Episode #56 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Cornelius Frey

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 bring you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they share their career journey and insights about the industry. Today I have Cornelius Frey from Nucleus Links. Welcome to the podcast, Cornelius.

Cornelius Frey [00:00:24]:
Thank you so much, Marshall.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:27]:
Excited to have you on. Let’s get right to it. Tell us a little bit about yourself when you’re not working.

Cornelius Frey [00:00:34]:
When I’m not working, Marshall. I just took up something a couple of years ago that lasted 20 years ago. I played bass in what I think is a funk rock band. Some others have called it dad Rock. So there’s. There’s varying takes on. On the sounds we make, but I love it.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:53]:
I love that name. So how’d you originally get your start in marketing?

Cornelius Frey [00:00:58]:
Got my start in marketing by founding a business called Opinory that’s now part of the wider affinity group back in 2015.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:09]:
And you originally got your start in investment banking, though?

Cornelius Frey [00:01:13]:
I did. Started out with JP Morgan in New York and London, then jumped ship to do something similar, somewhat more operational, I thought, at McKinsey & Company, the strategy consultants, which is actually great fun, working across projects in emerging markets all across West Africa and also Europe and the US. Be able to cobble that together.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:38]:
Hey there. Probably just.

Cornelius Frey [00:02:43]:
Are we going to be able to cut this part out?

Marshall Nyman [00:02:46]:
Yeah, we’ll probably just start over, if that’s easier. Cool.

Cornelius Frey [00:02:50]:
No worries. Sorry.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:52]:
Yeah, no. No worries. Or we could just jump back to the beginning. It’s not a big deal. It’s only like a minute. We can just go back to.

Cornelius Frey [00:03:13]:
I was talking for quite some time. Not sure where you lost me, but, you know, whatever is easiest for you guys. Happy to. To repeat a couple of questions.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:20]:
Yeah, it’s just like one question, so let’s just. Let’s just repeat it from the beginning. So, yeah, I’ll just kick it off again.

Cornelius Frey [00:03:30]:
Cool.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:33]:
So what time. What is the time stamp? Okay. 3:35. Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Naimon Co. Each episode I bring you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they share their career journey and insights about the industry. Today I have Cornelius Frey from Nucleus Links. Welcome to the podcast, Cornelius.

Cornelius Frey [00:03:58]:
Thank you so much, Marshall. Pleasure to be here. Hi from Berlin.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:02]:
Excited to have you on. Let’s get right to it. Tell us a bit about yourself when you’re not working.

Cornelius Frey [00:04:08]:
When I’m not working, I Got back into making music. Last played bass in a band 20 years ago and I’m back at it now.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:17]:
Sounds like fun. And I know you have some violin going on in the background with your kids. Maybe they’re going to be in the band too.

Cornelius Frey [00:04:25]:
Let’s see if your audience likes it. We’ll talk about that record deal.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:31]:
So how did you originally get your start in marketing?

Cornelius Frey [00:04:34]:
Got my start in marketing by founding a business called Opinionary as a side hustle while working for McKinsey. And opinionary serves publishers, driving polls and questionnaires and user engagement for first party data and that has become a part of the much better known Affinity group a couple of years back.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:57]:
What led to the start of Opinionary?

Cornelius Frey [00:05:00]:
Opinionary was I was working, as mentioned, for McKinsey after starting out with JP Morgan and investment banking. And it was two itches. One was I thought the switch to consulting from investment banking would make my life more operational and entrepreneurial. And while it was an event, very exciting time, working across West Africa on lots of tech banking, telco projects and so on, I was itching to go hands on, build products, sell products, deploy something great. And the second part, the actual reason behind the Pinry was realizing that Meta or Facebook back then and everybody else was eating traditional publishers breakfast, lunch and dinner by engaging them better, knowing them better, driving insights about that audience and monetizing it in a way that publishers didn’t do. And we felt like giving publishers a leg up in being able to compete on the open web on a level playing field. And that’s what opinion does to this day.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:58]:
What led to the acquisition with Affinity and how did you know it was the right time for a sale?

