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Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your 

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host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance 

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marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing. 

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We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth, 

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marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and 

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have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned. 

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Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm 

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your host, Ty DeGrange, and I am thrilled to talk with 

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Chris Tragic today. Welcome, Chris. Thanks very much. Great to talk to you again. 

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It's been a while since we met back in, back in April. Yeah. Absolutely. I 

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think we're in Miami for PL Live. Yep. Yeah. 

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Awesome. So good to have you on today, and, I'm really excited about this 

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conversation. For those of you who don't know, Chris is a true affiliate marketing 

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legend, veteran. He's built products from from the ground up, 

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launched publisher discovery to acquisition, and is now building Moonpool. Had some 

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great experiences. So ready to dive in with him today, and thanks so much for joining us. Great. It's 

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a pleasure. Absolutely. So maybe just starting off, tell us about your your 

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background, Chris. I know I think people would find it fascinating. Somebody as old as me goes back a long 

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way. I started off, out of college, ran a pub for four 

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years or in the state, and I call it a bar. But, basically, he ran a pub, which was 

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an interesting thing and made me vow never to ever think in terms of going into running 

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a pub or running anything in, dealing with kind of the food and drink and 

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things. But, yeah, that's that was fun. Then an art material shop, which and I thought, no. I don't wanna 

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be. Chris, is there is there any similarity between, maybe managing a pub and 

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managing affiliates? It's about relation I would 

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say. That's about the the key thing. It's about the relationships. And and if you got the 

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relationships right with your regulars in a pub, then they come back, 

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and you know what they're doing. You've got an idea what they're about. If somebody you 

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know has an argument, with a friend in the pub and you know them, then it's fine. If they don't know 

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them, you worry. But, luckily, with an affiliate, you don't get those kind 

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of arguments. It tends to be more about attribution or yeah. Yeah. You know, 

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Love it. I interrupted your your kind of background story to to kinda delve 

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into that a little bit, but we'd love to hear more if you if you have more to share there. Yeah. It's 

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I think they call it a patchwork portfolio ran an art material 

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shop because my degree was in art, history of arts and art fine 

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arts and things like that. Fell then into working with a 

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friend who had a print company, and I started typesetting on an eight inch Mac. If you can 

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imagine the fun of of well, actually, before that, I was sending stuff using 

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extremely early versions of HTML where you you specified the font, closed 

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font, and all of that stuff. And we sent that stuff down a forty eight hundred board 

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modem to a place that printed out the galleys of text, which you then glued down 

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with wax, old school type setting stuff. So I did it that way. Then we 

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bought an eight inch Mac, and the excitement of that You couldn't see the page, but you knew that 

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you you were doing stuff. You had to move the page around to work on page maker one 

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where things were gonna be. But But that was exciting because you had a whole page of stuff at 

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once with no galleys, no cutting. Yeah. So, yeah, I got involved in 

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on screen stuff way back then. Then I sold That's amazing. Sold 

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newspaper advertising, ended up joining a design agency, 

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and was what they call a bag carrier in Britain. Basically, I was kind of running from the 

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studio to the clients, and it might be anything from a mining machinery company to 

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Procter and Gamble. So it's kind of all sorts of different types of stuff. As part of 

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that while there That's amazing. I got involved, from a local charity 

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with these kind of fundraising web shops from a company called Byatt. 

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This is about middle of two thousand and two, early two thousand and two. Had about 

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six shops in it. It said Marks and Spencer's and the two or three others and whatever. 

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And as is the want of design agencies, when, Procter and Gamble 

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decided they were moving all of their stuff to London, got made redundant. But then, 

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bizarrely, as part of my kind of design work, I was doing some work for GE 

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and needed somebody to do some database stuff. So this is while we're still 

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rolling and, needed somebody to do it. Found somebody via a friend 

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of a friend, and I met Steve Brown on a roundabout in Surrey. We went to 

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GE's office, won the contract. We did the this kind of multiple, multi 

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language mailer into kind of, for events in Switzerland 

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and Portugal and whatever. I think it's what what it was anyway. And then kind of 

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that was the only time I've met Steve. It's bizarre kind of meeting, kind of in a cafe bar roundabout. We go to the 

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meeting, start the deal. Great job. Roll forward six months. That's 

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amazing. Can I ask you, how did you guys pull that off? Landing 

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GE is especially at that time, was a quite a coup. Can you share more about what do 

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you think got the deal done? I think we're fairly innovative agency, 

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which is quite cool, we've done quite a lot of mailings for, P and G anyway, that 

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kind of stuff. Mhmm. But there weren't many people could could deal with. 

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I think, in multilanguage, multicountry database 

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management from which we then pulled out the the lists for 

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mailing. And I I kind of put together the structure for the mailing envelope, 

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contents, all the rest of it, and and that was all mailed out successfully, and they 

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got several hundred people, bums on seats, as they call it in the UK. Mhmm. 

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To enable them to have these conferences, and I would imagine knowing GE, each one of 

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the contracts they win from these conferences was worth a fortune. So I think if I 

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recall, that contract was about fourteen thousand pounds UK. So 

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and that was two thousand and one. So that's a long that's a lot of cashback then. There's all the 

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mailing. Yeah. And then kind of whilst I was kicking my heels after the, P and G 

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were tried up, somebody mentioned that this company, Perfiliate, in 

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Newcastle was looking for for somebody. And so I gave a call, and it 

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turned out it was Steve Brown's bunch again. So, I ended up December two 

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thousand and two at BIAT, which within a space of a month or 

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so, Mal Cowley and Paul Fellows and Steve had eventually 

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kind of thought, actually, we can turn this into a network. So by mid o three, we 

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were an affiliate network as well, which was a bit of fun. We started winning some good 

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contracts. I think in o four, we held our first 

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event, we didn't call it com not quite a conference, but a first affiliate event, where 

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we were entirely unusual amongst networks that we encouraged our 

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advertisers to meet with our affiliates. If you're at one of the other big networks, 

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they were always chaperoned or they were never allowed to meet or they were told our affiliates are, 

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they're they're unique and unusual and unique to just trust us. But, we 

