Episode #10- The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Coady Joy

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:

Hello and welcome to the performance marketing spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Nymonco. Each episode, I’ll be bringing you someone with deep experience in the Performance marketing space where they will highlight their experiences within the industry. Today I have Cody Joy, who is head of affiliate and partnerships education at Impact, or also known as the Partnership Experience Academy, the PXA. Welcome to the podcast.

Coady Joy [00:00:28]:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:30]:

Of course. Very excited to have you on today. So let’s get right to it. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience and let them know a little bit about yourself.

Coady Joy [00:00:40]:

Yeah, so I’m Cody, I’ve been in the space for almost a decade now, and I started in Influencer marketing back in the days of big blog posts and that kind of thing, and shifted to affiliate at a company called Levi’s. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Levi’s, but I cut my affiliate teeth there and grew that program, launched Levi’s Canada along with their influencer program, and took my experience to the agency side where I built out the affiliate service at Wpromote. And then that brought me here to Impact, where I’m now teaching others everything that I’ve learned along the way and what not to do with all the mistakes that I’ve made and that kind of stuff. So it’s been an interesting journey to get here, but this role is the best thing ever. It’s really great to be able to teach other people well.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:32]:

Definitely have heard of Levi’s and it was actually one of my clients in the past when I was working on the SEO World and yes, working on the US and Canada business. So definitely familiar and great brand and great company to work. Awesome. So love to hear a little bit about how you got your start in Performance Marketing. What was that moment that got you in the industry?

Coady Joy [00:01:57]:

It was an accident, actually, and I feel like a lot of people probably have that same sort of story that we just accidentally got into this and continue to fail upwards. I went to college to be a radio star was the plan. I was a broadcast major. I was so certain I was going to have my own morning show. The joke was on me because those jobs don’t really exist anymore. So I quickly discovered shortly after graduation that I would need to shift gears a little bit. There’s a lot about radio that I wasn’t willing to sign up for, like moving to the middle of nowhere and making no money for a long time. And so I kind of know maybe some sort of marketing would be right for me.

Coady Joy [00:02:40]:

And I had zero experience in any of it. Again, my major was broadcasting, so I was not at all prepared. But I saw an internship, a paid internship for an influencer marketing assistant role at POPSUGAR, which is an online women’s focused online sort of content website, and influencer marketing seemed like I wouldn’t hate it. So I got the internship, turned it into a full time job within a few months and just fell into it from there, influencer marketing became affiliate marketing became both, became partnerships, and one thing led to another, and here we are. And I never looked back. But this role is great because I’m sort of marrying my radio dreams with affiliate and partnerships marketing, being able to lead courses and that kind of thing. So it all works out in the end.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:30]:

And being in a podcast definitely falls into that world. When you were saying all that, I was just kind of having a flashback and I almost forget that I was in that world a little bit too. When I was in college, I was helping produce a radio show a couple of times a week for the school, and then one of my internships was working for a radio station. So it’s funny how different things are now than then. Radio was everything. I think it was like 20 years ago now.

Coady Joy [00:03:56]:

Oh my God, the things that they taught me that are just so irrelevant now, it’s comical.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:02]:

Yeah, but I think what you said too, is a lot of people just kind of end up in the industry. It’s not like people graduate and go, I want to be in affiliate marketing. It’s like a friend tells you, hey, I’ve been in this space, it’s a great space to work in. And that’s what happened to me. A buddy told me and then another buddy told me, and then another buddy connected me with a friend, and the next thing I know, I was working in affiliate marketing. So it just kind of happens.

Coady Joy [00:04:24]:

It does. I mean, prior to Levi’s, I didn’t even know what it was. Literally the day before my interview at Levi’s, I had to Google what affiliate was. I didn’t realize that at POPSUGAR I was doing affiliate influencer campaigns. I didn’t even connect it. So I had to sort of learn on the fly what I was doing, which was the best way for me to learn. But yeah, a little scary at first.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:45]:

Yeah, the channel has evolved a lot over the last five years or so where affiliate was definitely one thing and now influencer is definitely becoming or even is affiliate. Everything was kind of like two channels, and now it’s really kind of coming together, even with PR as well. You’re seeing merge with affiliate.

Coady Joy [00:05:06]:

Yeah, that’s a whole nother battle I’ve fought many a time, as I’m sure you have to.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:12]:

Exactly. There’s all sorts of battles all the time. So would love to hear a little bit about POPSUGAR. You gave us a little insight there, but it was really before influencer marketing was big. So what was it like working there before the influencer surge that we’re seeing now?

