Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and
have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm
your host, Ty DeGrange, and I am thrilled to talk with
Chris Tragic today. Welcome, Chris. Thanks very much. Great to talk to you again.
It's been a while since we met back in, back in April. Yeah. Absolutely. I
think we're in Miami for PL Live. Yep. Yeah.
Awesome. So good to have you on today, and, I'm really excited about this
conversation. For those of you who don't know, Chris is a true affiliate marketing
legend, veteran. He's built products from from the ground up,
launched publisher discovery to acquisition, and is now building Moonpool. Had some
great experiences. So ready to dive in with him today, and thanks so much for joining us. Great. It's
a pleasure. Absolutely. So maybe just starting off, tell us about your your
background, Chris. I know I think people would find it fascinating. Somebody as old as me goes back a long
way. I started off, out of college, ran a pub for four
years or in the state, and I call it a bar. But, basically, he ran a pub, which was
an interesting thing and made me vow never to ever think in terms of going into running
a pub or running anything in, dealing with kind of the food and drink and
things. But, yeah, that's that was fun. Then an art material shop, which and I thought, no. I don't wanna
be. Chris, is there is there any similarity between, maybe managing a pub and
managing affiliates? It's about relation I would
say. That's about the the key thing. It's about the relationships. And and if you got the
relationships right with your regulars in a pub, then they come back,
and you know what they're doing. You've got an idea what they're about. If somebody you
know has an argument, with a friend in the pub and you know them, then it's fine. If they don't know
them, you worry. But, luckily, with an affiliate, you don't get those kind
of arguments. It tends to be more about attribution or yeah. Yeah. You know,
Love it. I interrupted your your kind of background story to to kinda delve
into that a little bit, but we'd love to hear more if you if you have more to share there. Yeah. It's
I think they call it a patchwork portfolio ran an art material
shop because my degree was in art, history of arts and art fine
arts and things like that. Fell then into working with a
friend who had a print company, and I started typesetting on an eight inch Mac. If you can
imagine the fun of of well, actually, before that, I was sending stuff using
extremely early versions of HTML where you you specified the font, closed
font, and all of that stuff. And we sent that stuff down a forty eight hundred board
modem to a place that printed out the galleys of text, which you then glued down
with wax, old school type setting stuff. So I did it that way. Then we
bought an eight inch Mac, and the excitement of that You couldn't see the page, but you knew that
you you were doing stuff. You had to move the page around to work on page maker one
where things were gonna be. But But that was exciting because you had a whole page of stuff at
once with no galleys, no cutting. Yeah. So, yeah, I got involved in
on screen stuff way back then. Then I sold That's amazing. Sold
newspaper advertising, ended up joining a design agency,
and was what they call a bag carrier in Britain. Basically, I was kind of running from the
studio to the clients, and it might be anything from a mining machinery company to
Procter and Gamble. So it's kind of all sorts of different types of stuff. As part of
that while there That's amazing. I got involved, from a local charity
with these kind of fundraising web shops from a company called Byatt.
This is about middle of two thousand and two, early two thousand and two. Had about
six shops in it. It said Marks and Spencer's and the two or three others and whatever.
And as is the want of design agencies, when, Procter and Gamble
decided they were moving all of their stuff to London, got made redundant. But then,
bizarrely, as part of my kind of design work, I was doing some work for GE
and needed somebody to do some database stuff. So this is while we're still
rolling and, needed somebody to do it. Found somebody via a friend
of a friend, and I met Steve Brown on a roundabout in Surrey. We went to
GE's office, won the contract. We did the this kind of multiple, multi
language mailer into kind of, for events in Switzerland
and Portugal and whatever. I think it's what what it was anyway. And then kind of
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
meeting, start the deal. Great job. Roll forward six months. That's
amazing. Can I ask you, how did you guys pull that off? Landing
GE is especially at that time, was a quite a coup. Can you share more about what do
you think got the deal done? I think we're fairly innovative agency,
which is quite cool, we've done quite a lot of mailings for, P and G anyway, that
kind of stuff. Mhmm. But there weren't many people could could deal with.
I think, in multilanguage, multicountry database
management from which we then pulled out the the lists for
mailing. And I I kind of put together the structure for the mailing envelope,
contents, all the rest of it, and and that was all mailed out successfully, and they
got several hundred people, bums on seats, as they call it in the UK. Mhmm.