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set up these, over the years, set up these events called Speakeasies, which started in a pub in 

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London. Of course. So we kind of, the guy from BT, which 

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is like the UK's at the time, the UK's biggest mobile phone operator and broadband 

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operator Mhmm. Was absolutely gobsmacked. And he turned he says, oh, I would 

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love to have a chat with him. He says, yeah. Have a chat. Have a beer. What do you fancy? And we he says, he don't wanna 

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come and sit with, why? It's your business. It's his business. It's nothing to do with me. We're just the 

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enablers. So that was, I think, the start of transparency in affiliate. There 

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wasn't any beforehand. There was no transparency for one of the networks 

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who actually had a two and a two point five two and a half two thou two hundred and fifty percent 

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override, on one of its programs. We want it not knowing what's going on 

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because we said that, oh, yeah. The affiliate commission at twenty pounds, you added thirty percent, 

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so twenty six pounds. So we went in and won the contract on that and got a very irate phone 

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call. A few days later, when the previous network, we realized they've been 

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earning fifty pounds, but only paying the affiliate twenty. 

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So that was an interesting kind of, shakedown in the affiliate marketplace. And, 

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Yeah. It's exciting running a network and or be being part of involved in network. 

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Started off with four of us, and then by two thousand seven or so, there 

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were I've forgotten how many staff. I think fifty old staff and about seventy million 

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turnover if I remember. So and and we had some of the biggest programs in in the world, really. I 

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think, like, Ticketmaster, Apple, a whole bunch of other stuff like that. 

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Yeah. In your experience, what would you say kind of you 

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started to identify as your superpower or what you gravitated 

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to in the affiliate industry as you got started and grew by it? 

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I think it's, honesty, transparency. At the time, we had a 

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policy of, if we were defaulted on by an advertiser and they weren't 

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paying their bills, we were paid to affiliates anyway, which seems to go down quite well with affiliates 

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as you probably understand. And that was without kind of insurance against it or whatever. So there were 

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a few tricky moments, as you probably understand, in the early days, but, it came back 

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rewarded in much firmer relationships with all the affiliates. And, of 

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course, the advertisers responded to that knowing that we had really, 

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really loyal affiliate base behind us as well. How did you prevent 

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against those taking advantage of that, or do you think that's a policy 

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that could be continued in some capacity? Because it's a fascinating idea. 

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It's I think perhaps it's a slightly kind of, trickier world, and things are 

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happening on so much bigger scale now. Back in those days, programs were 

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not massive necessarily. Yeah. And now it's going from back then, you know, 

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affiliate being five, six percent of a company's turnover. It can now be eighteen, twenty percent, and that's big 

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bucks. It's a big deal for a lot of advertisers. So and, actually, for 

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any organization being able to have the spare 

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cash capacity to manage somebody going down particular at a time between, 

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say, two thousand and eight, two thousand and Yeah. Teen, those kind of periods, a company can 

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go pop go pop like that leanie owing million. Yeah. That's are these not Yeah. 

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Not doable again. It's a great gimmick at the time, maybe. Yeah. You're not quite a bank, as 

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they say, so, doesn't really make sense. But as we will get to in 

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this episode, perhaps technology is the answer and transparency through technology, 

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which we'll which we'll get to. Yeah. Exactly. And I think transparency can the 

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next bit we are playing at, kind of after buyout, we sold buyout 

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to AOL for a lot, which is very nice. And then 

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Congrats. Yeah. It was a it was a well, a lot of very, very hard week 

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work by Steve Brown, who is the, the guy that managed the whole process, 

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but running between lawyers' offices for about a year or something from the sound of things. 

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And and and after AOL had spent a year couple of years kind of sucking the juice out of it and 

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ruining it like it does with most companies, so you can edit that out if you want, but 

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Awin came. I think that's the good stuff. Yeah. Awin came in and and I would 

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say, but potentially rescued. Biatt was still about the biggest network in the UK at the 

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time. Still Mhmm. Out of all of that mobile phone networks, the the Viator 

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network ran everyone but one. All but Vodafone was still on Viator network. 

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Mhmm. I was running Sky TV program. We had, Ticketmaster, 

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huge numbers of big programs. And, yeah, kind of millions 

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a month in terms of affiliate commissions, which is kind of what you wanna what you wanna hear going on. 

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I left shortly after the acquisition by Awen and went client side for a year and 

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had a bit of fun. It's quite different actually, kind of starting a program app, and actually 

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started the program and launched on CJ, which as it was in web hosting, it 

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made most sense because pretty much every other web hosting provider was on CJ. That's where the affiliates 

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were. And I think that's the information I got from doing that was it's bloody 

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hard recruiting affiliates. Damn hard getting affiliates on your program if you're new 

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and untried. So that's really, really tough. But it's also hard 

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actually finding affiliates, and that was a real real issue, and it's Google 

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search is not the way to go. But back in two thousand and ten stroke eleven, that's 

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all I had to go on. And so, got the programs up and running. It's still running 

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very successfully on CJ, so it must be doing the right kind of stuff. It's still, 

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and it's it was, cutting its numbers even from the quite early days when I had quite a 

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few really quite nice loyal old friends from affiliate who were the guys who were the 

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mainstay of the initial affiliates on the program. So it was it was a good learning 

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experience from my perspective on on that side of the industry. After that, 

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I'm trying to think, oh, it's while I was doing that. Steve Brown gave me a phone call again, I think, 

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and, he'd just started up an SEO company or or got involved 

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in and invested in a company called Linkdex, which he may have come across, which was 

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trying to become a competitor, conductor, or BrightEdge in those kind of 

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people. Mhmm. They were doing some pretty good stuff, so I ended up kind of going 

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there, doing marketing and selling. And it was Mhmm. I'm not a specialist in 

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anything, you know, as you can tell from my kind of, checkered history, running pubs 

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and, and selling advertising. So I I can pretty much cut 

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cut myself to anything. So I ended up doing marketing and, 

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running events and watching what else we were doing. Oh, yeah. I was selling as well, so we're 

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going to into agencies to sell the Linkdex product. From very early on, I 

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said to Steve, hey. We could find affiliates for this, couldn't we? Because it was basically it was backlink analysis. 