Coady Joy [00:05:32]:

It was very interesting. I actually remember I have like a great cousin who lives in Canada who used to do marketing back in the was talking to her while I was working at POPSUGAR and kind of explaining what it was that we were doing. And she was fascinated with the way that it’s evolved marketing to consumers, particularly with women. And basically back then it was like brands would pay us to facilitate influencer campaigns. That was a blog post with social, usually with like a social roundup. The blog post was the selling point and now it’s just in such a short period of time, you’ve never see that anymore, very rarely. And small caveat, I think there’s still a very large amount of value in the blogger world, even outside of social. That audience, especially if you’re trying to reach an older millennial or even above demographic, is still very strong and I don’t think it gets talked about as much as it should.

Coady Joy [00:06:36]:

So we were doing blog posts with add on social posts that didn’t cost as much. So crazy back then. And we would send them product and they would post. One time I got a campaign with, I think, Bloomingdale, and it was for fur coats. And so finding influencers that were willing to post about fur was one challenge and then the second interesting piece was that they didn’t get to keep it. It was on loan because these coats were extremely expensive. So facilitating the shipping and receiving and returning of fur coats was no pressure, but very scary. I mean, all in all, whatever your feelings about fur are, the campaign looked amazing and we found enough influencers willing to post about it, but we always got interesting things like that.

Coady Joy [00:07:26]:

And I felt like reviewing blog post content was so different because it was longer form and the creators had a chance to really almost review the products more and take their time to really write it out. Very thoughtful. And it was just a different type of influencer back then. We’ve evolved so much now and there are pros and cons, but it was very different and even the compensation structure was different. There wasn’t a ton of CPA hybrids happening. I think we’re seeing a lot more of that now, but it was very straightforward. Flat fees and rate cards and that kind of thing, which we still see. But again, there’s more flexibility with CPA, which I think is really good for the industry.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:12]:

Yeah, it’s probably a little easier to track things now than maybe then. And it’s funny you say long form because now everything is as short as possible. Somebody’s attention, like if it’s more than 20 seconds or it takes more than a few seconds to read, you probably going to lose the person’s attention because there’s just so much content out there where, yeah, 510 years ago, there wasn’t that much content to consume. So people wanted a really in depth piece of content to understand whether a product is value now. Now they have so many opinions, they don’t need as much content. So it’s definitely interesting how that’s shifted from long to short.

Coady Joy [00:08:48]:

Totally. And even back then, that’s back when POPSUGAR owned Shop style, which is a big competitive, reward style. And so we were using Shop style links for tracking was, but they weren’t paying commission on it. So it was like affiliate before affiliate POPSUGAR was doing it was very interesting how things have evolved. Obviously, Shopstell is now owned by Rakuten, and I think POPSUGAR got acquired by Vox or Vice or one of those. But yeah, lots of things have changed.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:18]:

Yeah, a lot of movement in the industry, especially the last few years, a lot of consolidation.

Coady Joy [00:09:22]:

Oh, yeah.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:23]:

Well, great insight on your experience working as a publisher. Would love to hear a little bit about your experience at Levi’s and what it’s like working on a brand side.

Coady Joy [00:09:32]:

I can’t say enough good things about Levi’s. I loved my time there. It’s obviously a well known company, but it’s also a great company to work for. I learned so much. Like I said, when I got that job, I interviewed or Googled what affiliate was the day before the interview because they had said if you have influencer experience, it’s great. It was a coordinator role. Things were new for them too, because previously they had been running all of their paid channels through an agency and they were ready to take affiliate in house. So they were hiring for somebody to do that without really fully understanding the scope of what that meant.

Coady Joy [00:10:08]:

So for two and a half years, I was a team of one person running the Levi’s program and the docker’s program and the Levi’s Canada program and the influencer program along with it. So it was a lot of work, but it was a labor of love. And the other thing that’s interesting about what I’ll say about brand side, and it depends on the brand you work for. When you work for a company like Levi’s, I don’t want to say everything works, but a lot works in affiliate. Like publishers are interested in promoting you, excited to promote you. What I learned later on from the agency side is that that’s not always the case. Know, strategy changes and that kind of thing. But like at Levi’s, it was fun because I got to test a lot of stuff and try a lot of new stuff.