Cornelius Frey [00:06:04]:
We had grown incredibly within Europe with marquee clients from Financial Times, the Times, the Economist, virtually all of the German publishing landscape. And quite frankly, we were hitting a ceiling in our ability to grow into both Asia Pacific and the US and we met the folks from Affinity who back then have bootstrapped a nine figure business and two parts told us this was the right time. Those were by far the first and the smartest folks to dissect our business, its incredible potential and strength and also its weaknesses, to be frank. And we felt, you know, I want to work with people smarter than myself. And the second part was clarity that Affinity has a global organization of over 500 people able to bring about what we weren’t able to bring. Truly taking this business global and being part of something big.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:02]:
Tell us a bit more about who Affinity Global is and what they do.

Cornelius Frey [00:07:07]:
Affinity Global is a US Indian company, been around for 17 years. Might to some in the audience be better known under some of the businesses that run under the Affinity umbrella. We run both a bunch of ad networks like Veevee, Site Plug and Canvas across serving all the world’s leading advertisers across the entire funnel from branding to hardcore performance and publisher software solutions like Nucleus Links and Opin and serving the world’s leading publishers on that side. And business has seen phenomenal growth, growing profitably, bootstrapped at a significant CAGR compound annual growth rate and very much shooting for you know what, going for the 10 figures now really trying to be an industry defining group. What’s special about us? I think we are very good collectively at finding under priced pockets of attention, whether that’s working with OEMs, browsers, device manufacturers and so on and building both the technology and the global sales footprint to monetize those better for a better outcome for all our clients.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:32]:
What roles have you been focused on since the merger with Affinity?

Cornelius Frey [00:08:37]:
I have two core roles and one additional one. One is running Nucleus Links which we are building up to be literally the operating system for navigating and profitably growing the business of any affiliate publisher. Happy to jump into more so bringing AI to an operational landscape that’s been badly neglected from a technology perspective. I think there’s a lot of publishers who will say fundamentally the way affiliate publishing works hasn’t changed enough in the last 10 years while the challenges and opportunities have grown incredibly. So that’s my day job and additionally across the group I run mergers and acquisitions, growing rapidly, organically and adding, looking to add also inorganically to that growth and also, you know, job two and a half. Taking a step back and looking at what are strategic outcomes we’re shooting for. Is there a capital markets or IPO potential down the road? Evaluating that and bringing my investment banking background to the firm.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:40]:
Tell us about Nucleus Links and what they’re solving for.

Cornelius Frey [00:09:44]:
We are solving for the fact that we actually think our core belief, number one, is being an affiliate publisher is actually a phenomenal and promising business to be in. It just doesn’t feel like that for so many of even the best publishers in the world because the hurdles of operating the business day to day just feel like plugging gaping holes all the time, working on, you know, repetitive menial tasks rather than focusing on what they’re best at. We believe publishers, affiliate publishers should do two things incredibly well, which is creating content, whether it’s deal content, review content or even news content. That drives audiences to keep coming back and to nurture and build great premium merchant relationships. Create deals that make a difference to them. Everything else from discovering which networks to work with, negotiating individual deals, getting the right approvals, fixing broken links, managing yields on the long tail is actually what publishes. If you really measure the hours, spend 80% of that time on on a typical day. Nucleus Links is the AI driven backbone that takes this non differentiated menial work off their backs and allows them to focus on what they are best at and what they need to be best at.

Cornelius Frey [00:11:09]:
So believe it’s a business that’s riddled with lost revenues. People you know publishers bleeding up to 50% of the affiliate revenues through due to operational inefficiencies. We are the solution to that and we work with clients from Vox Retail, me not and Ziff Davis, the Daily Mail, Big buy now pay later platforms, Microsoft. So the best and biggest affiliate publishers in the world rely on our technology to really grow their business by double percentage rates through work on our platform.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:48]:
How does the technology work?

