Episode #47 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Elisabeth Chambry

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:
Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Naimon Co. 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 Elizabeth Chambray, Director of commerce at insidehook. Welcome to the podcast, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:00:22]:
Hello. Thanks for having me.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:24]:
Of course. Excited to have you on today. And let’s jump right into it. Can you introduce yourself to the audience?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:00:29]:
Sure. So I am Elizabeth. I’ve been in the affiliate space my entire working career. Basically right out of college, actually a little bit in college. I started my job, my career at Wirecutter, and I live in New York right now, I guess. Should I tell. I guess you already said my title. I live in New York and I’m also the founder of a small cannabis accessory brand.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:59]:
Awesome. How did you get your start in affiliate marketing?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:01:02]:
So at Wirecutter, I was originally working part time to assist my manager, who had been my manager at another internship I had in college. So she kind of brought me over with her when she moved to Wirecutter, and I was doing social media production at first. So basically, if you scroll back to the very beginning of Wirecutter’s Instagram, I wonder if you’d see it. I don’t know, but we were doing that content back then. Our team kind of was responsible for, I think, almost like 300,000 new followers across all of the different channels. So, yeah, we were replying to every single tweet that came in. We were creating content on different platforms. And it was an interesting time.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:01:48]:
We were working out of a apartment in Chinatown and pre acquisition. So it was my very first experience with affiliate and I had no idea what it was. I was like, product reviews, what is this? Okay, I guess I’ll join in. And then I realized it was this entire world I had no idea about.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:07]:
And then New York Times acquired Wirecutter.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:02:10]:
Yes, New York Times acquired Wirecutter while I was there. And I did actually shift positions. I really, I didn’t love doing the social stuff, to be honest. I think I kind of wanted to get into the more like, business negotiation side of things. So I told my managers that, and bless their hearts, they were like, let’s try and figure something out for you. So I started doing syndication partnerships. So before, like Forbes vetted, before Slate had their own thing, we were syndicating Wirecutter content on their pages and then splitting the revenue. So I was kind of responsible for like building out that program and Managing it and managing, you know that that was very different from how things work now.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:54]:
And now you’re at Inside Hook. Tell us a bit about them and what they do.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:02:57]:
Yeah, so Inside Hook is like a lifestyle publication. We have a lot of different newsletters, which is our main channel and we have different categories spanning from travel, wellness Style is a big category for us. Oh, and spirits and booze is another big one. So, yeah, like the team here is really great. I’ve been here for almost four years and everyone here just does like amazing work. So if you haven’t read the articles before, I would highly recommend checking them out because they take a unique perspective. I think that’s a little bit different than other publishers.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:30]:
And what do you do in your role as director of commerce and partnerships?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:03:33]:
So everything. Basically I’m sort of leading the commerce team, which is really small here. It’s just me, two writers and actually it’s like three kind of writers and commerce editor type roles. So they work on all of the content and everything. And then I’m kind of doing all of the partnership aspects, selling all of our flat fee placements and then like managing the execution of all of that as well as gathering the insights and trying to build partnerships with other brands and kind of literally all anything that you could imagine. I’m going out to all the new vendor spotlight things to just see if there’s anything new we could be doing. Always trying to find another channel that we could be active in. So it’s a little bit of everything.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:04:28]:
Yeah. SEO I could keep going probably.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:32]:
Are there any new things that Inside Hook is trying to lean into?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:04:35]:
We’re definitely leaning a little bit more into social than we have in the past, which I think is really smart. We have the Spill is our booze focused kind of channel and it’s really interesting. Our spirits writers are great and they kind of go around the city and interview bartenders and they make different cocktails in a little studio that we have in our office. And yeah, it’s really interesting and I think going to grow substantially just because we’re getting a lot of good feedback on it.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:05]:
Tell us a little bit about Mantelpiece.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:05:07]:
Oh yeah, so Mantelpiece is my cannabis accessory brand. I just launched sales September of last year and actually this kind of spring I had a couple of reels go viral on Instagram. So sales have been like kind of picking up and steady. So we have clear ones available. Green is coming for pre order. I might release a couple more colors over the summer and I’m working on an ashtray. So yeah, there’s that. That’s kind of like my little passion project on the side.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:39]:
Amazing. You’re brave enough to just start your own site.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:05:42]:
Yeah, I mean, for a long time I was very hesitant, but I’m very lucky that the team here at Inside Hook is super supportive of it as well. So I don’t have to hide that I’m doing something like this on the side. I think I feel so much better that I can be very open about it with everyone that I’m working with.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:01]:
I had to hide this for a little bit while I was doing it on the side, so I get that. And now for a quick message from our sponsor, affiliate summit east 2025. We’re here to let you know that tickets are on sale for Affiliate Summit east, which is taking place at the New York Marriott Marquee in Times Square, New York City, August 4th and 5th. Don’t miss out on the best affiliate conference of the year and you can save 20% off with code NINEMO20. The event brings together all the key players in the affiliate marketing space with plenty of opportunities to network. Head to affiliatesummit.com east to get your ticket to join us for this key affiliate marketing conference. Use code NINEMO20 to save 20% off. We look forward to seeing you there.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:42]:
Will you be there, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:06:44]:
I will be. I will be there and I will be speaking actually.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:47]:
Yeah, I saw that. And it looks like you’re going to be on a great panel on how publishers are sustaining audience engagement and commerce revenue through own first party data. Would love to hear a little bit about what you might be speaking about.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:07:01]:
Yeah, so I’ll probably focus a lot on our newsletters and how we’re kind of using those. We do have some reliance on search as well. So I think it’s definitely a balance between trying to figure out where to put resources but newsletter and then building out our social is definitely kind of our top priorities.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:21]:
Why do you think a brand should get started in affiliate marketing?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:07:24]:
I think affiliate marketing is really good because it is an incentive for somebody to write about you or for somebody to post about you. It’s just something extra that is not forcing anything. But if somebody does post it and they see oh I’m getting credit for this and then they’ll want to keep doing it because it makes sense. So I think brands should be involved in affiliate because for one it’s a great way to get coverage and maybe not necessarily have to pay a flat fee. And also it’s just it’s like a good thing to do for the creators and the publishers that you’re working with so that they can keep working. And yeah, I just think it’s a great way to be visible too, across publishers and some influencer networks and stuff too. So I’m actually, I have my mantelpiece program up, but I haven’t really dove in yet to trying to like reach out to everyone. So stay tuned.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:08:25]:
I might be reaching out to you.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:27]:
How are you seeing AI impacting the affiliate marketing space?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:08:30]:
Oh, that’s a. That’s a big. A big one. I think a lot of the. A lot of traffic now is shifting over to ChatGPT. I’ve been going to a bunch of different webinars to try and learn as much as I can about this AI revolution, but it seems that a lot of people are still in the dark about where things are moving and what it might look like in the future. I do think that AI will substantially change the world that we live in in the next few years. I don’t think that things will be the same in ways that we probably can’t imagine.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:09:09]:
So I do think that there will be some effect in the affiliate world, but I do think that there are still going to be people searching for things and needing things and we’re just trying to put together basically the best information we can and hope that us doing a good enough job and optimizing and just being genuinely good at what we do will help us be surfaced in these places, wherever they might be.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:37]:
Search isn’t going anywhere. It’s just changing. That’s really the only difference. Any predictions on the future of performance marketing?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:09:47]:
I would say my prediction is that things are leaning much more towards influencers and individual creators. And even at publishers like writers and editors and things like that, I think people are really desperate for personalities and that human kind of connection. So I do see things moving that way. And influencers, even smaller influencers that have really highly engaged audiences being very attractive to brands.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:14]:
Absolutely. What do you see as a big opportunity for brands to grow in the space?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:10:18]:
I would say a big opportunity for brands to grow in this space is. Well, there’s. So here we’re testing a bunch of social whitelisting, which I’ve spoken on before, and I think that is a really big opportunity that a lot of brands aren’t taking a advantage of. They sometimes I’ve heard that they are with influencers, but they haven’t tested it with publishers yet. But basically we give access to our meta Handles so that brands can drive traffic to our article that we’ve written about their brand looks like it’s coming from us, but they’re able to target and spend as they please. So that has been really successful for a bunch of different brands. And I think it’s something that is maybe a little bit of a blind spot for like some agencies and stuff because, yeah, it just seems like there’s not as many people doing it as I would have thought. Just based on the success that we’ve seen when we’re doing it.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:11:17]:
What was I going to say? Oh, it’s a really good way too to just keep in touch with the brand and not let the content die. Because I think a lot of times there’s paid content or organic content or whatever it might be, and because of the way that search is now, it just disappears into the Ethereum and then there’s no way to like resurface it unless the brand reaches out and reminds you or like somebody else reminds you that it exists and it should be updated. I think having the kind of like always on partnership and those earnings kind of consistently coming through just like really strengths and strengthens the partnership and utilizes that content much longer and further than it would have just, you know, sitting on the website and.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:03]:
What has been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:12:07]:
I was gonna say the conferences and I’m still gonna say the conferences because I love going to see everybody and feeling like there’s. There’s like this community that the affiliate world has and everyone kind of, you meet new people every time you go to these things, but there are always going to be people that you’re walking through the halls and you’re like, hey, hey. Like, I know you like, let’s do this, let’s do that. It just feels like a very friendly and welcoming world and I really enjoy the knowledge sharing too. I think everyone’s pretty open about here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we think is going to happen. And so there’s not a lot of gatekeeping. So I really like that as well.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:53]:
Connections are absolutely the lifeline of affiliate marketing. A big thank you to Elizabeth for joining the podcast this week. Some really, really great insights into her background and inside hook. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Elizabeth Chambry [00:13:06]:
I would say LinkedIn. Just send me a connect request.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:12]:
Again, thank you to our sponsor Affiliate Summit East 2025, our guest Elizabeth, and to our producer Leon Sonkin. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and follow. Thank you for listening in. I’m Marshall Nyman, host of the Performance Marketing Spotlight and founder and CEO of Naimon Co. Signing off. Have a great day.

Elizabeth Chambry [00:13:30]:
Bye bye.