Affiliate Marketing Podcast - Back to the future with Matt Frary

In this week's episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, Lee-Ann is joined by Matt Frary to discuss affiliate marketing over the years and get some valuable tips for affiliate managers. Matt Frary has launched several successful companies, including SmarterChaos and She Is Media - both acquired by Digital Media Solutions (DMS) in 2020 - and SmartDog Marketing. 

Listen to the podcast to hear more about:

• The story of how Matt got into affiliate marketing
• How affiliate marketing has changed and how technology has helped to drive this over the years
• The importance of spending a brand’s money in the right way as an affiliate manager

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hi, and welcome to the affiliate insider podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers in the gaming industry. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the inside scoop on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliate and tech entrepreneurs and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started. Welcome.

Speaker 2: 0:54

It goes to the affiliate side, a podcast with mealy and Johnston. And today I am super excited because we have got an amazing guest on the show. I am joined today by Matt ferry, who has more than two decades of experience in affiliate marketing, digital commerce, internet marketing industries, and is known as the chief of chaos. Um, he's been developing an understanding what it takes to help brands achieve ROI in a highly competitive, um, and growing space and matters launch several companies, including smarter chaos. And she is media, which were both acquired by digital media solutions in 2020 and smart dog marketing. And without any further ado, Matt, it's absolutely amazing to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for joining

Speaker 3: 1:41

Leanne. Thank you so much for having me. That was a mouthful and, um, it's really fun to hear all of that. Uh, it's like an outsider looking into your own life, looking back like that. It's, it's kind of crazy.

Speaker 2: 1:54

That was kind of cool. I mean, you've been around for probably as long if not longer than I have in the affiliate space. So I'm really, really pleased to have you here. What I want to start with today is for you to just tell us your story of how you got into affiliate marketing.

Speaker 3: 2:09

Yeah. You know, one day you wake up and you realize you're old as dirt and, uh, then you take a look back. But you know, when I take a look at, uh, how I got into affiliate marketing is I answered a job ad at my local university in 1999. So back when the internet was just starting to get hot and everybody was getting online and getting excited, um, there was a job ad in my local, a university that said, uh, do you have any sales experience? Would you like to work for ebags.com? And I thought, Hey, that's perfect. I have some sales experience. And I would like to work for ebags.com. So I went to the interview and I wound up, um, for the next year, uh, helping them, uh, get links, links from travel websites. And if we got those links, then we would pay those travel websites, a percentage of sale. And lo and behold, there was a term for that. It was called affiliate marketing. And, um, that's how I got my start. And then immediately, while I was doing that immediately after that, um,[inaudible] bags launched this charity portal that basically if you shopped, uh, for your organization, let's say it was cancer society. Then, um, we had a start page and you would set your start page on your browser to kickstart, which was the name of our company and 50% of the proceeds of your shopping. Um, 50% of the affiliate commissions would come back to your organization. So, um, there's a lot of organizations like that today. I think we were one of the originals and I got to, I got to see every single affiliate program, every network at the time and early on in my early twenties, I was forging a lot of relationships, uh, in the industry. That's how I got started.

Speaker 2: 4:04

So really through the nuts and bolts of actually just getting on a learning on the job, which is pretty much how affiliate managers get into the industry today, especially in the gaming space, which is where we kind of, um, are seated. So now that we know a little bit about your long and illustrious history, I wanted to take time to talk about going back to the future in this episode, for some of the affiliate managers that are coming into, um, you know, marketing roles, digital roles, uh, they don't really know where this industry has come from. And I think you and I are probably two of the most experienced people that can talk about that. So let's go a little bit back into the future and talk about some of the biggest changes that you've seen in affiliate marketing and program management during this time, taking us from that initial, like click here for a link and get a kickback to where we are today and the ecosystem that we're in today.