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So Mhmm. From that, Steve and I kinda basically worked out, okay. And 

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within the space of a few few months, we had, again, an early version of what was called 

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Linkdex public publisher discovery and, got a few good 

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clients on board. And then Linkdex was acquired in twenty 

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sixteen more late twenty fifteen, early twenty sixteen. And they thought, right, 

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we're gonna concentrate on the SEO stuff. Don't want this affiliate stuff. I said, well, I'll give you a 

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fiverr for the software for the data. It turned out a bit more than a fiverr, but, basically, 

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I was gonna we kind of I took on myself and a colleague, the two of 

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us, took on that, set up a a separate company, and we 

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started off with kind of, clients like, June. Like, 

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Apple was one of our clients and Adidas, some fairly big clients who were using us to 

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find affiliates. And we started working with a whole load of other people that, DAZN 

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doesn't I forgot now. DAZN will be us in the States. Yeah. Which is doing 

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kind of sports stuff. And they just needed to find, okay, we're gonna set up in Canada. We need 

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some Canadian affiliates, like, now. And so it's kind of, it was quite fun doing that 

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stuff, but it was really manual because it's based on list of SEO stuff. But it 

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actually enabled us to to analyze the data in some detail and find the appropriate 

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affiliates. So two thousand sixteen, we we grew that to 

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reasonable enough to be able to be going to mostly conferences. So did quite a few affiliates, some at east 

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and west, and, Mhmm. Or Germany, Amsterdam, 

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Barcelona. So we did quite a few events signing up. And, also, in the gambling area, which is quite 

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different, we discovered how different gambling and and forex is as an 

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affiliate market. So those differences are are quite marked as you 

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probably know yourself. So that was quite fun. Twenty eighteen, somebody came knocking on 

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the door saying, we've got this thing which is AI 

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based, and it deals with a network's internal affiliates. And they were working 

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with a small UK network called Affiliate Future and analyzing their 

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internal affiliates to to match affiliate with advertiser. 

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Quite clever. And so they acquired our data and acquired us, 

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so which was quite nice to be able to sell a company and carry on working with it. So we helped to 

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develop that process and develop that product. So it's a machine learning and AI 

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driven version of publishing. So no longer lists, you're working on a platform, 

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and you say, yeah, I want. Mhmm. The kind of affiliates who work with, say, 

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three, four networks, but are also working in, say, pet foods or in 

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fashion or whatever it might be. And the other beauty for a an 

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advertiser's point of view is they can go into publisher discovery and say, right. I'm Bloomingdale's. 

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Who's on the Macy's program? And you can just hit the button, and you come up with all Macy's two 

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and a half thousand publishers, got public links on their site. Really simple. 

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And then there's the the ability to kind of find the email address within the 

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platform, contact them, recruit them. So, yeah, that was fun. Chris, what 

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would you say kind of fueled the growth of publisher discovery? 

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Obviously, that's a really compelling value proposition. You had growth leading up to 

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the introduction of AI. You had growth after that. Can you tell us a little bit 

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more about what do you think led to the success of publisher discovery? I think it was 

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because, well, as I identified when trying to do it myself, it's really 

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tough finding affiliates. And the usual way 

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is just kind of trolling through Google by keyword, which is a real longhand 

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way of doing it. Publisher's discovery enables a short kind of shortcut 

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that. Initially, with our old manual version just by looking at a win 

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one dot com or quick serve dot com and the other domains for CJ 

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and whatever. It was clunky, but it worked. It enabled you to look at all of those guys and 

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work out which ones are appropriate. And then you can work out which ones are then 

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connected to which programs. So you can see, right. They're the guys promoting Dell. 

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So they're obviously in the right sector. So, therefore, you can then but you can you can then 

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segment the right bunch of affiliates and then start recruiting. That's this 

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is the shortcut bit, isn't it? It just saved hours. And I think one of the networks that worked with 

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this said it saved about five hours a week of affiliate recruiting, 

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which is, you know, significant for an account back in time period. So that kind of 

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stuff, it pays for it. And, Chris, with regard to the networks, were you 

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technically tapping via API to be able to enable that, or was it 

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by some other integration or partnership? No. Net all the data is public 

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domain. So it's it's kind of if you do a backlink analysis for a win one 

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dot com, you come up with a great list if you're using Semrush or whatever it might be. 

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Actually doing something UTM based identification. Right? Not even necessarily that. Because if you've 

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if you look at a wave one dot com forward slash, and it will have, a equals 

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blah, b z v equals such and such. Same going into impact. It's 

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very simple. It's domain dot com slash So link structure? Number 

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dot slash. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So link structure was the only thing you needed 

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to determine who is linking to who in the affiliate industry. Exactly. Yeah. It's that simple. 

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So, just finally on who's t t m seven five, whatever it is, 

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I forgot the numbers now, but, yeah, the Ticketmaster one on impact now is t m seventy 

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five some dot net slash c slash blah. Piece of cake to just decipher 

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it. So not that complex. That's great. When you're building 

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you're thinking about product development. This will come up probably in other 

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topics as well. But how were you able to kind of prioritize 

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building, products like these and kind of informing 

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what you're doing now with Moonpool. I'm I'm curious to learn more, especially for those interested in 

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product Yeah. Those interested in partner marketing related products. Really, 

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really, fascinating to hear more about your background there. Yeah. I think with 

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publisher discovery, it was kind of we were slaloming. 

