Episode #38 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Lindsey Grillot

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:
Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall nyman, founder and CEO of Nymo & Company. 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 Lindsey Grillo, Senior Director Partnerships at PI. Welcome to the podcast, Lindsay.

Lindsey Grillot [00:00:20]:
Thanks, Marshall. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

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

Lindsey Grillot [00:00:28]:
Sure. I’m Lindsey Guerlo, like you said, senior Director of Partnerships at pie. We are pretty new publishers, so check us out@pie.org I’ve been in the affiliate space for about 8 years now. Always on the publisher side of the business though, and I’m based in Connecticut.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:42]:
Awesome. Would love to hear how you got your start in the space.

Lindsey Grillot [00:00:45]:
About eight years back, I started working at the Knot. You may be familiar with it if you’ve gotten married or have friends who have gotten married. I joined the Knot, I moved to New York, and I transitioned from an analytics role into an affiliate marketing role at the company and. And truly immediately fell in love with the space. My first cju, I was hooked. I was like, this is awesome. This is such a fun way to do business. It’s truly win win, right? You’re creating partnerships that are good for the company, for the advertisers and for the users.

Lindsey Grillot [00:01:14]:
Made a lot of friends in the space and realized that it was a great alignment of my marketing skills, my sales skills, and my analytics skills and kind of just found my home in this industry and haven’t looked back since. And from there, just leveraged my network to explore new opportunities. New doors opened, primarily just from networking and staying in touch with people. And it’s been a really fun almost a decade.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:37]:
And then two years later, you left for Honey. What led you to make that move?

Lindsey Grillot [00:01:41]:
Yeah, it was a really interesting time. The Knot was actually being acquired by a PE firm that owned Wedding Wire, which was their competitor at the time. And anytime there’s a big shake up at a company, I think it creates new opportunities. And sometimes those opportunities are internal and sometimes those opportunities are external. I started kind of poking around to see what other opportunities were out there. And at the time, Honey was gaining a lot of traction. They had raised a Series C. We’re just getting a lot of buzz in the industry, showing up in a big way at each of the events, and I realized that they were opening a New York office.

Lindsey Grillot [00:02:15]:
So I was like, yeah, you know, let’s Go check it out. We’ll see what happens. And I met the two other folks on the team that were there at the time, and it was just so much fun. I went up to the WeWork in Flatiron district, and it was a small little office, but the energy was just amazing. And the growth at the time of the company was really, really exciting. We’re growing on the user front, we were growing on the revenue front. And I realized this is going to be a complete change from everything that I’ve done in the past, but I’m going to learn a ton in this room with these people. And so, as the third hire in New York at Honey, I always say it was the best decision I ever made.

Lindsey Grillot [00:02:48]:
I grew up at Honey. I learned so much about affiliate, about sales, about people. It was. It was just such an incredible time and truly transformative in my career.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:58]:
And then in 2020, PayPal acquired Honey. So you went through another merger. Tell us what that was like.

Lindsey Grillot [00:03:04]:
Yeah, it was a really crazy time for everybody, right? 2020 was the start of the pandemic. The acquisition was really exciting for us. I think a lot of us were a little surprised at the timing. I mean, things were going so great at honey, and when PayPal announced that they were acquiring us, it was such a shift from everything that we’ve been doing. But again, a really great, interesting learning opportunity. Many, many doors were open for us. And it was so interesting going from that startup type of culture to PayPal while also handling all of the, you know, stresses and changes that come along with the pandemic and quarantine and all that good stuff, you know, fortunately, most of the team stayed on for quite a while, and we all got to work together and continue building what we had started. And again, got to learn a lot, got to be part of a huge Fortune 500 company and had some really amazing, like, leadership opportunities open up through PayPal.

Lindsey Grillot [00:03:57]:
It was fun.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:57]:
Amazing. And then after that experience, you ended up as Director of Commerce at Ziff Davis. Tell us about your time there and what you were focused on.

Lindsey Grillot [00:04:04]:
Yeah, at Ziff, I was overseeing the commerce team that handled all of affiliate and commerce transactions in general for PC Mag, Mashable, Ask Men, and Life Hacker. So went from kind of the loyalty extension space, and I wanted to get my feet wet with content. And that was. I had a fantastic team there. The they’re still doing really, really great work. Got to learn a lot about traditional advertising there as well. I worked very, very closely with our licensing team and ad sales team. And Learned a lot about like the more structured, like a traditional structure of a sales team and incorporated some of those ideas into like managing the commerce team.