To enable them to have these conferences, and I would imagine knowing GE, each one of
the contracts they win from these conferences was worth a fortune. So I think if I
recall, that contract was about fourteen thousand pounds UK. So
and that was two thousand and one. So that's a long that's a lot of cashback then. There's all the
mailing. Yeah. And then kind of whilst I was kicking my heels after the, P and G
were tried up, somebody mentioned that this company, Perfiliate, in
Newcastle was looking for for somebody. And so I gave a call, and it
turned out it was Steve Brown's bunch again. So, I ended up December two
thousand and two at BIAT, which within a space of a month or
so, Mal Cowley and Paul Fellows and Steve had eventually
kind of thought, actually, we can turn this into a network. So by mid o three, we
were an affiliate network as well, which was a bit of fun. We started winning some good
contracts. I think in o four, we held our first
event, we didn't call it com not quite a conference, but a first affiliate event, where
we were entirely unusual amongst networks that we encouraged our
advertisers to meet with our affiliates. If you're at one of the other big networks,
they were always chaperoned or they were never allowed to meet or they were told our affiliates are,
they're they're unique and unusual and unique to just trust us. But, we
set up these, over the years, set up these events called Speakeasies, which started in a pub in
London. Of course. So we kind of, the guy from BT, which
is like the UK's at the time, the UK's biggest mobile phone operator and broadband
operator Mhmm. Was absolutely gobsmacked. And he turned he says, oh, I would
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
come and sit with, why? It's your business. It's his business. It's nothing to do with me. We're just the
enablers. So that was, I think, the start of transparency in affiliate. There
wasn't any beforehand. There was no transparency for one of the networks
who actually had a two and a two point five two and a half two thou two hundred and fifty percent
override, on one of its programs. We want it not knowing what's going on
because we said that, oh, yeah. The affiliate commission at twenty pounds, you added thirty percent,
so twenty six pounds. So we went in and won the contract on that and got a very irate phone
call. A few days later, when the previous network, we realized they've been
earning fifty pounds, but only paying the affiliate twenty.
So that was an interesting kind of, shakedown in the affiliate marketplace. And,
Yeah. It's exciting running a network and or be being part of involved in network.
Started off with four of us, and then by two thousand seven or so, there
were I've forgotten how many staff. I think fifty old staff and about seventy million
turnover if I remember. So and and we had some of the biggest programs in in the world, really. I
think, like, Ticketmaster, Apple, a whole bunch of other stuff like that.
Yeah. In your experience, what would you say kind of you
started to identify as your superpower or what you gravitated
to in the affiliate industry as you got started and grew by it?
I think it's, honesty, transparency. At the time, we had a
policy of, if we were defaulted on by an advertiser and they weren't
paying their bills, we were paid to affiliates anyway, which seems to go down quite well with affiliates
as you probably understand. And that was without kind of insurance against it or whatever. So there were
a few tricky moments, as you probably understand, in the early days, but, it came back
rewarded in much firmer relationships with all the affiliates. And, of
course, the advertisers responded to that knowing that we had really,
really loyal affiliate base behind us as well. How did you prevent
against those taking advantage of that, or do you think that's a policy
that could be continued in some capacity? Because it's a fascinating idea.
It's I think perhaps it's a slightly kind of, trickier world, and things are
happening on so much bigger scale now. Back in those days, programs were
not massive necessarily. Yeah. And now it's going from back then, you know,
affiliate being five, six percent of a company's turnover. It can now be eighteen, twenty percent, and that's big
bucks. It's a big deal for a lot of advertisers. So and, actually, for
any organization being able to have the spare
cash capacity to manage somebody going down particular at a time between,
say, two thousand and eight, two thousand and Yeah. Teen, those kind of periods, a company can
go pop go pop like that leanie owing million. Yeah. That's are these not Yeah.
Not doable again. It's a great gimmick at the time, maybe. Yeah. You're not quite a bank, as
they say, so, doesn't really make sense. But as we will get to in
this episode, perhaps technology is the answer and transparency through technology,
which we'll which we'll get to. Yeah. Exactly. And I think transparency can the
next bit we are playing at, kind of after buyout, we sold buyout
to AOL for a lot, which is very nice. And then
Congrats. Yeah. It was a it was a well, a lot of very, very hard week
work by Steve Brown, who is the, the guy that managed the whole process,
but running between lawyers' offices for about a year or something from the sound of things.
And and and after AOL had spent a year couple of years kind of sucking the juice out of it and
ruining it like it does with most companies, so you can edit that out if you want, but
Awin came. I think that's the good stuff. Yeah. Awin came in and and I would
say, but potentially rescued. Biatt was still about the biggest network in the UK at the
time. Still Mhmm. Out of all of that mobile phone networks, the the Viator
network ran everyone but one. All but Vodafone was still on Viator network.