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Kind of just, oh, that works. Try that. And if that comes back with money on it, 

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then great. You carry on with it. Mhmm. And it's about understanding where it can go 

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to. And so with publisher discovery, so, okay. Yeah. We can do that. But and then you 

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can flip it on its head and do something, which is publisher side. So looking for programs, 

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so the potential for that, and understanding what you can do with the data. And it's just being 

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slightly more creative with the the data you're working with to come up 

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with something which somebody wants to buy. And the key thing is, is is it gonna save 

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somebody time and effort? Because that's the the goal of any automation. If If you can automate 

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something, it's gonna make it faster, make it simpler, make it slicker, make it actually deliver 

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what you want without all the usual problems you'd have with, you know, 

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go back to Google search or is this guy a website? Who owns it? I 

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can't find who's the who is for it. Those kinds of stuff. You avoid all of that because 

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it's all it's all there. It's all dealt with. And that's what we're trying to do, stuff which 

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is Yeah. Is a no brainer. Oh, why wouldn't you do that? And I think the same things 

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in inform the things we're doing with moon pools. How about doing this? Ah, 

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yeah. That's great, but it's not urgent, so that goes down the road to six months time for 

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another facing product. And just recently, just conversations with people at 

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conferences has led to us. I was thinking, actually, no. What we thought might be the the route to 

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go by talking to people about how we could take save them time 

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and save and make life easier for them, but also, more importantly, make things 

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actually work better for them. We just changed the way we look at stuff, changed the 

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way we position the product. Don't be frightened to completely ditch an avenue 

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you've started going up because you think that's the right thing. If you talk to people and they 

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they think, no. Just ditch it. Bring it back later. Maybe as an additional part 

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to another part of the product at a later date. But, follow where people are 

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actually wanting the time and effort to be put put in from their perspective. Always follow what 

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somebody wants rather than what you wanna sell. How do you think about the kind 

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of gathering of qualitative and quantitative customer feedback 

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and discovery and understanding what customer needs, what are the 

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paying customers looking for, what are they not looking for, what are their pain points to kind of uncover those 

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great value props in product? Like, what how would you how do you approach that with 

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both? Yeah. In terms of kind of understanding how people use it, it's great to use I mean, 

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it's amazing that tools like Amplitude cost nothing, which is barmy, 

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absolutely nuts. If you use Amplitude if you're building a product, get Amplitude built 

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into it from the ground up. You then have an idea of exactly what people are doing 

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inside your your website. You really understand then, oh, yes. They are doing 

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that. Oh, no. Nobody actually touches that button ever. So, okay, it's not doing 

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not adding value. Maybe hold a little bit of a focus group with some of your stronger users. Say, 

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have you looked at this? Yeah. It doesn't do much for us. In which case, you think, yeah, pointless. Let's 

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move on to something else. And it enables you to kind of to look at 

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behaviors without even having to go to some hot jar of looking at people in in 

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a microscopic level of of clicking on a page. The amplitude will tell you what they're 

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clicking on, and then you can assess across, you know, ten, hundred, thousand 

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users which parts are most useful, what the usual routes are, and then you 

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just make those routes easier. Those kinds of things. And if that's what's important, 

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then you have to make sure the UI is doing the same thing, following the same process so you make 

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those simple routes to visually follow. That way, it makes it much faster for people to 

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find the stuff they want. That's awesome. With Moonpool, how did that kind of get sparked, 

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kicked off? How what was the genesis of Moonpool? I see entirely a product of Steve's 

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massive brain. Steve has an ability to create Yeah. A vision from 

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half an idea and build stuff. It worked very well with, with, 

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of course, and it's worked pretty well since then. And Moonpool is no different. He's, 

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he has an uncanny ability to create from, a raw vision something that can 

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actually work. And the fact that listen. My third journey with 

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Steve's proves that I probably think in a usefully similar way, but, 

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maybe with a bit of a Venn diagram thing, I do stuff with you. And he says, yeah. You're future 

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engaging, Chris. So I'm I'm normally kind of four months down the road where Steve's trying to make stuff happen 

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now. But, having that ability to kind of to think around a 

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prod a production, I can think, okay. Yeah. It'd be nice to be able to get to that 

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kind of stuff. I reckon from conversations, this would be really useful, but we don't know that 

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yet. Let's have a look and see if we can get the lily pad to get across the pond to make that 

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work. Now if you know my I like When you're usually. 

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No. I love it. And it it with your collaboration with Steve, what has made 

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it work? It sounds like there's elements of forward thinking, here and now, 

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visionary, integrator. Like, how do you, how do you 

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balance that? It sounds really, really cool. I don't think it's that complex. Steve's 

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the guy with the original vision. I just basically try and, I try and put some jam on the 

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bread and butter, which, hopefully, some of the ideas stick. Some of them have worked, which is great, 

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and some of them will work in future, I'm sure, because I think there's some pretty cool things I think we can be doing 

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with Moonpool. We're coming along. We're doing some very exciting stuff now with, 

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Moonpool verifications where it enables programs to say, yes. This works, 

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and it's it's worked every week for the past x. You know? So so we the automated 

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system enables people to check a program and audit the program weekly, make 

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sure that the links work as you would expect to them. And the toughest part is actually 

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understanding what's happening in that in that handover, the affiliate handover 

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process between the the publisher side and the advertiser. And so much 

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technology now get becomes involved that things can get in the way. Things 

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like consent management platforms, which are becoming well, they've been an issue across the 

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whole of Europe and, UK certainly, but now you've got something like 

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ten states, or is it now eleven states in the US, all of whom now have privacy 

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regulations coming in, that are requiring people to say, yes. I'm okay with 

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cookies or don't sell my data or, for some reason, every single state seems to be 

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different and seems bizarre to me and cross here, across but there you go. But, 

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that kind of stuff can interfere with, you know, when according to, I think I'm 

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trying to think where it was. I think one of the magazines was stating that something around 

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forty eight to fifty percent of consumers reject cookies and don't accept. That 

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can be really quite scary if you're running an affiliate program. So if only half of your 

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cookies are likely to be rejected, then I think affiliate cookies need 

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to be dealt with slightly different, third or first first party. Third party, of course, will 

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disappear soon. But, your first party cookie, if it's coming from a site 

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where the consumer understands that there's a relationship, then it should not be dealt with 

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as a marketing one. It should be dealt with as a necessary one. Nothing as very much, as, 

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James Little has argued quite forcibly across various conferences recently 

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that somebody coming from a cashback site, the contract has started with a cashback site, not with 

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the landing on the cons the advertiser's page because they want their cashback. If that's 

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held up by a cook cook first party cookie, which doesn't which is not 

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necessary, then the whole kind of premise of of the contract is broken. 

