
Clients are seeing it, we're showing it.
And I love where you
guys are going with it.
I love the conversations we had in Austin
and the product roadmap with Max
was always much anticipated.
And you described it as insane.
I was impressed being
there, seeing it roll out.
I'd love to hear from
you on what you can share
and maybe what was
shared related to the Evertune
and the eye expansion and what you're
wanting to get towards
and give folks a
little bit more of a peek
behind the curtain on the excitement
that's happening with
the product roadmap.
Yeah, I've already mentioned
a couple of them right here.
So we've already gotten
into that right with Evertune.
With some of the measurement and signals,
that was a big part of
what Max talked about on stage
at IPX in Austin in June.
And so you would expect that we'll
continue to make advancements
in measurement and
tracking in this future proof
sort of world that we're clearly in now.
Before it was like by choice.
Now it's like, you're
really kind of getting pushed
into that world.
And so we're a platform
that has enabled that already.
We're doing a lot with
creators, quite frankly.
I mean, we acquired a
business called ActiDate
over three years ago now.
They were not well known,
but like clearly a leading
influencer marketing platform
out there, bit of an aqua hire.
Like, we had those
individuals basically natively rebuild
that full capability in
the Impact.com platform.
And we're just, it is a
high priority in the company
just to continue to improve
usability, remove friction,
how creators are using the platform,
how they're finding brands
to work with and vice versa.
When we started our
creator roadmap years ago,
we actually started with
storefronts for brands,
which is interesting.
So Walmart had a press release,
it's gotta be a couple of years ago,
where they were inviting
creators to build essentially
a storefront at Walmart.com.
So if you're a creator
and you shop Walmart,
you can kind of curate your
list under your creator brand
at Walmart.com, really cool.
I think we're, I think
still the only company
in the space that had
done that essentially.
And even better, if you
refer to customer over
on a certain product
and they buy other things
within your store, you're
getting credit for that too.
Why wouldn't creators want to engage with
someone like Walmart
on something like that?
So what we're about to release is
storefronts for creators.
So think of the first one I mentioned,
storefronts for brands is really a
creator's full collection
of just that retailers products.
And going the other
way, if I'm a creator,
I may have a selection of
products across your brand.
And so that's coming,
we've got amplification,
we're doing a lot
with platforms like Meta
in terms of amplification.
I think companies like
Meta are saying that a lot
of the content that's
being posted is about products.
And we've got integration with them
that's making it easier
for brands to then boost
that creator
generated, you can call it UGC,
you can call it commerce content,
but basically turning
those posts that may not have
commercial intent or nature to them,
kind of like getting
brands in a position to boost
essentially that commerce
content that creators are doing
on the Meta platform.
I think that--
Yeah, the boosting
stuff's taken off like crazy.
It's funny, I wrote about
that like six or seven years ago,
it was not as highly adopted.
And it's just like
taken off like gangbusters.
So it makes sense that you
guys are able to enable that.
And I love the ability to
think about other payment
methodologies like
paying out for citation,
paying out for
influencers based on engagement
and other things that are coming.
Like there's a lot of really cool stuff,
partnerships with Meta, YouTube,
there's a lot of really exciting things
you guys are thinking about,
they think are really
needed in our industry.
And I always love the measurement stuff
because that's near and dear
and something we're
always educating people around
to improve really
emphasizing that as well,
which I was very impressed with.
We're doing something interesting with
what we call seller,
brand sellers, vendors, manufacturers.
So I mentioned
Walmart, for example, right?
They're a retailer and
there are seller brands,
manufacturer brands, vendor brands
that sell their products at
Walmart, obviously, right?
So think of Hamilton
Beach, think of Shark Ninja.
They sell their products
at various retailer stores.
So what's new this year that we're
starting to roll out now
is what we call seller, essentially,
in fact, our home seller.
And this is where
somebody like a Shark Ninja
can basically either add
on to Walmart's program
so they can boost their existing
partnership program,
meaning tapping into their established
partner relationships
and just adding
campaigns, adding funding.
So think of them starting a
campaign on Walmart's program
or they can start their own program
where they've got their own partnerships,
which they may wanna
do for various reasons.
Maybe they don't wanna
coordinate so closely
with Walmart on their partnerships.
They want their own partnerships.
They might want those for GEC,
generating content for their own site,
generating content for other
paid media that they're doing.
But it's pretty fascinating.
When you look at somebody like Walmart,
who has just been one brand on our
platform up till now,
has over 100,000 seller brands
that sell their products at Walmart.
And so we just kind of
opened up the addressable market
for more brands to join
our platform, essentially,
and develop partnerships of all types.
And so that's an
exciting development, I think,
on our platform as well.
Absolutely, absolutely.
That's amazing.
Yeah, there's so much
happening, so much innovation,
and it's super, super exciting.
I gotta ask there, your
background is obvious.
You've achieved so much, right?
How much was that Navy experience
and some of your
earlier formative experiences
kind of help you
through all of this stuff
that you've been able to do?
When I think back, I
grew up in Cleveland, Ohio,
so very blue collar,
working class sort of thing.
And I remember I've always
had jobs since I was little,
whether it was paper
route, hunting lawns,
taking care of someone's
property, that sort of thing.
So I've always kind of hustled that way.
But when I graduated high school,
I went straight to boot camp.
And the reason was I needed a
way to pay for college, right?
I didn't have the means to do that.
And so I signed up for
this program called Boost.
I should say I got accepted.
It was very hard to get
accepted to this program
because it helped boost, actually stiffer,
brought an opportunity for officer
selection and training.
And the program was
originally designed by the military
to help less privileged
folks find their way in life,
essentially.
So just a lot of like inner
city kids and things like that.
And I always felt like I
was the token ethnicity
as part of this program.
So I had 100 kids, like
it was like two people
that looked like me.
That's awesome.
But to get into that part of the program,
boot camp first, I was
enlisted to boot camp in San Diego,
fell in love with California actually
through that experience.
I wouldn't trade that for anything.
But I think what the military did was,
I already had the hustle,
but I think the Navy
really gave me two things.
One was attention to detail.
I mean, you learn that
like day one in boot camp,
just extreme attention to detail.
But a lot of structure
and respect for structure,
so you don't feel like
you're not trying to find a hack
through something.
It's like, you just gotta respect.
You've got superiors, you
got rules, you gotta follow.
Had a lot of respect for that,
but I'd say more than anything,
it helped me relate
to people of all types.
So when I think about
skills that I've developed
as a leader, I attribute
almost all of that, to be honest,
to my military experience.
Wow, that's amazing.
Yeah, it's so cool.
It goes almost, it doubles down your,
okay, who am I working with is such an
important part of it.
And like you've been able
to navigate that so well,
and have such an amazing career,
and appreciate sharing your insights
with all the things impact's
doing, your personal journey,
and give hopefully some
nuggets to people who are looking
to learn from a great
practitioner, a great leader.
So really appreciate you coming on, Dave.
It's always a pleasure chatting with you
and always a good chat.
Likewise, likewise, I've enjoyed it.
Amazing, thank you.