Lindsey Grillot [00:04:43]:
Incorporated a lot of their best practices that they’ve been doing for a very long time on the ad sales side into the commerce business as well. And that was great. Very different challenges than we faced in previous roles, but an amazing learning opportunity. Got to work with some huge brands and on some really exciting types of partnerships and had a great time there as well.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:06]:
Well, let’s shift to your current role. Now you’re at pie, Senior Director of Partnerships. Tell us about PIE as they’re fairly new to the space and what are you doing in your role there?

Lindsey Grillot [00:05:15]:
Yeah, absolutely. So at pie, we have created an ad blocker that basically gives users, consumers control of their Internet experience. And on top of that, we’ve enabled the opportunity for consumers to earn rewards for their time and attention. So I’ll tell you a little bit about the background of pie, what we started or why we started and what we’re building today. PI is founded by Ryan Hudson. He was one of the co founders of Honey. I’ve worked for him in the past and I was very fortunate to get a call from him and Chris Erigan over the summer telling me that they were launching this really exciting brand new publisher that was disrupting a $700 billion advertising industry. Right.

Lindsey Grillot [00:05:55]:
You can’t say no to an opportunity like that. So I joined the team at the end of the summer with a couple of some old friends. We’ve brought on a couple other folks from Walmart, from X, from Amazon, from Cameo. We’ve assembled a small crew, there’s 25, almost 30 of us now, to basically solve two of the biggest problems that we saw in the space back when we were at Honey. Like I mentioned, we’ve built an ad blocker. It is actually an affiliate friendly ad blocker. When we were at Honey, we were realizing that almost a quarter of the Internet, almost a billion people, were using ad blockers. And at the time, about 30% of the honey users were having issues accessing their cash back and rewards.

Lindsey Grillot [00:06:37]:
You can imagine that was pretty poor experience as a user. If you’re being told that you’ve earned rewards and you can’t access them or the tracking is breaking. As an advertiser, if you’re paying to get in front of these users and then that flow is getting disrupted, that is not ideal. And for the business, you know, the volume that we were operating at, especially at that time, it was a pretty big Revenue hit. Right. So we learned a lot about ad blockers. The team would dive in and realize that all of these users had these ad blockers installed and that was what was breaking the affiliate tracking. And so we understood that there was this gap in the market where consumers wanted more control over their Internet experience.

Lindsey Grillot [00:07:18]:
They didn’t want to be browsing YouTube or browsing a recipe site and hit with constant ads to the point where the page is not even loading properly. But browsing the Internet with your privacy completely exposed and no ad blockers, not really the ideal experience either. This was why we saw so many people shifting over to utilizing ad blockers. We said, what if we make an ad blocker that solves all these problems? It’s this nice medium between completely ad littered Internet and a completely like paywall, you know, Internet. That’s not ideal either. And so when we launched PI, we wanted to make sure that we were building something for the mass market that we could serve everybody. So PI is for everybody. We support over 10,000 stores.

Lindsey Grillot [00:08:03]:
Anyone is welcome to utilize it. And we at this point have over 6,000 affiliate partners that we’re working with. We just launched about two months ago and we surpassed 300,000 users this past week. We’re adding about 100,000 users right now. So it is just absolutely taken off. It’s super exciting. So we’re definitely solving that adblock challenge for the user. Right.

Lindsey Grillot [00:08:24]:
And also for our industry because we’re giving advertisers the opportunity to get in front of adblock users who were previously completely unreachable through digital advertising. So that’s problem one. Right. The second problem that we saw at Honey, the question that we got constantly, I’m sure, Marshall, you can relate to this, being an agency yourself, is how is this extension based publisher incremental? I’ve heard that a million times. Right. And so pie, we wanted to make sure that we solved that challenge or addressed that immediately out of the gate. So pie, we have traditional shopping tools. We have the best coupon application on the market.

Lindsey Grillot [00:09:03]:
It’s the fastest available. We have loyalty rewards, cash back. But what we’ve also done is we built something called PIE Instant Rewards, which is an opportunity because our users have said yes, I am okay with seeing some types of advertising as long as I get a piece of the pie, as long as I get a piece of this. We have the opportunity to offer our advertisers some really interesting top of funnel placements to influence where those users are clicking and starting their shopping journeys. We’re taking this concept of cash back that everyone is really familiar with seeing at the end of the funnel at the cart page. And we said, what if we take this higher up the funnel? If the user is browsing, maybe they’re on Google looking for an espresso machine, but they haven’t necessarily decided which retailer they’re going to purchase from. We can offer the user a micro reward. So we’re cutting them into the advertising equation, right? We’re giving them a micro REWARD, maybe it’s 50 cents, maybe it’s 25 cents.

