Episode #34 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Lynda Mann

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:
Hello and welcome to the performance marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Niman, founder and CEO of Nymonco. Each episode, I will be bringing you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space, where they highlight their experiences within the industry. Today I have Linda Mann, co founder and coo at affiliate. Welcome to the podcast, Linda.

Lynda Mann [00:00:21]:
Thanks. Excited to be here.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:23]:
Excited to have you on. Let’s jump right into it. Can you briefly introduce yourself to the audience?

Lynda Mann [00:00:28]:
Sure, yeah. So, hello, I’m Linda. I’ve been in the digital marketing space for, gosh, I’m going to sound like a dinosaur, probably over 15 years now. But yeah, other than that, I live in Seattle. I’ve got a lovely dog named Rosie, love to do some DIY projects and, yeah, generally just excited to be here.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:49]:
Well, excited to have you on. How did you get your start in the performance marketing space?

Lynda Mann [00:00:53]:
Sure, I think most recently I was on the publisher side, but I don’t think a lot of people know that I actually started on the advertiser side. So I actually used to work at a subscription based information services company, Super Sexy, selling public records, turning those into consumer based reports. And that was really my first foray. My role there was user acquisition, and I focused on the sort of non paid marketing channels. So BD Partnerships was the channel affiliate and then private marketplaces. I don’t know if you remember, I’m sure you remember white pages, but that was a very, very unique and interesting ecosystem to be buying traffic. So that’s how I got introduced to affiliate, and it was really my first kind of experience with massive data sets and data models and how you kind of aggregate those and, you know, run a business. And then obviously they create a lot of products.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:51]:
Then you joined Wirecutter in 2016, right before content commerce really started to explode. Tell us about your time there.

Lynda Mann [00:01:58]:
Sure. I mean, while looking back, it was exciting just because, I mean, there are some major seismic shifts happening in the media industry. And I distinctly remember moments where, you know, I could just physically see, you know, media operators and brands, you know, starting to adopt into this channel. But. But commerce content generally, when they first started, there wasn’t a thing yet. And product reviews really weren’t that prolific. I had a hard time getting advertisers to meet with me at conferences as wirecutter. I mean, nobody really knew about the brand.

Lynda Mann [00:02:33]:
There were two brands at the time. It was actually wirecutter and sweet home. But the advertisers who were adopted in or who have been on the site really kind of knew how successful the channel was and how successful the medium of the model was. But, yeah, again, like, it wasn’t like at these conferences, there were all these household media brands to add that social proof. So, yeah, it was a little rough at the start, but then, yeah, the New York Times happened and, you know, in my opinion, like, that acquisition of New York Times, buying Wirecutter, like, really legitimized the channel for mass media at large and also really legitimize the content model. And it was like, when I say I saw these sort of physical, you know, observations, it was the next year and a half I started to see, you know, I didn’t see CNN at these conferences before. It was, you know, these sort of like niche publishers. And then it started to shift really, really dramatically where CNN started coming and all of a sudden Forbes started coming.

Lynda Mann [00:03:34]:
And it was, it was kind of exciting to just like, see one, to have peers to finally be able to talk to and trade war stories with. But it was really, really cool to just like, be kind of at the beginning of a major shift in industry as large as media.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:49]:
And then a few years later, you landed at digital trends. What led you to make that change?

Lynda Mann [00:03:53]:
Yeah, I mean, mostly I’m a builder at heart. My dad is an engineer, and so he, I’ve always been a very curious person. And he, you know, because he is an engineer, led me to believe that anything was possible to create and wirecutter post acquisition, there wasn’t a lot of, obviously, you have to get your ducks in a row and figure out what the right, figure out what the right integration strategy is for the business. So for me, I wanted to run really hard and fast at building out some infrastructure and technology that enabled me as a publisher to be able to manage affiliate links a little bit less manually and in a more sophisticated way. And digital trends was really, really young and scrappy and interested in investing in that journey with me. So, yeah, that’s what I left over there.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:48]:
Tell us a bit about digital trends and what you did in your role there.

Lynda Mann [00:04:51]:
Yeah, so I led commerce at large there. So that was sort of three prongs. It was our editorial team. It was a sales and partnerships team, and then what is sort of generally call optimization. And so the flywheel, really, of creating the content, we were lucky enough to manage our own commerce content team, which gave us a lot of flexibility. And so, yeah, flywheel was really create the content, work with partners to get additional investment around that, and then continue to kind of optimize it over time. So, yeah, the team went from two when I started to 60 by the time I left in four years. And we were really focused on one, obviously just trying to create a good foundation and base, but then also to try to incorporate commerce into other areas of the business, like our direct sales teams and licensing as well.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:49]:
And now you’re at a filament. Tell us what led to the creation of that and what they do.

Lynda Mann [00:05:54]:
Yes, so again, since we had, since my passion was always in sort of building technology, I went to go do that inside a publisher where in media, the content’s the product, the tech isn’t the product. And so, yeah, that was a really great lesson for me to learn. In affiliate, we aggregate revenue data for publishers. We pair it with the page view information and then, yeah, we really just provide that visibility for publishers so that they can actually see how the performance of, see the performance of their links within all of their content and then be able to optimize those, which is a major gap that publishers have. And as you know, as it sort of trickles down to the app at the advertiser level, you know, it, it impacts kind of everybody. So that’s what we do. In a nutshell. We, I guess you’d call us an aggregated analytics platform, but we have features to support editorial teams, sales teams, other know, bi teams, but really from that publisher lens specifically.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:00]:
And what are you doing in your role there?