Cornelius Frey [00:11:51]:
There’s two parts of the technology. One is what I call the operating system element. So it’s solid tools that find out which networks ought I to be working with. How can Nucleus links directly connect a publisher to the right networks? Tracking, fixing broken links, all the ops challenges. And then there’s the heart of the platform. What we call smart redirects, our yield management platform. That’s what makes this from a nice to have to an immediate bottom line impact where we basically take all of the long tail merchants of a publisher and at an individual click level determine where does that individual click for that individual location that user get the highest earning per click. Most publishers reality looks like I have a long tail of merchants.

Cornelius Frey [00:12:42]:
I figure out who’s their primary network, I set a link and I you know, with a default network and I hope for the best. That is a recipe for losing money. We’ve built an AI driven inference model that at an individual click level decides where all this individual click at this minute go to drive the highest earning for the publisher. And you wouldn’t believe, you know, we’re not talking about 1%, 5% or 10% gains even, we’re talking about solid double digit percentage gains. Because one thing that’s really that this AI system is you know, working on is the industry has changed. Even three years ago typical long tail merchant might have worked with up to a handful of networks and these networks will have had pretty predictable bidding patterns. Two things have really changed and not all publishers, most publishers Know this, not all have changed their yield management, their operations accordingly. A typical merchant now has bids available from dozens of networks.

Cornelius Frey [00:13:40]:
The budgets flowing to the networks range from typical affiliate budget, search, display and a lot of other parts. And the bidding sophistication, especially of the CPC networks, has increased incredibly. And that’s a level of complexity that nobody can deal with manually, but that delivers so much upside potential for revenue if exploited smartly in an algorithmic automated way. And that’s what we do.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:11]:
So you’re leading Nucleus Links and then you’re also supporting on the M, M A side with your investment banking background. What is your focus and goals on the M and A side?

Cornelius Frey [00:14:25]:
We are, we have grown very profitably I mentioned we are, you know, shooting for the stars for a, you know, 10 figure revenue type of operations. So we’re adding, happy to add profitable growth where it fits snugly with our strength and activities, which is running great ad networks and great, especially publisher technology solutions across the globe. One deal that we just closed is sort of exemplary for what we’re looking for. We just acquired Affilis, a French solution that beautifully complements what Nucleus Links does. Everything that I just told you about Nucleus Links happens behind the scenes, invisible to the user. Affilis complements that by building AI, populated and enhanced shopping widgets that add so much to the richness of how any given publisher shows their offers from price comparisons, merchant comparisons, product review features, you know, pros and cons of a given product driving up to 2x increases in click through rates. So really doing what currently some publishers do manually and others do not at all, driving a beautiful shopping experience on site and increasing the click through rate that drives revenue growth, profitability growth and makes our existing offerings better by bringing complementary skills and features to the table.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:59]:
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Cornelius Frey [00:16:44]:
I will absolutely be there, Marshall. I even just Booked my flight today and very excited. Affiliate Summit west, always one of our marquee events. Incredible get together as you know of the industry. We’re even going to be hosting a very nice side event around the edges. So if you’re a publisher and want to join us at the Sphere, we may have a couple of special spots for the listeners of your podcast. Marshall, hit me up@corneliusffinity.com Very easy.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:17]:
Can’t say no to an invite at the Sphere. I know a lot of people are very excited to check that out. Any other conferences you plan on attending next year?

Cornelius Frey [00:17:26]:
We are always attending PI Life and Affiliate Summit east of course, and there’s a bunch of some of the networks hosting great get togethers. Think Tank, the global think tank. Last year in Portugal was a fantastic event. We’ll be heading to all the local editions in the years to come. That’s sort of our core backbone of events.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:54]:
I was just looking at the list of events for next year and it seems like there’s no shortage of events in the affiliate marketing space. A lot of global stuff. So would love to know how you’ve begun to leverage AI at Affinity and Nucleus Links.