Mhmm. I was running Sky TV program. We had, Ticketmaster,
huge numbers of big programs. And, yeah, kind of millions
a month in terms of affiliate commissions, which is kind of what you wanna what you wanna hear going on.
I left shortly after the acquisition by Awen and went client side for a year and
had a bit of fun. It's quite different actually, kind of starting a program app, and actually
started the program and launched on CJ, which as it was in web hosting, it
made most sense because pretty much every other web hosting provider was on CJ. That's where the affiliates
were. And I think that's the information I got from doing that was it's bloody
hard recruiting affiliates. Damn hard getting affiliates on your program if you're new
and untried. So that's really, really tough. But it's also hard
actually finding affiliates, and that was a real real issue, and it's Google
search is not the way to go. But back in two thousand and ten stroke eleven, that's
all I had to go on. And so, got the programs up and running. It's still running
very successfully on CJ, so it must be doing the right kind of stuff. It's still,
and it's it was, cutting its numbers even from the quite early days when I had quite a
few really quite nice loyal old friends from affiliate who were the guys who were the
mainstay of the initial affiliates on the program. So it was it was a good learning
experience from my perspective on on that side of the industry. After that,
I'm trying to think, oh, it's while I was doing that. Steve Brown gave me a phone call again, I think,
and, he'd just started up an SEO company or or got involved
in and invested in a company called Linkdex, which he may have come across, which was
trying to become a competitor, conductor, or BrightEdge in those kind of
people. Mhmm. They were doing some pretty good stuff, so I ended up kind of going
there, doing marketing and selling. And it was Mhmm. I'm not a specialist in
anything, you know, as you can tell from my kind of, checkered history, running pubs
and, and selling advertising. So I I can pretty much cut
cut myself to anything. So I ended up doing marketing and,
running events and watching what else we were doing. Oh, yeah. I was selling as well, so we're
going to into agencies to sell the Linkdex product. From very early on, I
said to Steve, hey. We could find affiliates for this, couldn't we? Because it was basically it was backlink analysis.
So Mhmm. From that, Steve and I kinda basically worked out, okay. And
within the space of a few few months, we had, again, an early version of what was called
Linkdex public publisher discovery and, got a few good
clients on board. And then Linkdex was acquired in twenty
sixteen more late twenty fifteen, early twenty sixteen. And they thought, right,
we're gonna concentrate on the SEO stuff. Don't want this affiliate stuff. I said, well, I'll give you a
fiverr for the software for the data. It turned out a bit more than a fiverr, but, basically,
I was gonna we kind of I took on myself and a colleague, the two of
us, took on that, set up a a separate company, and we
started off with kind of, clients like, June. Like,
Apple was one of our clients and Adidas, some fairly big clients who were using us to
find affiliates. And we started working with a whole load of other people that, DAZN
doesn't I forgot now. DAZN will be us in the States. Yeah. Which is doing
kind of sports stuff. And they just needed to find, okay, we're gonna set up in Canada. We need
some Canadian affiliates, like, now. And so it's kind of, it was quite fun doing that
stuff, but it was really manual because it's based on list of SEO stuff. But it
actually enabled us to to analyze the data in some detail and find the appropriate
affiliates. So two thousand sixteen, we we grew that to
reasonable enough to be able to be going to mostly conferences. So did quite a few affiliates, some at east
and west, and, Mhmm. Or Germany, Amsterdam,
Barcelona. So we did quite a few events signing up. And, also, in the gambling area, which is quite
different, we discovered how different gambling and and forex is as an
affiliate market. So those differences are are quite marked as you
probably know yourself. So that was quite fun. Twenty eighteen, somebody came knocking on
the door saying, we've got this thing which is AI
based, and it deals with a network's internal affiliates. And they were working
with a small UK network called Affiliate Future and analyzing their
internal affiliates to to match affiliate with advertiser.
Quite clever. And so they acquired our data and acquired us,
so which was quite nice to be able to sell a company and carry on working with it. So we helped to
develop that process and develop that product. So it's a machine learning and AI
driven version of publishing. So no longer lists, you're working on a platform,
and you say, yeah, I want. Mhmm. The kind of affiliates who work with, say,
three, four networks, but are also working in, say, pet foods or in
fashion or whatever it might be. And the other beauty for a an
advertiser's point of view is they can go into publisher discovery and say, right. I'm Bloomingdale's.
Who's on the Macy's program? And you can just hit the button, and you come up with all Macy's two
and a half thousand publishers, got public links on their site. Really simple.
And then there's the the ability to kind of find the email address within the
platform, contact them, recruit them. So, yeah, that was fun. Chris, what
would you say kind of fueled the growth of publisher discovery?