Speaker 3: 4:52

Well, there's so much history there and it's hard to sum it all up, but my next move right out of, uh, running the charity portal was one of the next moves was basically building an affiliate network. So I built one of the top 20 affiliate networks, uh, called ROI rocket. And so during that time, it's very what I would call transactional. So affiliate marketing went from, Hey, would you place my link? Actually it was, Hey, uh, would you place this banner that was like punched a monkey or, um, get the cash from that? Yeah,

Speaker 2: 5:28

Correct. Yep.

Speaker 3: 5:30

So it was these, let's get a click to let's get a sale. And then, um, you know, you look back at what the affiliates were back during that time. And we all pictured these, uh, affiliates in their basement that were, um, coming up with all these schemes and tricks to get you to click or get you to purchase or put in a lead or something like that. As I was building out ROI rocket, I realized that it was a very, it was very transactional nature. And what I mean by that was there, wasn't a lot of value added up and down the value chain. It was just simply, um, can I get you a lead? Can I get you a click? And can I get it for this amount of money? Um, and so I worked as a very transactional broker between the advertiser and the affiliate, but I wasn't adding a lot of value to the affiliate or to the advertiser, so to speak, it was just jamming, clicks, leads, sales calls, whatever I could do that funnel very lucrative business. It was a very good business at the time. But, um, what I started to happen was that a lot of fraud started to creep into the industry, a lot of, um, players doing, uh, some dirty tricks and so on, came in. And that's important to Mark that because, um, that's really when the brand started to look at is affiliate marketing, a viable channel, is there value in this channel more than just clicks, leads, sales and so on. And so I think, I think that's really where you started to get affiliate management companies. You started to get agencies, you started to get, um, a lot of consultants coming in and they started to come in, um, and, and really help you figure out strategies and how to, um, go around some of that fraud and how to pick the right partners and so on. And so that's when I launched an agency called smarter chaos, and that was the idea of making the chaos smarter. So I sold my position in ROI rocket. I started smarter chaos. I started, she is media. And I started to realize that the advertiser at the person paying for the clicks, the leads, the sales, whatever really held all of the power because they had the money and up until then it was a very publisher centric, uh, industry, right? We would bend over backwards for whatever the pub needed, higher payout. Um, do you need incentive traffic approved? What do you need? You know, and we would just bend over backwards and wine and dine all the pubs. Um, and we kind of forgot for awhile that the advertisers held all the power when we switched that model and started looking at that, we started to realize that we could add a lot of value to the advertiser.

Speaker 2: 8:25

And that's actually a really important point because a lot of affiliates that I meet at some of the conferences that we go to, they still expect to be wined and dined, even though they haven't delivered the goods because it's, it's almost a natural part of what has happened with this industry, the real kind of relationship management we did, we gave them bad habits, but I think that's starting to change now across a lot of different industries because of the evolution of data. So back in those days, we had very simplistic tracking. Um, you know, technology has evolved, you know, networks have evolved from what it used to be, where it was originally just a place where the transaction could take place and be recorded. Now there's so many more features and functions and widgets and things built into networks and, you know, like really big networks that I think publishers need, you know, they're, they're patching and start to deliver and deliver more efficiently and effectively. So I do, I do think that that's a big difference. That's happened from back in the day when you and I started to, to what's expected. Now, the result of that I think is also then if an asset managers have to be experts in lots of different digital channels in order to do their job well. So that kind of brings me onto the next question, because it is actually, I believe one of the most stressful jobs to do in affiliate marketing, because your mindset really matters like this. Isn't just a job that you get into or a position that you get into. Um, you know, because you love digital. This is, this is like a, I would say it's a vacation, you know, because you constantly have to learn, you are an eternal student for the rest of your life. How do you think that's changing and shaping, you know, digital marketers that are coming into the industry?