Coady Joy [00:10:51]:

And I was fortunate enough to have people on the data science team that wanted to build me things and build me ways to report and build me a lift analysis and that kind of thing, where I could really see what was working and what wasn’t. And I got to try different types of promotions and all kinds of stuff. I had a lot of free rein and it was a really fun program to run. And it helps when the product is really well liked and super old and established. It’s always a little bit of a leg up, but just being able to see the program growth. And it’s so funny because my first sort of initiative at the job, other than taking it in house from an agency was a migration from Pepper Jam to Impact. And as somebody with no affiliate experience, I was in way over my head, but learned again so much. This is the only way I learned things is to not know anything and just be told to do it, essentially.

Coady Joy [00:11:42]:

So it worked out for me in the long run, but it was just really fun and getting to have some creativity on the influencer side, too. It was really my job to marry them together, which back then wasn’t done as much. So I loved that piece of it and sort of getting to talk, to influencers, know CPA and open those doors a little bit. And with a company like Levi’s, they’re more willing to do that. So it was just a very massive learning experience for me. And working brand side is there’s a lot of pros and cons versus agency, but one of the big pros is that your focus is on this brand. Granted, I had Dockers as well and they were very different programs to run, but I got to just put everything into this one company and again, try all kinds of stuff. And there’s a little more of a safety net when you’re on the brand side, just because there’s always high turn rated agencies compared to in house companies.

Coady Joy [00:12:39]:

It’s just the nature of the business. So it feels a little safer at times. But that was all pre COVID, so I feel like everything’s out the door now. But, yeah, I really loved it. I enjoyed it. That employee discount didn’t hurt either. And I’ll still only wear Levi’s pretty much exclusively in my denim.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:58]:

I’ll say I have a lot of different denim brands that I’ve worked on in the past and I don’t think I’ve paid for a pair of jeans in a long time. Luckily, they’re still making it through, but at some point I might have to buy jeans again. But you’re probably in the same boat where you’re like, I don’t know if.

Coady Joy [00:13:12]:

I want to do I want to deviate. I like what I like now.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:17]:

Well, that was awesome to hear about your experience there. So you start out as a publisher, then you went onto the brand side, and then your next stop was an agency, and ultimately you then worked for a network. So you actually covered, I think, all four buckets. I really have would love to hear a little bit about your time at W Promote and what it was like working for an agency.

Coady Joy [00:13:38]:

Yeah, so again, with the failing upwards thing, I don’t know how this keeps happening to me, but long story short, I wanted to move to Los Angeles and that was, again, pre COVID. So Levi said, sorry, we don’t do remote work. So I had to find a new job and I kind of felt like agency would be good experience. I thought I was just taking a role to manage some accounts and that was it. And when I started, they were like, oh, no, you’re building this service, it doesn’t exist yet. So you’ll take accounts and then you’ll also price this and staff it and all of that stuff. So, I mean, talk about a learning curve. I had never been in sales before.

Coady Joy [00:14:15]:

It was wild. Those three years were Fast and Furious, but it’s the most I’ve ever learned in my life and the fastest. It was so valuable, that experience, because coming from, again, a brand like Levi’s, where most things work and you get to just have fun, that’s not the case all the time. And I learned that very quickly at an agency. So it sharpened my strategy skills and my quick thinking and creative thinking of what might be good for different brands and how to speak to different audiences and even international brands and how that differs. And different verticals like finance and regulated industries and all these things that I had never experienced before was coming at me just like Fast and Furious and navigating that with a lot of trial and error. And I think the other thing I learned, especially as a first time people manager there, is how important it is to hire strong people around you. I love to hire people that are smarter than me, that are faster than me and can just add so much value to my team and raise us all up.

Coady Joy [00:15:20]:

I think a lot of people get intimidated and want to be the smartest person in the room, but there’s a lot of value to having people around you that know more. So that was a really helpful thing for me to adapt very quickly and build out that team with really strong people. And a lot of the people that I hired are still there and still killing it, which is I’m just so proud of them and how much that team has grown. And I think it’s my proudest accomplishment, what I was able to build there before I left. Agencies are hard and it’s hard to get business and it’s hard to sell affiliate. A lot of times there’s preconceived notions about it and it’s hard to cross that barrier and convince clients and not churn them. And every client retained and every client won was just such a big win for me that I can’t say enough about my experience there. I had a great agency behind me supporting me, the sales team.