Obviously, that's a really compelling value proposition. You had growth leading up to
the introduction of AI. You had growth after that. Can you tell us a little bit
more about what do you think led to the success of publisher discovery? I think it was
because, well, as I identified when trying to do it myself, it's really
tough finding affiliates. And the usual way
is just kind of trolling through Google by keyword, which is a real longhand
way of doing it. Publisher's discovery enables a short kind of shortcut
that. Initially, with our old manual version just by looking at a win
one dot com or quick serve dot com and the other domains for CJ
and whatever. It was clunky, but it worked. It enabled you to look at all of those guys and
work out which ones are appropriate. And then you can work out which ones are then
connected to which programs. So you can see, right. They're the guys promoting Dell.
So they're obviously in the right sector. So, therefore, you can then but you can you can then
segment the right bunch of affiliates and then start recruiting. That's this
is the shortcut bit, isn't it? It just saved hours. And I think one of the networks that worked with
this said it saved about five hours a week of affiliate recruiting,
which is, you know, significant for an account back in time period. So that kind of
stuff, it pays for it. And, Chris, with regard to the networks, were you
technically tapping via API to be able to enable that, or was it
by some other integration or partnership? No. Net all the data is public
domain. So it's it's kind of if you do a backlink analysis for a win one
dot com, you come up with a great list if you're using Semrush or whatever it might be.
Actually doing something UTM based identification. Right? Not even necessarily that. Because if you've
if you look at a wave one dot com forward slash, and it will have, a equals
blah, b z v equals such and such. Same going into impact. It's
very simple. It's domain dot com slash So link structure? Number
dot slash. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So link structure was the only thing you needed
to determine who is linking to who in the affiliate industry. Exactly. Yeah. It's that simple.
So, just finally on who's t t m seven five, whatever it is,
I forgot the numbers now, but, yeah, the Ticketmaster one on impact now is t m seventy
five some dot net slash c slash blah. Piece of cake to just decipher
it. So not that complex. That's great. When you're building
you're thinking about product development. This will come up probably in other
topics as well. But how were you able to kind of prioritize
building, products like these and kind of informing
what you're doing now with Moonpool. I'm I'm curious to learn more, especially for those interested in
product Yeah. Those interested in partner marketing related products. Really,
really, fascinating to hear more about your background there. Yeah. I think with
publisher discovery, it was kind of we were slaloming.
Kind of just, oh, that works. Try that. And if that comes back with money on it,
then great. You carry on with it. Mhmm. And it's about understanding where it can go
to. And so with publisher discovery, so, okay. Yeah. We can do that. But and then you
can flip it on its head and do something, which is publisher side. So looking for programs,
so the potential for that, and understanding what you can do with the data. And it's just being
slightly more creative with the the data you're working with to come up
with something which somebody wants to buy. And the key thing is, is is it gonna save
somebody time and effort? Because that's the the goal of any automation. If If you can automate
something, it's gonna make it faster, make it simpler, make it slicker, make it actually deliver
what you want without all the usual problems you'd have with, you know,
go back to Google search or is this guy a website? Who owns it? I
can't find who's the who is for it. Those kinds of stuff. You avoid all of that because
it's all it's all there. It's all dealt with. And that's what we're trying to do, stuff which
is Yeah. Is a no brainer. Oh, why wouldn't you do that? And I think the same things
in inform the things we're doing with moon pools. How about doing this? Ah,
yeah. That's great, but it's not urgent, so that goes down the road to six months time for
another facing product. And just recently, just conversations with people at
conferences has led to us. I was thinking, actually, no. What we thought might be the the route to
go by talking to people about how we could take save them time
and save and make life easier for them, but also, more importantly, make things
actually work better for them. We just changed the way we look at stuff, changed the
way we position the product. Don't be frightened to completely ditch an avenue
you've started going up because you think that's the right thing. If you talk to people and they
they think, no. Just ditch it. Bring it back later. Maybe as an additional part
to another part of the product at a later date. But, follow where people are
actually wanting the time and effort to be put put in from their perspective. Always follow what
somebody wants rather than what you wanna sell. How do you think about the kind
of gathering of qualitative and quantitative customer feedback
and discovery and understanding what customer needs, what are the
paying customers looking for, what are they not looking for, what are their pain points to kind of uncover those
great value props in product? Like, what how would you how do you approach that with
both? Yeah. In terms of kind of understanding how people use it, it's great to use I mean,
it's amazing that tools like Amplitude cost nothing, which is barmy,
absolutely nuts. If you use Amplitude if you're building a product, get Amplitude built