Speaker 3: 10:01

Well, I think that you made a lot of really interesting points, um, in that last bit, um, let's start with just the fact that it's not a binary transaction anymore. It's not click on a link cookie set, sail made there's multichannel attribution and there's there's attribution models. And now advertisers are deciding how they want to look at that data. Where do they want to give the credit, the power isn't in the publisher's hands, it's in the advertisers hands and how they want to pay. Do they want to pay on last click first click, some sort of regression analysis? Do they want to do some sort of, you know, time decay? Like what model are they looking at to try to figure out who gets the credit? And so then we have to look across all the different channels. And I always say that we have made a big mistake over time. We have called affiliate marketing a channel. It is not a channel affiliate. Marketing is a way in which we actually partner with, um, a marketer to pay them for driving the, a customer. They could do it on social. That's a channel. They could do it on search. They could do it on content. They could do it on blogs. They could do it on mobile, they could et cetera, et cetera. So now I, as an account, as an affiliate manager, I have to suddenly become the best and an expert in all those channels in data analysis and in statistics, in looking across all those channels. And, and, um, it's, it's, it's crazy if you're managing an, an affiliate budget that's in the millions of dollars a month. One decision that you make could totally be worth hundreds of thousands to millions of pounds or dollars, um, either way, and it could get this pub paid this much money or that pub pay that much money and it could be a massive decision. And it's very, very, very stressful. And if you don't actually know what you're, you're talking about, it could be, um, it could be very dangerous for the brand, because I mean, at the end of the day, if you're just going out there and you're firing as you go with no real plan, um, you could be obtaining customers that aren't profitable for you costing your brand a lot of money. If you don't understand things like lifetime value or, um, new to file, or, um, you know, how you get a incremental customer, any of that stuff then, and let's say you're an affiliate manager that just, um, learned a couple of key terms like coupons and incentive and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Um, that's, you know, a little bit of knowledge can be very, very, very dangerous to a brand. So how has that changed? That was your question. I wake up every single morning and I'm consuming literally 6:00 AM this morning. I was sitting on my couch consuming five newsletters from the industry immediately because every day something's changing and Tik TOK or snap or Facebook or whatever has to be on top of the club. Oh my God.

Speaker 2: 13:11

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm super excited about that channel. I agree. And I think it's incredibly important that brands invest in training and continuous skills development for their teams. And even, you know, so far as to say executive coaching to actually get teams to work smarter together as well, especially if they sort of, you know, large, global, international kind of big brand, um, you know, programs, what have been some of the big lessons that you've learned doing affiliate program management for, I mean, some of the biggest brands in the world and let's face it. Um, what are some of the big lessons that you can share with people that might be listening to this podcast, um, who maybe haven't had a chance or an opportunity to manage really big programs? Like what's the scale from, you know, managing a program in maybe three regions to, you know, all the regions?

Speaker 3: 14:01

Well, I think that one of the biggest lessons I learned is there's no such thing as a bad affiliate, just bad affiliate managers. You know what I mean? Like a lot of affiliates will try to get away with things. It doesn't make them a bad affiliate. It just means that you didn't give them the guard rails that would make them successful. And so that's lesson number one, you know, there's no such thing as a bad affiliate, only bad, uh, bad affiliate managers. Um, number two, uh, I think that, you know, you always need to be learning that's, that's something that, that, um, we forget, there's no such thing as an affiliate guru. If you see a guru in the middle of the road, just run them over because