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So cashback and, to some extent, maybe coupon size, the cookie should 

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be allowed to run through. Interesting. Oh, do you think that there's gonna 

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have to be and what do you think the end goal of that debate is? Because we kinda jumped into 

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that topic. Is there gonna have to be some kind of a almost 

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nexus like national or state ruling? Because it feels like there's a 

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number of, like, vocal voices arguing on both sides with legitimate 

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questions. Where do you think that's going? Where do we think we land in years 

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down the road or months? In the the US, it's difficult to say. In Europe, of 

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course, we've segment fragmented again slightly, but even though Mhmm. 

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UK is no longer effectively part of the EU, most companies in the UK 

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follow EU law because it's the only way you're gonna sell into Europe. You're not gonna do it by 

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adopting a different, legal standard. In the US, it's very difficult 

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different anyway because you had, as you say, the Amazon Nexus issue. There 

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will be issues when you're dealing with something which is not just, say, for instance, 

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statewide. It's not like popping along along to your local 07:11 or Walmart. 

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Stuff is national or global. If you can buy from Kaspersky, 

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you're buying from Kaspersky anywhere in the world, or same same with Dell. I looked on 

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CJ the other day. I think there's thirty odd separate programs that are all they're all totally 

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separate, all with different legal parameters for Germany, for 

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Spain, for US, for UK, etcetera. So it's very difficult for an 

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advertiser to deal with all of those legal parameters. From a publisher point of 

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view, they don't have necessarily that viewpoint and the understanding of the legal stuff. 

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So it's really tough, and it's it's one that can only kind of work 

382
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well through transparency, through an understandings 

383
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between publisher and advertiser. Yeah. This is what happens. If you're sending 

384
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if you're running a global, say, email campaign, you need to have the 

385
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understanding that if you're sending to different sites, you need to make sure you segment your email list so that 

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it's going to the right place, and you're dealing with the right kind of right kind of intros 

387
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as it were. And that's down to big publishers, big advertisers working together, you 

388
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know, more partnership way. How would you say there's a lot in there. 

389
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A lot to kind of unpack and talk through. But if you think about, you know, loophole is 

390
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helping in a number of levels. What would you say how how big is the problem would 

391
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you say? Like, the the linking not working Yeah. The the linking not having the, 

392
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what's the percent that that's impacting the industry in your opinion? The problems 

393
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are they're big so far, about to be huge. I mean, if you think in 

394
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terms of for an average program that's got first party tracking in place. Now 

395
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a proportion of the the first party tracking, if it's only first party tracking, it 

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won't be working because the consumer will be saying no to reject 

397
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cookies or they'll want to manage their cookies. Proportion will like it. Now, 

398
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of course, we see and we see a huge proportion. I can't remember the it's over 

399
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eighty percent of the advertisers have retained their third party tracking, 

400
00:33:00,800 --> 00:33:05,800
not on that no. Networks, let's say, WebGaines or Everflow or whatever, don't 

401
00:33:05,800 --> 00:33:10,800
have a third party backup. But for so many of them, we see they've still got the third 

402
00:33:10,800 --> 00:33:15,800
party tracking in. Now if there's a program that's been running ten years, it probably only ever had third party tracking 

403
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in. Now when they put their first party in, they just forgot to take third party stuff 

404
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out. So you've got first party and third party. Now if the first party is firing, 

405
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great. If the third party is firing as well, that will probably be firing 

406
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even if somebody rejects cookies. So that's fine. But what happens next 

407
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year when Google finally joins Firefox and Apple and the rest of 

408
00:33:39,700 --> 00:33:44,700
them to say, okay. Third party's gone. Everyone who has still had third 

409
00:33:44,700 --> 00:33:49,300
party tracking running up until then, they're gonna find a cliff edge of their 

410
00:33:49,300 --> 00:33:54,300
tracking may well have dropped off because in the past year over that year, they'll not have 

411
00:33:54,300 --> 00:33:59,200
noticed if the first party tracking has become compromised, either by something daft like 

412
00:33:59,700 --> 00:34:04,500
setting up an entirely new category within the website product. And 

413
00:34:04,900 --> 00:34:09,800
that category not having been set up correctly or not even having had the JavaScript put in the header for 

414
00:34:09,800 --> 00:34:14,500
the category and all the product pages where it might have been made. The CMP has been introduced, 

415
00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:19,400
which has interfered with it, and we see that so often. So leading up 

416
00:34:20,300 --> 00:34:25,000
to the end of the cookie the leading up to the cookie deprecation by Google next 

417
00:34:25,000 --> 00:34:29,800
year, what's the percent roughly that you feel like tracking is 

418
00:34:29,800 --> 00:34:34,800
essentially not working? It doesn't have to be exact, but I'm curious. Yeah. So it's so tough 

419
00:34:34,800 --> 00:34:39,700
to actually kind of think in terms of those numbers. But if so currently, if you 

420
00:34:39,700 --> 00:34:44,300
are running third party, we heard the bizarre story recently of a company 

421
00:34:44,500 --> 00:34:49,200
major financial company in the UK, which has set up a brand new affiliate 

422
00:34:49,200 --> 00:34:54,200
program, third party tracking only. Why on earth would you do that? Third party 

423
00:34:54,200 --> 00:34:59,200
only means Wow. Twenty five percent to thirty percent of all the links sent to 

424
00:34:59,200 --> 00:35:03,700
them are not gonna track in the first place because anything over over Apple, 

425
00:35:04,500 --> 00:35:09,500
site iOS, iPads, Apple, in Safari, They won't track 

426
00:35:09,500 --> 00:35:14,400
at all. ITP stopped it. Anyone using Firefox, it won't track. It will track through 

427
00:35:14,400 --> 00:35:19,100
Google at the moment. Google from early next year is trialing in certain territories, 

428
00:35:19,700 --> 00:35:24,400
deprecating third party just to see the impact upon probably on their own earnings 

429
00:35:24,700 --> 00:35:29,300
because, you know, the way Google runs. So the rest of us, it's down. Mhmm. 