into it from the ground up. You then have an idea of exactly what people are doing
inside your your website. You really understand then, oh, yes. They are doing
that. Oh, no. Nobody actually touches that button ever. So, okay, it's not doing
not adding value. Maybe hold a little bit of a focus group with some of your stronger users. Say,
have you looked at this? Yeah. It doesn't do much for us. In which case, you think, yeah, pointless. Let's
move on to something else. And it enables you to kind of to look at
behaviors without even having to go to some hot jar of looking at people in in
a microscopic level of of clicking on a page. The amplitude will tell you what they're
clicking on, and then you can assess across, you know, ten, hundred, thousand
users which parts are most useful, what the usual routes are, and then you
just make those routes easier. Those kinds of things. And if that's what's important,
then you have to make sure the UI is doing the same thing, following the same process so you make
those simple routes to visually follow. That way, it makes it much faster for people to
find the stuff they want. That's awesome. With Moonpool, how did that kind of get sparked,
kicked off? How what was the genesis of Moonpool? I see entirely a product of Steve's
massive brain. Steve has an ability to create Yeah. A vision from
half an idea and build stuff. It worked very well with, with,
of course, and it's worked pretty well since then. And Moonpool is no different. He's,
he has an uncanny ability to create from, a raw vision something that can
actually work. And the fact that listen. My third journey with
Steve's proves that I probably think in a usefully similar way, but,
maybe with a bit of a Venn diagram thing, I do stuff with you. And he says, yeah. You're future
engaging, Chris. So I'm I'm normally kind of four months down the road where Steve's trying to make stuff happen
now. But, having that ability to kind of to think around a
prod a production, I can think, okay. Yeah. It'd be nice to be able to get to that
kind of stuff. I reckon from conversations, this would be really useful, but we don't know that
yet. Let's have a look and see if we can get the lily pad to get across the pond to make that
work. Now if you know my I like When you're usually.
No. I love it. And it it with your collaboration with Steve, what has made
it work? It sounds like there's elements of forward thinking, here and now,
visionary, integrator. Like, how do you, how do you
balance that? It sounds really, really cool. I don't think it's that complex. Steve's
the guy with the original vision. I just basically try and, I try and put some jam on the
bread and butter, which, hopefully, some of the ideas stick. Some of them have worked, which is great,
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
with Moonpool. We're coming along. We're doing some very exciting stuff now with,
Moonpool verifications where it enables programs to say, yes. This works,
and it's it's worked every week for the past x. You know? So so we the automated
system enables people to check a program and audit the program weekly, make
sure that the links work as you would expect to them. And the toughest part is actually
understanding what's happening in that in that handover, the affiliate handover
process between the the publisher side and the advertiser. And so much
technology now get becomes involved that things can get in the way. Things
like consent management platforms, which are becoming well, they've been an issue across the
whole of Europe and, UK certainly, but now you've got something like
ten states, or is it now eleven states in the US, all of whom now have privacy
regulations coming in, that are requiring people to say, yes. I'm okay with
cookies or don't sell my data or, for some reason, every single state seems to be
different and seems bizarre to me and cross here, across but there you go. But,
that kind of stuff can interfere with, you know, when according to, I think I'm
trying to think where it was. I think one of the magazines was stating that something around
forty eight to fifty percent of consumers reject cookies and don't accept. That
can be really quite scary if you're running an affiliate program. So if only half of your
cookies are likely to be rejected, then I think affiliate cookies need
to be dealt with slightly different, third or first first party. Third party, of course, will
disappear soon. But, your first party cookie, if it's coming from a site
where the consumer understands that there's a relationship, then it should not be dealt with
as a marketing one. It should be dealt with as a necessary one. Nothing as very much, as,
James Little has argued quite forcibly across various conferences recently
that somebody coming from a cashback site, the contract has started with a cashback site, not with
the landing on the cons the advertiser's page because they want their cashback. If that's
held up by a cook cook first party cookie, which doesn't which is not
necessary, then the whole kind of premise of of the contract is broken.
So cashback and, to some extent, maybe coupon size, the cookie should
be allowed to run through. Interesting. Oh, do you think that there's gonna
have to be and what do you think the end goal of that debate is? Because we kinda jumped into
that topic. Is there gonna have to be some kind of a almost
nexus like national or state ruling? Because it feels like there's a
number of, like, vocal voices arguing on both sides with legitimate
questions. Where do you think that's going? Where do we think we land in years
down the road or months? In the the US, it's difficult to say. In Europe, of
course, we've segment fragmented again slightly, but even though Mhmm.