Speaker 2: 14:41

They don't exist. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 14:44

Um, I, I do not like the term guru, especially for someone like myself, because, um, I know that I have to come palms up every single day. I'm learning with humility that the industry is going to teach me something new today. Um, yeah. And then number three, you know, I would say that, uh, we don't have intuition, even though we think we do a what's going to work and what doesn't. So you have to be testing all the time in your affiliate channels. So, you know what we might think B might be a great idea or a great landing page. It doesn't matter until the proof is in the pudding until we see the data until we test it. And, um, we can't be so bold and egocentric that we have the best ideas we have to let the internet tell us if, if something's going to work out. So always be testing. That's a really big, um, key. And I think that, um, we don't give enough credit to the affiliate channel or to the partnership channel. I think that's another huge thing that I've learned is that we have this sort of taped over the top of all of affiliate marketing. It's this, it's this Russ that we need to blow off and, um, help people realize that affiliate marketing can be very good. We just have to, um, ignore the bad actors, get to the meat of it, show the value and help those brands realize that value very quickly. But, um, you know, there's a lot of fly by night, um, gurus and a lot of, uh, you know, people in the industry that are claiming to, to know what they're doing and that's, um, poisoning the industry just a little bit. So I like to separate ourselves from affiliate marketing and call ourselves, uh, either performance marketing, or I really liked the term partner marketing and the reason, and some say, well, that's just a, you know, that's just a terminology switch map. What does it matter? Well, if I'm looking at affiliates, um, I'm looking at, um, to what has that affiliate done for me lately, and then the affiliates looking at why hasn't that brand increased my payout. And it's a very contentious relationship in a partner marketing scenario. I'm working with the partner, the publisher, the affiliate, and I'm helping them with content. I'm lending them brand assets. I'm giving them part of my, um, marketing knowledge. I'm telling them info and Intel from my other channels, I'm not holding all my cards to the chest. I'm actually, those affiliates are an extension of my marketing team. So partner marketing is a, is a, is a great thing. So I think that we need to, we need to start looking at this more as partners treat them like part, treat affiliates like partners. Um, and then those partners will treat us like a partner, a brand partner, um, where they're showing us what they're doing. They're going to show us, uh, their Google accounts, their Facebook accounts, you know, how are they doing the marketing? And if we both act as partners, um, we're going to get a lot more together than we will separately. And it won't be as contentious as we go. So I think those are, those are some big lessons that I've learned,

Speaker 2: 17:44

And those are fantastic, phenomenal lessons for anybody that's new coming into the industry to take away and learn from the key thing that I've seen on my side is that, and you actually coined this phrase, um, when we were speaking earlier. So I'm going to just use your own words again. You think that affiliate partner, marketers, performance, marketers, whatever you want to label us, we're more like funds managers. Yes, because we now earn, we now own the budget and we need to make sure that that budget is being spent efficiently. And it ties back in with what you've said earlier on the podcast in that there are no bad affiliates. They're only about affiliate managers because it's your job to make those commercial decisions and to understand how to value those traffic sources and where and how, when and how to actually use them to meet your company's objectives. And this is a lot about what we teach and train and I am program. Um, and, and it's through these years of experience of managing many, many different programs that you and I have picked these skills up. Um, and, and why, why it's led me to teach. So, I mean, you've kind of already answered. My next question is just give us your best piece of the pieces of advice, um, that you can give us. If we infinite managers on board performance, marketers that are new to coming into this industry. But I mean, what, what do you think the key thing is for somebody that's fresh out of uni maybe coming into the role?