430
00:35:29,300 --> 00:35:34,000
So people will start noticing stuff early next year. Now if you think in terms of an 

431
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:38,800
average advertiser who's moving from third to first party so an average 

432
00:35:38,800 --> 00:35:43,800
one has probably got a tech team of, say, 10:20, thirty techies. Fine. If you're 

433
00:35:43,800 --> 00:35:48,700
the size of a global organization with, say, thirty programs across fifteen 

434
00:35:48,700 --> 00:35:53,600
countries or something, it might be that your actual sprint time is 

435
00:35:53,600 --> 00:35:58,600
three to six months for actually getting something done sitewide. So actually getting 

436
00:35:58,600 --> 00:36:03,600
into that time. So if you think back three to six months from quarter four 

437
00:36:03,600 --> 00:36:08,500
of next year, for instance, that needs to be started off by 

438
00:36:08,500 --> 00:36:13,500
very latest, probably February. And with all the stuff happening over q four, Black Friday, 

439
00:36:13,500 --> 00:36:18,400
all the rest of it, nobody's gonna be looking at anything before then, so they won't get scoped until March, 

440
00:36:18,800 --> 00:36:23,200
maybe June, by which time it's too late. Their program is gonna tank 

441
00:36:23,400 --> 00:36:27,900
come October, November in time for Christmas twenty twenty four. 

442
00:36:28,100 --> 00:36:33,100
So it's gonna be some very interesting time to see who's prepared, who's come to the 

443
00:36:33,100 --> 00:36:38,100
party, wearing a hat, or who's not. Now how much 

444
00:36:38,100 --> 00:36:43,000
do you think that utilizing something like API or server to server 

445
00:36:43,800 --> 00:36:48,700
can support that transition or not, and where are the gaps there? Oh, yeah. API 

446
00:36:49,100 --> 00:36:53,900
server to server tracking is fine. But as most major advertisers 

447
00:36:54,100 --> 00:36:58,600
will tell you, actually getting server to server installed is a phenomenal, 

448
00:36:59,000 --> 00:37:03,800
very difficult you know, technical project, which is why so many big 

449
00:37:03,800 --> 00:37:08,700
advertisers resisted it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We can do first party cookie. Yeah. Or we can do JavaScript 

450
00:37:08,700 --> 00:37:13,700
in the headers and stuff like that. But it just needs to be managed properly. And so 

451
00:37:13,700 --> 00:37:18,500
often we see it's not. Affiliate tends to get relatively short compared 

452
00:37:18,900 --> 00:37:23,800
to other marketing channels. So for instance, the Mhmm. SEO, 

453
00:37:24,100 --> 00:37:29,000
PPC guys. If the PPC team say, we need this happening 

454
00:37:29,400 --> 00:37:34,100
for this event, it happens very fast because every click 

455
00:37:34,200 --> 00:37:39,200
and for some of these b to b b to b programs, every click could be twenty twenty 

456
00:37:39,200 --> 00:37:44,200
dollars plus. So they need to make sure that the site actually responds and is able to 

457
00:37:44,200 --> 00:37:47,700
track what's happened on those PPC clicks pretty much immediately. 

458
00:37:48,800 --> 00:37:53,500
Affiliate, it's gonna be three weeks before your your cashback affiliate actually noticed that the 

459
00:37:53,500 --> 00:37:58,300
cashback isn't happening, and so you've got a bit of leeway time. So affiliate tends to get 

460
00:37:58,300 --> 00:38:03,300
pushed a little bit down. So when you got a stack of paper on the on the, CTO's desk, 

461
00:38:03,800 --> 00:38:08,500
yeah, it can go down there, and it just keeps going further and further down. As affiliate 

462
00:38:08,500 --> 00:38:13,400
now reflects about eighteen percent or so of an average advertiser's revenue 

463
00:38:13,400 --> 00:38:18,300
or earning opportunity, they will notice the difference if they start to compromise affiliate 

464
00:38:18,300 --> 00:38:22,900
far too much. Advertisers, on average, we see change their 

465
00:38:22,900 --> 00:38:27,900
websites between two and five percent every month. Two and two and five percent advertisers 

466
00:38:28,100 --> 00:38:33,100
change their month their advertisers, their programs, and their platforms every month, which 

467
00:38:33,100 --> 00:38:37,900
means over a period of year, more than a hundred percent of advertiser websites are changing. And each 

468
00:38:37,900 --> 00:38:42,600
one of those changes can impact the tracking capabilities and tracking ability 

469
00:38:43,000 --> 00:38:47,400
of the network. The network won't know anything about it because it's not within their 

470
00:38:48,100 --> 00:38:52,800
wheelhouse. It's all being dealt with advertiser side. They've delivered them. The affiliate 

471
00:38:52,800 --> 00:38:57,600
handover is delivered to the advertiser. And if they screw stuff up on their site, 

472
00:38:57,600 --> 00:39:02,600
nobody will know until the canary in the coal mine and the cashback website actually starts squeaking 

473
00:39:02,600 --> 00:39:07,600
and says, hang on. There's no cashback coming here. Every other affiliate will just see it start to drift 

474
00:39:07,600 --> 00:39:12,500
down and the conversion rate let rates will droop. And you 

475
00:39:12,500 --> 00:39:17,200
might find, okay. That conversion's gone down there. Let's con let's change my program to that. So they 

476
00:39:17,300 --> 00:39:22,300
instead of promoting computer company a, they'll comp I won't say any names, 

477
00:39:22,300 --> 00:39:26,900
computer company b instead. So they start moving. So the program starts to kind of 

478
00:39:27,400 --> 00:39:32,300
slow downs and affiliate is then discount to say, not very good this affiliate 

479
00:39:32,300 --> 00:39:37,200
stuff, is it? Why don't we kind of just turn it off and we'll just carry on doing what we're doing? Then 

480
00:39:37,200 --> 00:39:42,100
they realized, but because it's just not being tracked, that all of the sales they're getting, 

481
00:39:42,100 --> 00:39:47,100
once they close the program, the sales just go through the floor. Oh, holy shit. The trouble 

482
00:39:47,100 --> 00:39:52,000
is the transparency. If there's no transparency of what's happening, and the beauty of Moonpool 

483
00:39:52,000 --> 00:39:56,900
is it actually sheds a light on all of that stuff, Is that actually set up to 