UK is no longer effectively part of the EU, most companies in the UK
follow EU law because it's the only way you're gonna sell into Europe. You're not gonna do it by
adopting a different, legal standard. In the US, it's very difficult
different anyway because you had, as you say, the Amazon Nexus issue. There
will be issues when you're dealing with something which is not just, say, for instance,
statewide. It's not like popping along along to your local 07:11 or Walmart.
Stuff is national or global. If you can buy from Kaspersky,
you're buying from Kaspersky anywhere in the world, or same same with Dell. I looked on
CJ the other day. I think there's thirty odd separate programs that are all they're all totally
separate, all with different legal parameters for Germany, for
Spain, for US, for UK, etcetera. So it's very difficult for an
advertiser to deal with all of those legal parameters. From a publisher point of
view, they don't have necessarily that viewpoint and the understanding of the legal stuff.
So it's really tough, and it's it's one that can only kind of work
well through transparency, through an understandings
between publisher and advertiser. Yeah. This is what happens. If you're sending
if you're running a global, say, email campaign, you need to have the
understanding that if you're sending to different sites, you need to make sure you segment your email list so that
it's going to the right place, and you're dealing with the right kind of right kind of intros
as it were. And that's down to big publishers, big advertisers working together, you
know, more partnership way. How would you say there's a lot in there.
A lot to kind of unpack and talk through. But if you think about, you know, loophole is
helping in a number of levels. What would you say how how big is the problem would
you say? Like, the the linking not working Yeah. The the linking not having the,
what's the percent that that's impacting the industry in your opinion? The problems
are they're big so far, about to be huge. I mean, if you think in
terms of for an average program that's got first party tracking in place. Now
a proportion of the the first party tracking, if it's only first party tracking, it
won't be working because the consumer will be saying no to reject
cookies or they'll want to manage their cookies. Proportion will like it. Now,
of course, we see and we see a huge proportion. I can't remember the it's over
eighty percent of the advertisers have retained their third party tracking,
not on that no. Networks, let's say, WebGaines or Everflow or whatever, don't
have a third party backup. But for so many of them, we see they've still got the third
party tracking in. Now if there's a program that's been running ten years, it probably only ever had third party tracking
in. Now when they put their first party in, they just forgot to take third party stuff
out. So you've got first party and third party. Now if the first party is firing,
great. If the third party is firing as well, that will probably be firing
even if somebody rejects cookies. So that's fine. But what happens next
year when Google finally joins Firefox and Apple and the rest of
them to say, okay. Third party's gone. Everyone who has still had third
party tracking running up until then, they're gonna find a cliff edge of their
tracking may well have dropped off because in the past year over that year, they'll not have
noticed if the first party tracking has become compromised, either by something daft like
setting up an entirely new category within the website product. And
that category not having been set up correctly or not even having had the JavaScript put in the header for
the category and all the product pages where it might have been made. The CMP has been introduced,
which has interfered with it, and we see that so often. So leading up
to the end of the cookie the leading up to the cookie deprecation by Google next
year, what's the percent roughly that you feel like tracking is
essentially not working? It doesn't have to be exact, but I'm curious. Yeah. So it's so tough
to actually kind of think in terms of those numbers. But if so currently, if you
are running third party, we heard the bizarre story recently of a company
major financial company in the UK, which has set up a brand new affiliate
program, third party tracking only. Why on earth would you do that? Third party
only means Wow. Twenty five percent to thirty percent of all the links sent to
them are not gonna track in the first place because anything over over Apple,
site iOS, iPads, Apple, in Safari, They won't track
at all. ITP stopped it. Anyone using Firefox, it won't track. It will track through
Google at the moment. Google from early next year is trialing in certain territories,
deprecating third party just to see the impact upon probably on their own earnings
because, you know, the way Google runs. So the rest of us, it's down. Mhmm.
So people will start noticing stuff early next year. Now if you think in terms of an
average advertiser who's moving from third to first party so an average
one has probably got a tech team of, say, 10:20, thirty techies. Fine. If you're
the size of a global organization with, say, thirty programs across fifteen
countries or something, it might be that your actual sprint time is
three to six months for actually getting something done sitewide. So actually getting
into that time. So if you think back three to six months from quarter four
of next year, for instance, that needs to be started off by
very latest, probably February. And with all the stuff happening over q four, Black Friday,
all the rest of it, nobody's gonna be looking at anything before then, so they won't get scoped until March,
maybe June, by which time it's too late. Their program is gonna tank
come October, November in time for Christmas twenty twenty four.