Speaker 3: 19:04

Can I, can I go off for a second on what you just said? Yeah. So I want to just pay attention to what you just said for just a second, because I do think it's very important, not because I coined it because it's something that I've learned over time is, um, it's very interesting in the financial world, we have to certify a, uh, financial planner. So a financial planner has to go through a ton of training, a ton of certification. You're going to manage someone's money and a hundred thousand dollars to someone investing with you. Of course, we need you certified. You need to know how the markets move. You need to know the best investments. You need to know the terminology. You need to know like how you're going to invest my money. Why in our industry is the affiliate manager. Who's managing multimillion dollar budgets. Who's investing in certain channels. So I send this dollar out a soldier out into the world, and I want that soldier to come back with three more captives so that I have$4. Yes. So every dollar I spend, I want$4 or$5, or I just want more of them to come back to me. And so me as an affiliate manager, it's not about how much I can pay the affiliates, which is traditionally how an affiliate manager is incentivized is how much can they spend of the brand's money, what they should be incentivized on and what an affiliate managers should be thinking is how could I invest my brand's money so that I send a dollar out and I get four more captives back. And I now have$5 back as I send them out there. And if you look at search social, um, mobile SEO, et cetera, et cetera, really what you're doing is you're saying if I spend a dollar there like a stock. So, so if I'm going to spend it on the new technologies like Twitch, or I'm going to try to figure out how to do, um, clubhouse, or I'm going to try to figure out how to spend my money in those channels. That's like a risky stock because those are new technologies, but then I have the tried and true email marketing, or I have the, and those might be less risky technologies. And so they're less risky stocks in a portfolio management perspective. And I'm getting an average return back from all of those culminating in some best average return. And I've hedged my, my portfolio. So that's the idea of the fund manager. And that's, that's kind of where I go. And, and if I was giving advice to an affiliate manager is not, what can the role do for you or, or what can you do for your affiliates, but how can you create a net profitable customer acquisition channel for the brand that you work for? How can you spend their money judiciously so that you can get a return. If you do that as an affiliate manager, you'll become the most valuable asset at that company. Abstinent you'll become very valuable in your career. And you can essentially start to name your price because you can consult. You can, um, show others how to do it, et cetera, just don't become a guru.

Speaker 2: 22:09

No, we don't believe in gurus and affiliate marketing. So just to close off, because I mean, you're like such a hive of information. I don't want to kind of extract every possible thought and idea that you have in this podcast. I have some rapid fire questions. I'm going to just throw them at you. And then you just answer. So how do you think affiliate management will change in 2021?

Speaker 3: 22:31

I think it'll, uh, I think it'll change in that more money's coming into the market. I think we'll be spending more in it. I think the large brands, the Grubhubs, the DoorDash is the Uber is et cetera, et cetera. I think they're spending more and, uh, we're going to become more professionalized, um, with association and certifications training and so on. That's I that's where I think this is

Speaker 2: 22:53

Amen to that. Cause I'm right there helping people get trained, uh, network or in-house. What do you think?

Speaker 3: 23:01

Um, well, I'll go one step further network in-house or agency. I think that you really need someone to guide you running something in-house is great when you're really, really tiny and small, but as you become a large brand, there's absolutely. And I'm going to be very controversial here. No way that you can effectively run an affiliate program. In-house with one person it's not going to happen.

Speaker 2: 23:25

Doesn't happen. Absolutely not. And you also need virtualization and areas of expertise. So totally agree with you there. Next one. How long does it take to launch and grow an affiliate program and get ROI? This is like the golden million dollar question that I get asked. Like if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me this that'd be rich. What are your thoughts? Well, it varies,

Speaker 3: 23:46

Right? There's no one size fits all. And it almost never happens that the traffic comes tomorrow. So it's not going to happen tomorrow. And it's probably not going to happen in two weeks. So the best answer is that the more that the team that I have in place proactively contacts, affiliates, and isn't just a reactive approve affiliates, um, affiliate manager, then the it's going to be, um, directly correlated to how proactive my team is in affiliate recruitment. And it's also going to be, uh, directly correlated to how proactive the team is in establishing lifetime value for a customer for that brand. Um, you know how that the business model of that brand, how they actually make money down the road and what they want to acquire a customer for. So establishing the KPIs going out proactively, and then I'm going to tell you, um, 60 to 90 days,

Speaker 2: 24:46

That's impressive. That's very impressive, but I think that's when you're, when you are somewhat of an expert, if you're just starting that you're not going to get that kind of return in the first six months,

Speaker 3: 24:55

You're not going to it'll take six months if you're just starting out, for sure, for sure. And it needs to be thought of as an investment, you invest in other technologies and other divisions of your company. Why wouldn't you invest in, take the time to set it up and invest in a film?