Lynda Mann [00:07:01]:
Yeah, so I focus predominantly on growth and operations, so you’ll see me at the conferences drumming up excitement about the products, talking with, you know, publishers and partners around. Yeah. How we can best support and just grow the industry at large.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:17]:
Anything exciting on the roadmap for filimate?

Lynda Mann [00:07:19]:
Yeah, well, we just launched a feature I’m super excited about, which is to support sponsorship campaigns between advertisers and publishers. And yeah, we’re working on a lot of exciting things without giving too much away. Our goal is really to provide publishers, give publishers as much operational leverage over their affiliate links as possible. And we really believe that the whole industry moves forward if we can provide more transparency and actionability on the supply side of the ecosystem. And that’s where we focus our roadmap.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:52]:
What’s been your favorite part of working there?

Lynda Mann [00:07:54]:
To be honest, the speed at which we’ve been able to solve problems for publishers, probably more simply, is the engineering team, which is a weird thing to say. I guess what I can say is I’ve worked with a ton of really brilliant engineers in publishing, outside of publishing, but by virtue of the channel being so young, still within media. It’s not like there’s like this large pool of engineers who are super specialized in affiliate marketing, and it is a different language. There’s a lot of complex problems. So, yeah, I’m super fortunate to be working with a team that understands the language really deeply. And, yeah, it can move really quickly because of it.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:39]:
You just mentioned you were just at CJU. What’s one of your favorite parts about attending conferences?

Lynda Mann [00:08:44]:
Oh, my gosh, hands down, the people, the people, the relationships. Like, there’s people who I’ve been seeing for the last, you know, ten years that, um, yeah, I mean, it’s exciting. You sort of like, you feel like you grow up with them a little bit. You know, like you watch their, you know, families evolve and, yeah, it’s just, it’s like the, the relationships are my, definitely, like the most memorable and my favorite part of the industry.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:09]:
What other conferences are you planning to go to?

Lynda Mann [00:09:11]:
Oh, gosh, nothing. For the rest of this year, I will definitely hit affiliate summit. I’m going to miss PI, live in Europe this year, but that was really fun to go to last year, figuring out how I can get to Portugal for a one’s conference. But yeah, those are probably the ones that I’ll hit next year.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:31]:
Definitely see it. ASW what is a common misconception people have about working within performance marketing?

Lynda Mann [00:09:37]:
I’ll get to it. Twofer. I think that there’s, um, and maybe less of a misconception, but I don’t think that there’s enough emphasis on the value of a user. I think there’s a lot of, obviously, emphasis on the sale that’s driven, but I think the user, I think there’s a lot that’s at stake between, you know, the value they provide in terms of, you know, being able to remarket them and, you know, everything that you can do as an advertiser when you’ve got that customer within your ecosystem. And then I’ll also say on the, from the publisher perspective, I don’t know, or I personally don’t feel like there’s enough emphasis on the brand weight behind having like a sponsored article created. So, you know, it’s not just that you’re getting an article created, you’re getting an article created on a CNN or a New York Times. And I think that, that sometimes a little can get a little bit lost in the shuffle.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:30]:
What are some challenges you’re seeing within the space?

Lynda Mann [00:10:33]:
Oh, my gosh. How much longer do we have? I’m kidding. I think that, I mean, I think there’s obviously the age old problems of attribution, which, you know, hopefully someday somebody will solve, but I’m not gonna hold my breath on that one. I think I’m most interested to see how AI is gonna shift everything. You know, the, I think that how Google and SEO had sort of commoditized and, you know, created a product root format that became a bit generic. I curious to see how AI shifts content creation and how publishers create content to meet the new medium that it’s being featured on. So I’m really interested in that.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:16]:
Any predictions on the future of performance marketing?

Lynda Mann [00:11:19]:
Oh my gosh. Right now it’s just a crazy time. I don’t have a lot of great predictions. I can say again, I’m watching AI. I’m excited to see what shakes out when, you know, there’s a little bit more disruption in the search landscape. I think retail, media and social are really fascinating to watch as well just because there are, you know, the amount of product searches that happen on those platforms increases quite a bit year over year. So I think that that’ll be interesting to see what that does to the performance marketing landscape as it matures. Yeah, those are the two things I think I’m watching the most.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:56]:
What has been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Lynda Mann [00:12:00]:
Oh, again, gosh, the relationships. I think that’s the biggest piece, the relationships hands down. And then just really being able to. It’s still new and it’s still very exciting in my opinion, on the publisher side. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity to change the model a bit once you give publishers a little bit more maneuverability. And so, yeah, I get excited about solving those with people that I like.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:28]:
A big thank you to Linda Mann for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into her background and how you can leverage affiliate what’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Lynda Mann [00:12:37]:
Yeah, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or reach out to me directly email it’s Linda with a y@filimate.com always happy to talk shop.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:45]:
Again, thank you to our guest Linda Mann and to our producer Leon Sonkin. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and follow. Thank you for listening. And I I am Marshall Niman, host of the performance marketing spotlight and founder and CEO of Nymon Co signing off. Have a great day.