So it's gonna be some very interesting time to see who's prepared, who's come to the
party, wearing a hat, or who's not. Now how much
do you think that utilizing something like API or server to server
can support that transition or not, and where are the gaps there? Oh, yeah. API
server to server tracking is fine. But as most major advertisers
will tell you, actually getting server to server installed is a phenomenal,
very difficult you know, technical project, which is why so many big
advertisers resisted it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We can do first party cookie. Yeah. Or we can do JavaScript
in the headers and stuff like that. But it just needs to be managed properly. And so
often we see it's not. Affiliate tends to get relatively short compared
to other marketing channels. So for instance, the Mhmm. SEO,
PPC guys. If the PPC team say, we need this happening
for this event, it happens very fast because every click
and for some of these b to b b to b programs, every click could be twenty twenty
dollars plus. So they need to make sure that the site actually responds and is able to
track what's happened on those PPC clicks pretty much immediately.
Affiliate, it's gonna be three weeks before your your cashback affiliate actually noticed that the
cashback isn't happening, and so you've got a bit of leeway time. So affiliate tends to get
pushed a little bit down. So when you got a stack of paper on the on the, CTO's desk,
yeah, it can go down there, and it just keeps going further and further down. As affiliate
now reflects about eighteen percent or so of an average advertiser's revenue
or earning opportunity, they will notice the difference if they start to compromise affiliate
far too much. Advertisers, on average, we see change their
websites between two and five percent every month. Two and two and five percent advertisers
change their month their advertisers, their programs, and their platforms every month, which
means over a period of year, more than a hundred percent of advertiser websites are changing. And each
one of those changes can impact the tracking capabilities and tracking ability
of the network. The network won't know anything about it because it's not within their
wheelhouse. It's all being dealt with advertiser side. They've delivered them. The affiliate
handover is delivered to the advertiser. And if they screw stuff up on their site,
nobody will know until the canary in the coal mine and the cashback website actually starts squeaking
and says, hang on. There's no cashback coming here. Every other affiliate will just see it start to drift
down and the conversion rate let rates will droop. And you
might find, okay. That conversion's gone down there. Let's con let's change my program to that. So they
instead of promoting computer company a, they'll comp I won't say any names,
computer company b instead. So they start moving. So the program starts to kind of
slow downs and affiliate is then discount to say, not very good this affiliate
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
they realized, but because it's just not being tracked, that all of the sales they're getting,
once they close the program, the sales just go through the floor. Oh, holy shit. The trouble
is the transparency. If there's no transparency of what's happening, and the beauty of Moonpool
is it actually sheds a light on all of that stuff, Is that actually set up to
succeed? And if it's set up to succeed, you can guarantee that once it's set up to succeed and
the cookie is actually fired correctly, by the time it hits the thank you page
after the purchase, that stuff never gets screwed up with because that
kind of piece of piece of code is never changed. You don't change your thank you page. You
don't change your your checkout page because that just breaks a whole load of stuff. Sorry. I've got
a slash Fantastic. Say. I love it. And, I
love the ongoing theme of transparency, Chris. It seems like that just continues to
come up through this whole conversation, continues to come up in your career, in your experience
building pub discovery, in your experience with Moonpool. And I think my sense in working with you
and talking to you and our work with the PMA together has been that that's kind of
where our hope is for this industry to continue to build and improve on that transparency.
So tip of the cap to you there. Sure. Thanks. Yeah. And, just one of the things we're
working with with the measurements council kind of is, is looking at
toolbars and all those kinds of things, which are incredibly nontransparent.
Advertisers don't know what's going on. Huge companies with massive amounts of cash are behind the
toolbars, so it's a bit like US government lobbying. People with the most
cash get the most shout, which means that they get the most attention. And it's exactly what's
happening with the toolbar lobby. They're lobbying the advertisers saying, oh, yeah. Yes. It's all incremental, and
is it hell? Particularly when you see the cookie dropped or the cookie
activated fifteen seconds before somebody hits buy. It's not difficult to
police. It's not difficult to deal with. It just there's a lack of will to deal to deal with it
correctly. Yeah. And I I love the shining of the light. I think that that's the theme of of a
lot of, I think, the work that you are doing with the performance marketing association, the
work the collaboration that we have in talking about the measurements council. And I think the aim
is to kinda elevate and shine light and say, here's the here's the actual data. Here's the
information. You can make an informed more informed decision because of that.
You know, I it's funny. In in my old previous days getting into programmatic, I
remember transparency was like the buzzword du jour, and it comes in waves in different
in different areas. Right? And I think that it's kind of funny that twenty years
later, we're actually still asking for more transparency. We're actually still advocating
for more transparency in the industry. And so, ideally, that only benefits the consumer, only
benefits the buyer, the the advertiser, and and certainly the, you know, the partner in a lot of
cases. Yeah. And that kind of transparency, it helps to
drive far more informed decisions of where you allocate time,
effort, budget, whatever it might be, to make sure that the overall goal
and the drive of of your company and your marketing is in the right place, which means that
you've got the right stuff for your consumers. Yeah. If they're cashback consumers, they know they're
gonna get a cashback, and it's gonna work. So they become perhaps more loyal
customers through the cashback relationship. That stuff kinda happens.