Cornelius Frey [00:18:08]:
Yeah, so one part is delving deeper into the yield management kit that I just mentioned that is driven by our own inference model, which takes in all the historical bid and putative bid data of all the networks to predict the most likely earning per click across all the networks, each of the networks in real time. That is AI at work. It’s not, you know, some flashy prototype with a quick chat prompt. This is AI and machine learning at work, driving millions of dollars in additional revenue and bottom line every single month for our publishers. It’s a core part of Nucleus Links and very excited to roll out the affiliate suite of tools around the world. The buying widgets that I mentioned before because this is a team that is serving most of the French market and is not yet well known enough, especially in the US and around the rest of the world because they are automating the shopping experience on site with the help of Gen AI. Also writing in the, you know, optics, language and tone of the publisher, irresistible widget type pieces of content around the the products that any given microsite is about and that is entirely driven by AI.

Marshall Nyman [00:19:41]:
Outside of AI. What else is exciting you about the performance marketing space right now?

Cornelius Frey [00:19:47]:
I’d say what excites me. Also coming with my, you know, that old McKinsey lens. I’m excited by the imperfection of the market as it stands. If you will I mention, you know, nine out of 10 publishers you talk to and you ask them, are you actually gender deep down in your heart happy at the level of data and insight and transactionable data transparency that you have? Do you think you are really operating a lean, mean, efficient and effective shop? Even the best ones will tell you nowhere near. And that just leaves so much scope to do things better and makes it a great time to be in the industry.

Marshall Nyman [00:20:29]:
Definitely agree there’s a lot of opportunity there. What are some industry challenges that you’re currently facing?

Cornelius Frey [00:20:37]:
I think it really a core challenge and an opportunity of course, is maintaining traffic and user loyalty and managing to break free from dependence on external sources of traffic. Whether it’s AI overviews or migration of traffic patterns towards LLM, each publisher needs to be crystal clear why a loyal audience has to keep coming back to them. Because the traffic, the content is just so unique and relevant. That’s the first step and the second part, if and when they come, which they are still very happy to do, you need to make the very most of every click, every visit and every purchase. And that’s where we see Nucleus links coming in very, very powerfully.

Marshall Nyman [00:21:29]:
Any predictions on what the future of affiliate marketing may look like?

Cornelius Frey [00:21:34]:
Yes, my prediction is simple. Those publishers who manage successfully what I just mentioned, producing content that’s differentiated, interesting, unique, relevant and are commercially savvy to create great deals around that and build the best partnerships, they have a fantastic future ahead of them. They will thrive in an LLM only age, in a Google AI overview age, in a Google algorithm change age. There is real space for them to not just exist, but to grow and thrive. Everybody who’s not managing those two core components and just keeping themselves busy by managing the base, you know, core operations, the ancillary parts, the core plumbing, rather than those two essentials where they need to be excellent, will be struggling.

Marshall Nyman [00:22:30]:
And what’s been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Cornelius Frey [00:22:35]:
We were laughing about this earlier. I think there’s. In the history of affiliate marketing, there’s probably not been a single person who didn’t say the people, which is probably also because that’s true. So let me start out with that. There is why the people, you know, fun and nice and occasionally, you know, fun to party with. But also I think what makes this an interesting space is people are tech driven and smart, but also very pragmatic, very business driven, very outcome driven. There’s no faff, there’s no nonsense here in this industry, which is great fun. Beyond the people I’LL come back to the part.

Cornelius Frey [00:23:15]:
It’s amazing to be in an industry where AI isn’t a buzzword, but it’s a real opportunity to build products that aren’t a nice feature or flashy prototype, but something that makes a difference right now in the operational reality of businesses. And that’s always that’s what drove me towards starting my first business. The pure joy of not just building, you know, shiny towers of technology, but building new technology that is immediately applied and useful. And I don’t think there’s a better place right now than online marketing and affiliate marketing in specific to do that.

Marshall Nyman [00:23:52]:
Well, I think that’s a great place to wrap a big thank you to Cornelius for joining the podcast this week. Some really great insights into his background and into affinity. Slash Nucleus Links. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Cornelius Frey [00:24:06]:
Corneliusffinity.com Nice domain, easy name, Cornelius with a C. Hit me up. Looking forward to it.

Marshall Nyman [00:24:15]:
Again, thank you to Cornelius for joining our sponsor Affiliate Summit West 2026 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. Thank you and have a great day.