Speaker 2: 25:10

Okay. Last rapid fire question. What are the best tools that you've ever used in affiliate program management and recruitment? So give us the shot. The date now

Speaker 3: 25:20

Media rails, media rails will help you discover over 8 million different affiliates in different verticals. Um, it's owned by impact. Um, my friend max created the tool, uh, media rails is, um, by far one of the best discovery engines to find publishers or partners in certain verticals all the way through to influencers. They now cover influencers as well. Um, it also shows you what networks that publisher works with, what programs they run, um, all of that. So it's, it's a great tool. You can use it competitively to look at your competitors affiliate program, and then basically just go pluck off all those affiliates from your competitor. So that's a good one.

Speaker 2: 25:59

There are quite a lot of, uh, discovery tools that are out there. And we do cover a lot of those in our training courses. I'm just going to plug my course there again. Um, what other types of tools like other than partner discretionary,

Speaker 3: 26:12

The platforms I like are, um, impact a win. Those are two of my favorite Rakuten has really impressed me recently. Um, if you're going to go to a network, if you're going to do it in house, the best, um, tracking technologies are going to be like tune. Tune's a really good one. Um,

Speaker 2: 26:29

We've got, we've got our own in gaming. So income access and refer, uh, select expert, but, you know, we can reel all of those off in the, in the block underneath

Speaker 3: 26:38

Opt out, um, suppression list management and compliance. I really liked, um, I love Optivo Optivo. Those are good buds of mine, but they're, they also have built and surpassed all the other suppression file management, um, you know, cam spam compliance stuff, um, for email monitoring to monitor billions of, of email IP addresses. I like lash back to lash. Lash back is one of the best, um, tools for monitoring. Who's doing the email. Are they compliant? Are they, um, you know, abiding by all the rules in your program, et cetera, um, either, uh, the search monitor or brand bearing your great tools

Speaker 2: 27:21

We use in our industry as well.

Speaker 3: 27:23

Yep. Yep. Also great, great folks there. Um, and then I would say, um, there's some strong influencer tools out there, like a web fluential is one that I really liked. They're a South African company. Yeah. Yep. That's right. So check out web fluential and see what your, what you like there. But those are just some off the top of my head. Um, I, uh, you know, I've, I've met so many different tools over time and it's hard and you look at that marketing graph, you know, back in 1999, there was probably like, you know, less than a hundred MarTech companies. And now you look at that slide that they put out there. Um, I can't remember.

Speaker 2: 28:02

Um, I think it was a commission junction, I think. Yeah. Just like tens of thousands of companies. It's insane. Yeah. I mean, like I'm, I'm really keen on, um, like Skimlinks is quite a good little tool as well for which you can use for like influencers and smaller micro-cap campaigns. Um, I just, I want to thank you for coming on board this podcast and sharing your knowledge and, you know, there's so much that our industry can learn from the kind of retails this, which is kind of your bread and butter. So thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge. Thank you for having me for coming on this podcast and for helping us to educate new affiliate managers that are coming into this industry. It's a billion dollar growing industry, worldwide. It's an exciting place to be working. Um, and you know, you and I are continuously learning as we go forward, even with, you know, 20 ideas experience. So sure. I hope that the people listening to this podcast, I as excited about the future as we are, because all of the things that are changing is just going to make this industry evolve, even if a bigger, um,

Speaker 3: 29:02

Yeah, it's an exciting time for sure. And if anybody wants to, uh, you know, just get random thoughts and follow me, um, you can go to chief of cast.com or any of the social media platforms at chief of chaos.

Speaker 2: 29:15

Love it. Thank you so much. We'll put the links in the blog as well. Thanks man. Cheers. That's a wrap for this week's affiliate insider affiliate marketing podcast. If you've loved what we've been putting down in this podcast series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribed to the podcast channel that way. You'll never miss another insightful episode tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic

Speaker 4: 29:42

Driving trends.

Speaker 1: 29:56

[inaudible].