Lindsey Grillot [00:10:01]:
And we’ll say, hey, why don’t you try this search on walmart.com why don’t you try this search on Target? And we can take that traffic and drive it directly to our partner sites. This is just different ways that we’re thinking about how to revolutionize the advertising economy, giving users more control and solving a big problem for advertisers, which is ultimately how do we reach new users and drive new traffic to our site. I know that’s a long winded answer, but let me know if that makes sense or if you have any questions about that.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:31]:
That’s great. Sounds like a real new opportunity for the space. What are you focused on in your role there?

Lindsey Grillot [00:10:38]:
My role is to bring on advertising partners. We, like I mentioned before, we have over 6,000 partners right now. We are live in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany and we are excited to chat with anybody that is interested in partnering with us. So I’ve been attending several of the conferences at, you know, towards the end of the summer and then next year we have a full slate of events coming up. But my job is to get advertiser partners on board and get them in front of our user base.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:09]:
Why should a brand get started with pie?

Lindsey Grillot [00:11:12]:
Yeah, like I mentioned before, PIE offers a couple really unique things that are not found anywhere else in the affiliate space right now as far as publishers go. One, we’re giving our advertiser partners access to those ad blocker users that have never been marketed to previously. So that’s a huge untapped market. Right. There’s about a billion people globally using ad blockers. We’re shifting a lot of those users over to using pie. And so this is a completely untapped market that advertisers can get in touch with. And two, if advertisers are looking for new customers and incremental orders, we should chat because through PIE Instant Rewards, that’s exactly what we’re offering our partners.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:52]:
Anything exciting on the roadmap for P.I.

Lindsey Grillot [00:11:55]:
Yeah, I’d say the most exciting thing right now is our growth. It has been staggering. We launched right before CJU so early September. Like I said before, we surpassed 300,000 users this past week. We have been growing like crazy. We have a mobile extension. If you have an iPhone you can go to the app store and search for piadblock for Safari and we also have desktop extensions in the Chrome extension store you can search for piadblock and PI Shopping. And we’re growing like crazy.

Lindsey Grillot [00:12:21]:
We have same growth team that grew Honey to 35 million plus users at its peak is handling our growth strategy here at pie and we’re really excited to continue onboarding a very diverse audience and giving our advertiser partners access to that audience. So I think we’re on track to hit a million users close to the end of the year, if not early Q1. And as we bring on more and more users, it just opens up new exciting opportunities for our partners.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:49]:
Anything exciting on the roadmap for PI?

Lindsey Grillot [00:12:52]:
Yeah, that’s really it. It’s leaning into the growth piece and then also expanding the PIE instant rewards campaign. We have been running these for a while. They’re live right now. If you check out pie, you can see them. We’ve been self funding initially to get some data points on how our users are interacting with them and it’s been absolutely incredible. It’s been really exciting to see. So we’re definitely going to be expanding that broader to more of our partners.

Lindsey Grillot [00:13:16]:
And we’re also working on a couple other things. We have some called pifair ads which like I mentioned before, we’re giving users the opportunity to earn rewards, to opt in to earn rewards for seeing ads. So in addition to earning rewards like cash back or the instant rewards, you know, the earn 50 cents for clicking over to this retailer. We also have something called PI fare ads, which is a couple ads that we approve. You know, we have guardrails in place about how many a certain user would see. The user can passively earn rewards by letting some of those ads through. So something else that we’re trying to again provide value to our users in many different ways, keep them hooked, you know, they’re earning, earning rewards from us and they’re also gaining value by not having an ad littered browsing experience. But we have a couple other things in the works too.

Lindsey Grillot [00:14:04]:
But it’s all in the same vein, right? Giving rewards to users, cutting them into the advertising equation and making their Internet experience safer and better overall.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:14]:
Is this something that integrates with into the affiliate networks or is this something that works outside of them?

Lindsey Grillot [00:14:19]:
Absolutely. Everything runs through the affiliate networks. So to work with us, it is super, super easy. There is no launch fees. There will never be launch fees. We hate integration fees. Basically all we need is just terms and the affiliate network. We work with almost all of them.

Lindsey Grillot [00:14:34]:
So feel free to reach out. I’ll provide my contact info at the end. We work at any affiliate network. Send us terms. We’re just asking for baseline loyalty rates at this point, and we’ll basically get the store up and running within about 24 hours. We have store pages on pie.org shops. So let’s say a brand wants to partner with us, send us terms of the network, we’ll get the integration going. On our end, we’ll create a store page for that brand on pie.org shops.