And, oh, don't get me get me started on Yeah. On the the budgets thing. Sorry.
One of one of my soapboxes is is budgets for affiliate programs.
Now if if you're running an affiliate program on a CPA basis, you only pay when somebody
buys stuff, which means that if that happens, why the hell would you put a budget on it?
You're gonna close your door of your high school. It's Macy's gonna close the door at Cap. Week three of the
month. Oh, we hit budget. We're gonna go home for three for a week. They don't do it. You
don't why would you do it online? Madness. Absolute madness. And you get people
pausing their affiliate program. What? If there's a pause because it's costing you
money, then you're doing it wrong. Because
on the CPA base, it's the only way it works. It should be a revenue
generator or a, rather than a cost center Yeah. Essentially, if it's being managed
properly. And if it's managed by the sales marketing, then if it's run managed
by the sales team, it will be worked like that. But too often, it comes under marketing as
a as a cost. Well, the question also is interesting one. Would you apply a
similar logic to paid search if paid search was hitting your ROAS or MER
goals, if you were getting left unvalue you know, if you're getting quality, if you're hitting your
goals on paid search, would you pause paid search? Probably not. Well, it's,
yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's it's a bit like kind of, is it mister Micawber or something from Charles
Dickens or whatever? If you're if you're spending nineteen shillings and making a
pound back sorry. This is old school. If you've saved ninety cents and getting a dollar back,
then great. If you're spending a dollar but getting ninety cents back, then stop it. So if it's
making a profit, why would you not do it? Yeah. Exactly. And and
you bring up an interesting, you know, with the with the pound, shilling example,
UK, US. What's the key difference you've observed in your career in terms of maybe the
performance marketing space? I would say the biggest shock to me first time I went to
affiliate summit west back in two two thousand something, eight,
nine, whatever it was, is how massive the the lead
gen side of affiliate is in the states. Now there's a I
think there's a a real issue amongst CMOs of understanding of what affiliate is.
They see lead generation and think that is affiliate, which is why when you're dealing with lead gen, you pause your
lead gen campaigns. The trouble is so many CMOs, that's the breadth of
their understanding, and they think they can pause a relationship campaign.
You ask your wife if you can do that. It doesn't work.
So yeah. Good point. If you're dealing with if you're dealing with partnerships or
performance marketing with a partner, with a a publisher that's got stuff happening
all the time. So you don't tell, Wall Street Journal, oh, we're pausing the affiliate stuff,
so you're not gonna earn something for week three of this month. That's not good not pretty good for
that relationship. So why would anybody ever cause a CPA affiliate program?
It's just a nonsense. So you should never have that split personality. You should
always deal with, okay, they both use the affiliate model, as Gino likes to call them. It's
not affiliate channel. The affiliate model is applied to multiple channels. The
trouble is most CMOs only ever see it as a channel, and it should be a model. Deal with your lead
gen channel, fine. Deal with it differently to your partnership and performance channel,
which is based on relationships. They're not the same thing. Yep. Chris, if
you are not working in digital, you're not talking affiliate, tracking
transparency, What are you doing for fun outside of work? I bake. If
anyone's seen me on Instagram, they probably realize I bake a bit. I love it. I enjoy making
bread on whatever, and I sing. Wow. My passion is
singing. This past weekend, I I in the choir, we sang
the services for Chester Cathedral here in UK, which is fab,
certainly. You can actually look for Chester Cathedral for the sixth of
August, and you'll you'll hear our choir singing the services there. So we sang an amazing
Holst unductimitis and, Victoria Magnificat. So yeah. Beautiful.
If you're really into music, you could have, of choral music, then that's
my that's my weakness. That's really cool. We we'll have to the audience will have
to look that up. Maybe we'll have to get a little sample from you at some point. Cool.
Chris, I really appreciate having you. It's been a pleasure. I feel like we could go on for
for so much longer. I definitely got a I think everyone got a sense of how much
you've contributed to the affiliate industry from the performance marketing industry and also just aiming
for a higher standard of of transparency and and and value. So really appreciate
you. Hey. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much for inviting me. It's been, yeah, as you
say, well, you know, I can talk all day. But, yeah, I'm sure we could have chatted on longer.
There's plenty Thanks, Chris. Thank you. Have a great one.