484
00:39:56,900 --> 00:40:01,900
succeed? And if it's set up to succeed, you can guarantee that once it's set up to succeed and 

485
00:40:01,900 --> 00:40:06,900
the cookie is actually fired correctly, by the time it hits the thank you page 

486
00:40:06,900 --> 00:40:11,800
after the purchase, that stuff never gets screwed up with because that 

487
00:40:11,800 --> 00:40:16,800
kind of piece of piece of code is never changed. You don't change your thank you page. You 

488
00:40:16,800 --> 00:40:21,800
don't change your your checkout page because that just breaks a whole load of stuff. Sorry. I've got 

489
00:40:21,800 --> 00:40:26,800
a slash Fantastic. Say. I love it. And, I 

490
00:40:26,800 --> 00:40:31,700
love the ongoing theme of transparency, Chris. It seems like that just continues to 

491
00:40:31,700 --> 00:40:36,300
come up through this whole conversation, continues to come up in your career, in your experience 

492
00:40:36,600 --> 00:40:41,500
building pub discovery, in your experience with Moonpool. And I think my sense in working with you 

493
00:40:41,500 --> 00:40:46,500
and talking to you and our work with the PMA together has been that that's kind of 

494
00:40:46,500 --> 00:40:51,400
where our hope is for this industry to continue to build and improve on that transparency. 

495
00:40:51,600 --> 00:40:56,600
So tip of the cap to you there. Sure. Thanks. Yeah. And, just one of the things we're 

496
00:40:56,600 --> 00:41:01,000
working with with the measurements council kind of is, is looking at 

497
00:41:01,600 --> 00:41:05,700
toolbars and all those kinds of things, which are incredibly nontransparent. 

498
00:41:06,600 --> 00:41:11,600
Advertisers don't know what's going on. Huge companies with massive amounts of cash are behind the 

499
00:41:11,600 --> 00:41:16,400
toolbars, so it's a bit like US government lobbying. People with the most 

500
00:41:16,400 --> 00:41:21,300
cash get the most shout, which means that they get the most attention. And it's exactly what's 

501
00:41:21,300 --> 00:41:26,200
happening with the toolbar lobby. They're lobbying the advertisers saying, oh, yeah. Yes. It's all incremental, and 

502
00:41:26,200 --> 00:41:31,100
is it hell? Particularly when you see the cookie dropped or the cookie 

503
00:41:31,100 --> 00:41:35,900
activated fifteen seconds before somebody hits buy. It's not difficult to 

504
00:41:35,900 --> 00:41:40,800
police. It's not difficult to deal with. It just there's a lack of will to deal to deal with it 

505
00:41:40,800 --> 00:41:45,800
correctly. Yeah. And I I love the shining of the light. I think that that's the theme of of a 

506
00:41:45,800 --> 00:41:50,800
lot of, I think, the work that you are doing with the performance marketing association, the 

507
00:41:50,800 --> 00:41:55,800
work the collaboration that we have in talking about the measurements council. And I think the aim 

508
00:41:55,800 --> 00:42:00,600
is to kinda elevate and shine light and say, here's the here's the actual data. Here's the 

509
00:42:00,600 --> 00:42:05,500
information. You can make an informed more informed decision because of that. 

510
00:42:05,700 --> 00:42:10,300
You know, I it's funny. In in my old previous days getting into programmatic, I 

511
00:42:10,300 --> 00:42:15,000
remember transparency was like the buzzword du jour, and it comes in waves in different 

512
00:42:15,100 --> 00:42:20,100
in different areas. Right? And I think that it's kind of funny that twenty years 

513
00:42:20,100 --> 00:42:25,100
later, we're actually still asking for more transparency. We're actually still advocating 

514
00:42:25,300 --> 00:42:30,100
for more transparency in the industry. And so, ideally, that only benefits the consumer, only 

515
00:42:30,100 --> 00:42:34,800
benefits the buyer, the the advertiser, and and certainly the, you know, the partner in a lot of 

516
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:39,500
cases. Yeah. And that kind of transparency, it helps to 

517
00:42:39,500 --> 00:42:44,200
drive far more informed decisions of where you allocate time, 

518
00:42:44,200 --> 00:42:49,200
effort, budget, whatever it might be, to make sure that the overall goal 

519
00:42:49,200 --> 00:42:54,100
and the drive of of your company and your marketing is in the right place, which means that 

520
00:42:54,100 --> 00:42:59,000
you've got the right stuff for your consumers. Yeah. If they're cashback consumers, they know they're 

521
00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:03,800
gonna get a cashback, and it's gonna work. So they become perhaps more loyal 

522
00:43:03,800 --> 00:43:08,600
customers through the cashback relationship. That stuff kinda happens. 

523
00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:14,000
And, oh, don't get me get me started on Yeah. On the the budgets thing. Sorry. 

524
00:43:14,900 --> 00:43:19,300
One of one of my soapboxes is is budgets for affiliate programs. 

525
00:43:19,900 --> 00:43:24,800
Now if if you're running an affiliate program on a CPA basis, you only pay when somebody 

526
00:43:24,800 --> 00:43:29,800
buys stuff, which means that if that happens, why the hell would you put a budget on it? 

527
00:43:29,900 --> 00:43:34,900
You're gonna close your door of your high school. It's Macy's gonna close the door at Cap. Week three of the 

528
00:43:34,900 --> 00:43:39,800
month. Oh, we hit budget. We're gonna go home for three for a week. They don't do it. You 

529
00:43:39,800 --> 00:43:44,300
don't why would you do it online? Madness. Absolute madness. And you get people 

530
00:43:44,500 --> 00:43:49,100
pausing their affiliate program. What? If there's a pause because it's costing you 

531
00:43:49,100 --> 00:43:54,000
money, then you're doing it wrong. Because 

532
00:43:54,000 --> 00:43:58,800
on the CPA base, it's the only way it works. It should be a revenue 

533
00:43:59,100 --> 00:44:03,800
generator or a, rather than a cost center Yeah. Essentially, if it's being managed 

534
00:44:03,800 --> 00:44:08,800
properly. And if it's managed by the sales marketing, then if it's run managed 