Lindsey Grillot [00:15:03]:
We’ll pull in the logo, any available codes and offers from the network, and we’ll activate cash back. And from there we can chat about optimization opportunities like Pioneer Rewards.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:14]:
What has been your favorite part of working at PI so far?

Lindsey Grillot [00:15:18]:
It has been so much fun working with really smart people that I admire a lot. And I’ve had such a great experience working with many of them in the past. And to just be reunited, newly invigorated by a new challenge has been really fantastic. Building something that our users are really loving. All the positive reviews that we’ve been getting in the Chrome Extension store has been awesome and it’s just been like such an exciting thing to be a part of. Plus, you know, the affiliate conferences are always so much fun. We get to work with so many partners that we. I’ve personally worked with in the past, get to see so many familiar faces every time we all get together.

Lindsey Grillot [00:15:56]:
So it has just been. I’m very, very lucky to be having such a great experience here.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:02]:
And you were just at PI Live in London. How was that? And any upcoming events that you’re planning on attending.

Lindsey Grillot [00:16:08]:
Yeah, PI Live was great. I’ve been to the US show several times. This is my first time at their Europe event, and it was absolutely fantastic. We had such an amazing range of networks and agencies and retailers that we were meeting with from all different countries, which was really fantastic to get in front of that global audience, including a lot of US merchants too. I was a little surprised, but they had a really, really great showing from all across the globe and the event was amazing. So great. If you guys did get a chance to stop by our booth, I’m sure you remember our fancy pumpkin pies that we were giving out. But you know, come find us for treats at any future conference because we will always have a little something special.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:52]:
I think you’ll always have to have pie, I guess.

Lindsey Grillot [00:16:54]:
Right, exactly. And to your point about next year, so we, I will be at the Martech Record event in New York in December. We will definitely be at asw, actually be on the publisher demo stage. So catch me there. Several other events lined up for next year. Basically every affiliate event that you can think of, we will definitely be there. So feel free to reach out if you ever want to chat, set up a meeting. Love to meet everybody.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:19]:
Any predictions on the future of performance marketing?

Lindsey Grillot [00:17:23]:
Yeah, yeah, no, a couple of things. I mean at PIE we definitely see the usage of ad blockers continuing to rise. You know, hopefully they’ll come to us and that’s going to present some interesting challenges and opportunities for our space. Right. If the traditional ad blockers are blocking affiliate tracking and PIE isn’t, there’s just a lot more that we can do there and a lot more value we can create for advertiser partners. I think that a lot of especially younger consumers are gravitating more towards mobile. I think we’ve been hearing this for a while, but it’s true. This is why at PI, we’re a mobile first company.

Lindsey Grillot [00:17:58]:
We have a mobile safari experience as well as desktop and we’re continuing to lean and optimize that experience as we see more and more transactions occurring on mobile. And we really need to be meeting that consumer wherever they’re shopping. Right? Yeah. I think beyond that, I think just continuing to see the concepts and the bones of affiliate like this cash back type of model expanding to other channels at pie, like I mentioned before, through PIE Instant Rewards, we are taking that concept of cash back and we’re bringing it higher up the funnel. We’re giving users rewards in exchange for taking certain actions like visiting a retailer site. And that just kind of opens up our channel to a much broader playing field. Right. I think a film affiliate sometimes is kind of just like one of the sub channels, you know, within marketing.

Lindsey Grillot [00:18:45]:
But if we can take this concept which is proven, it works really, really effectively, I think that it’s going to be great for our whole industry.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:54]:
And what has been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Lindsey Grillot [00:18:58]:
It’s definitely the people. It’s such a tight knit industry. It’s so fun to, like I said before, see people, the same people, same familiar faces at all of the affiliate events over the years. See what interesting new products people are working on and I think in general the affiliate community does a great job of staying in touch. You know, I utilize the Martech Record Slack channel all the time. Just catching up with people and like learning about new ideas has been awesome. I don’t think I’ll ever leave the industry. It’s such a fun place to be and really looking forward to seeing so many people next year at all the upcoming events.

Marshall Nyman [00:19:35]:
Well, a big thank you to Lindsey for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into her background and how you can leverage PIE in your affiliate program. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Lindsey Grillot [00:19:46]:
You can reach me directly at Lindsay.org you can reach our full team at partnersi.org or feel free to shoot me note on LinkedIn.

Marshall Nyman [00:19:55]:
Again, thank you to our guest Lindsey Grillo and to our producer Leon Sonkin. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and a follow. Thank you for listening in. I am Marshall Nyman, host of the Performance Marketing Spotlight and founder and CEO of NYMO and co. Signing off. Thank you and have a great day.