Coady Joy [00:16:16]:

It’s always a struggle with affiliate sales team at a big digital agency like that because it just takes a lot of education. But that also trained me up for what I’m doing now. So it’s funny how things lead to the other so perfectly in life when you don’t plan it that way. But it was one of the best decisions I ever made, just kind of jumping into that full steam ahead, even though I was terrified all the time. And the first time, the first time you lose a client, it’s like, I’m going to get fired. This is over. This is not for me. But it’s funny how fast you kind of rebound through that stuff.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:55]:

That’s one of the reasons I liked working for an agency, because I felt like I had a portfolio of clients. So if one thing went south on one client, then I had other ones to keep me happy. And if you work on one client and things are going south or they’re not happy, it feels like your whole world is kind of going in the wrong direction, where having that portfolio with an agency, sometimes it takes a little pressure off on having to make sure that that one client is happy all the time. So I think there’s a little bit of a balance there. And the other thing that you were talking about is the education piece for an agency. And while you were working in W promote, I was probably a couple offices down from you and El Segundo on Continental Boulevard, literally. And I drive by the old W promote office all the time, and so that’s where I got my agency experience. And it was the same thing.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:46]:

I think pre 2020, an affiliate program was like a really hard sell, and you really had to convince somebody to do an affiliate program. And then once March April 2020 hit, people were like, okay, how can I grow my business? And then with the iOS changes later that year, it’s all of a sudden people are like, well, where can I put this budget? And affiliate became like, a much easier sell. And now we talk to a lot of brands, and it’s not like, oh, I don’t know about affiliate. It’s like, I know I need affiliate. What should I be doing? And now more brands are saying, hey, is this the right timing for us? Versus like, oh, I just don’t know about affiliates. So I think the industry has changed a lot. There’s a lot more positive outlook on the industry. I think when I was working at that agency, I always felt like we were the last channel to be looked at, the last channel to get budget, the last channel for everything.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:44]:

And it was always like a struggle. And it’s funny to hear I’m not the only one that was the only one.

Coady Joy [00:18:51]:

No, you’re not.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:52]:

But I think it’s changed a lot now. It’s not a hard sell anymore, which is great, and I think that just speaks to how the industry has matured. I think somebody said it’s a teenager becoming almost like, old enough to drink or something like that.

Coady Joy [00:19:07]:

It’s kind of true. Like affiliate has been around since the very late ninety s. And that puts them at about mid, early 20s.

Marshall Nyman [00:19:16]:

Exactly, yeah. The first time I heard about affiliate was like right before I finished college and I had a friend working at a network and he explained it to me and it was like totally over my head. And at the time I was like, okay. And then another friend told me about it. I was like, all right, some reason people are telling me I got to figure out how to get into it.

Coady Joy [00:19:35]:

But even still, my family has no idea what I do for a living. I try to explain it and it still goes over their heads. Some people are just beyond help with education. But the other thing I’ll say about an agency that I loved is just like getting different experience on different softwares too. I hadn’t really looked at Rakuten Share Sale, I hadn’t been able to touch any of those. And so it taught me a lot about how to commission differently with the different options I had at my disposal. Then obviously I feel like impact is and always has been superior. But now I have to say that because I’m super biased, but I felt that way all along.

Coady Joy [00:20:12]:

But it was nice to get different experience and different softwares and different types of programs with different types of compensation structures and tracking and things that I had never thought of before. And I also think it’s interesting the way that you’re saying things have changed post COVID. It’s so true. And I think a lot of that is because of content and influencers. Every brand I’ve ever worked with pretty much has said, I want to be on content sites and I want creators promoting my brand. Can you make that happen in affiliate? And the answer is yes. There’s just a lot of different ways to go about it, but it’s really helped boost our industry in such a big way. This content in general has put us at the top, which is preferred, and.

Marshall Nyman [00:20:58]:

I think with influencer and PR now, affiliate is like something that companies are saying, hey, if you’re going to run a PR campaign, you need an affiliate program. If you’re going to run an influencer program, you probably need an affiliate program. So now there’s other channels that are helping us where when I was at that other agency, I felt like the other channels were like, don’t work with affiliate, give us. And I was always like, we’re not asking for a lot of budget, and the budget we’re asking for is only on sales that we’ve generated. We’re not asking for $100,000 up front to run a campaign where all the other channels were asking for big dollars. And they were always like, yeah, don’t work with them. I feel like the other channels now are actually more supportive of the affiliate channel than they were in the past. I think they saw the affiliate channel as like a lot of last click and stealing some attribution where now it’s more content focused.