535
00:44:08,800 --> 00:44:13,800
by the sales team, it will be worked like that. But too often, it comes under marketing as 

536
00:44:13,800 --> 00:44:18,800
a as a cost. Well, the question also is interesting one. Would you apply a 

537
00:44:18,800 --> 00:44:23,600
similar logic to paid search if paid search was hitting your ROAS or MER 

538
00:44:23,600 --> 00:44:28,500
goals, if you were getting left unvalue you know, if you're getting quality, if you're hitting your 

539
00:44:28,500 --> 00:44:33,200
goals on paid search, would you pause paid search? Probably not. Well, it's, 

540
00:44:33,500 --> 00:44:38,400
yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's it's a bit like kind of, is it mister Micawber or something from Charles 

541
00:44:38,400 --> 00:44:43,400
Dickens or whatever? If you're if you're spending nineteen shillings and making a 

542
00:44:43,400 --> 00:44:47,900
pound back sorry. This is old school. If you've saved ninety cents and getting a dollar back, 

543
00:44:49,200 --> 00:44:54,200
then great. If you're spending a dollar but getting ninety cents back, then stop it. So if it's 

544
00:44:54,200 --> 00:44:59,200
making a profit, why would you not do it? Yeah. Exactly. And and 

545
00:44:59,200 --> 00:45:03,500
you bring up an interesting, you know, with the with the pound, shilling example, 

546
00:45:04,300 --> 00:45:09,200
UK, US. What's the key difference you've observed in your career in terms of maybe the 

547
00:45:09,200 --> 00:45:13,900
performance marketing space? I would say the biggest shock to me first time I went to 

548
00:45:13,900 --> 00:45:18,700
affiliate summit west back in two two thousand something, eight, 

549
00:45:18,700 --> 00:45:23,600
nine, whatever it was, is how massive the the lead 

550
00:45:23,600 --> 00:45:28,600
gen side of affiliate is in the states. Now there's a I 

551
00:45:28,600 --> 00:45:33,600
think there's a a real issue amongst CMOs of understanding of what affiliate is. 

552
00:45:33,600 --> 00:45:38,500
They see lead generation and think that is affiliate, which is why when you're dealing with lead gen, you pause your 

553
00:45:38,500 --> 00:45:43,500
lead gen campaigns. The trouble is so many CMOs, that's the breadth of 

554
00:45:43,500 --> 00:45:48,000
their understanding, and they think they can pause a relationship campaign. 

555
00:45:48,500 --> 00:45:51,100
You ask your wife if you can do that. It doesn't work. 

556
00:45:56,100 --> 00:46:01,000
So yeah. Good point. If you're dealing with if you're dealing with partnerships or 

557
00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:05,900
performance marketing with a partner, with a a publisher that's got stuff happening 

558
00:46:05,900 --> 00:46:10,900
all the time. So you don't tell, Wall Street Journal, oh, we're pausing the affiliate stuff, 

559
00:46:10,900 --> 00:46:15,900
so you're not gonna earn something for week three of this month. That's not good not pretty good for 

560
00:46:15,900 --> 00:46:20,900
that relationship. So why would anybody ever cause a CPA affiliate program? 

561
00:46:20,900 --> 00:46:25,900
It's just a nonsense. So you should never have that split personality. You should 

562
00:46:25,900 --> 00:46:30,900
always deal with, okay, they both use the affiliate model, as Gino likes to call them. It's 

563
00:46:30,900 --> 00:46:35,700
not affiliate channel. The affiliate model is applied to multiple channels. The 

564
00:46:35,700 --> 00:46:40,600
trouble is most CMOs only ever see it as a channel, and it should be a model. Deal with your lead 

565
00:46:40,600 --> 00:46:45,400
gen channel, fine. Deal with it differently to your partnership and performance channel, 

566
00:46:45,500 --> 00:46:50,400
which is based on relationships. They're not the same thing. Yep. Chris, if 

567
00:46:50,400 --> 00:46:55,200
you are not working in digital, you're not talking affiliate, tracking 

568
00:46:55,300 --> 00:47:00,000
transparency, What are you doing for fun outside of work? I bake. If 

569
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:04,800
anyone's seen me on Instagram, they probably realize I bake a bit. I love it. I enjoy making 

570
00:47:04,800 --> 00:47:09,500
bread on whatever, and I sing. Wow. My passion is 

571
00:47:09,700 --> 00:47:14,700
singing. This past weekend, I I in the choir, we sang 

572
00:47:14,700 --> 00:47:19,500
the services for Chester Cathedral here in UK, which is fab, 

573
00:47:19,500 --> 00:47:24,200
certainly. You can actually look for Chester Cathedral for the sixth of 

574
00:47:24,600 --> 00:47:29,500
August, and you'll you'll hear our choir singing the services there. So we sang an amazing 

575
00:47:30,100 --> 00:47:35,100
Holst unductimitis and, Victoria Magnificat. So yeah. Beautiful. 

576
00:47:35,300 --> 00:47:40,300
If you're really into music, you could have, of choral music, then that's 

577
00:47:40,300 --> 00:47:45,300
my that's my weakness. That's really cool. We we'll have to the audience will have 

578
00:47:45,300 --> 00:47:50,300
to look that up. Maybe we'll have to get a little sample from you at some point. Cool. 

579
00:47:50,400 --> 00:47:55,300
Chris, I really appreciate having you. It's been a pleasure. I feel like we could go on for 

580
00:47:55,300 --> 00:48:00,100
for so much longer. I definitely got a I think everyone got a sense of how much 

581
00:48:00,100 --> 00:48:04,700
you've contributed to the affiliate industry from the performance marketing industry and also just aiming 

582
00:48:04,700 --> 00:48:09,700
for a higher standard of of transparency and and and value. So really appreciate 

583
00:48:09,700 --> 00:48:14,300
you. Hey. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much for inviting me. It's been, yeah, as you 

584
00:48:14,600 --> 00:48:18,500
say, well, you know, I can talk all day. But, yeah, I'm sure we could have chatted on longer. 

585
00:48:19,600 --> 00:48:24,500
There's plenty Thanks, Chris. Thank you. Have a great one.