Marshall Nyman [00:21:46]:

There’s publishers across the funnel and so it’s not cannibalizing maybe some of the other channels that it may have been doing in the past. So I think some of those things have made it more palatable. And yes, it seems like the other channels aren’t battling us as much as maybe it was. And so things are just coming together. It’s definitely headed in the right direction and it’s just as we said, it’s a maturity thing. As the industry grows and develops, we’re continuing to evolve. And I think that’s one thing I’m seeing out of affiliate more than any other channel is the evolution and continuing to grow. I feel like some of the older channels, like affiliate are starting to become a little stagnant and we’re not seeing a lot of innovation.

Marshall Nyman [00:22:24]:

Email feels like it’s been the same thing for a while. And I don’t know about you, but every time I look at my inbox, there’s just a lot of messages in there and I’m not reading them like I used to. So is it as effective? Is paid search as effective? Maybe they’re still effective, but I don’t think they were as effective as they were. But they’re not evolving as well. They’re still the same things that people were doing. And even social is still fairly similar where you see a lot of evolution in the affiliate channel. So I think that’s a key piece. As long as it keeps evolving, it’ll continue to be a big piece of what people are doing.

Marshall Nyman [00:22:57]:

And I’m sure there’ll be other things, like outside of influencer that pop up as we go, and maybe that’ll be like another channel that we can bring into affiliate.

Coady Joy [00:23:07]:

Yeah, and I think other channels are leaning on us more now too. A lot of SEO is now looking at affiliate to work with and even social, like with TikTok shops and that kind of thing. It’s merging, which I’ve always been an advocate of. I think channels operating in silos and measuring them against each other has just never been the right way to go about any of this. Marketing all works together. It’s all about, at the end of the day, the conversion from the consumer. And it shouldn’t really matter where they saw the brand, as long as they saw the brand. And, you know, incrementality is a whole nother piece of the puzzle.

Coady Joy [00:23:41]:

But I’m really happy to see this evolution and to have other channels be on board with us finally.

Marshall Nyman [00:23:48]:

Well, let’s let’s switch into your current role. You’ve been with Impacts PXA now for a bit, helping build out that education for whether it’s a brand agency, affiliate manager, really anybody that’s looking for more insight into how they can do more in the space and really be educated. Love to hear that role. I’m sure you never anticipated being an educator in the affiliate space and now that’s what you’re doing. Love to hear a little bit about that.

Coady Joy [00:24:15]:

I didn’t at all, obviously, but I had always thought if there’s a role for me at Impact, I want it. Because I have been working with this company since I was at Levi. So it’s been a long time now and a lot of the people I worked with back then are still at the company, which to me says so much about this company. I never thought there would be a place for me because I am not as much tech experience as I’ve had working with these softwares. That’s not my strong suit, that’s not my skill set is like any technical back end, nothing. So I figured there’s really probably not going to be a place for me. But when I saw this role, I walked into the interview and basically said, I logged on and basically said, stop your search, it’s me, you found the person. And the more they told me about it, the more excited I got.

Coady Joy [00:25:03]:

And it’s the best job I’ve ever had. Especially going to conferences and seeing people and hearing that we’re helping know. At the beginning I kind of felt like this content is great, I wish I had it at an agency, I wish I’d had it at Levi’s, but are other people going to feel this way? Are they going to sit down and take an hour long? Like, is it going to be helpful to them? And to hear that it is, is just worth everything. And even now we’re changing up our formats. We have our long form courses, but we also have micro learning. So if you only have five minutes to learn something, we have that for you too. So we’re getting really flexible with where we’re meeting our learners and it’s been just such a fun thing to watch the team evolve and to watch our content get better and grow. Our learner database, everything is free.

Coady Joy [00:25:52]:

So that’s also a great selling point for people that are interested is it’s free education and it’s really high quality education as well. We put a lot of work into it. We do what we can to stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the industry. And we have two sort of facets to our training. We have industry and we have product. So if you’re not an Impact client or you don’t use the software, we have industry training. That’s platform agnostic and applicable to wherever you are. And it’s totally strategy related.

Coady Joy [00:26:24]:

So if you’ve never run a program before, if you’re super experienced, there’s still something for you. And then we have our product side, which is if you are using the Impact software as a brand or a publisher or an agency, we help you learn how to use it. Which I know in the past, even my own complaint about Impact is there’s. So much tech that you just need help sometimes learning and navigating what you can do with the software. So we’ve made that available to anybody who needs it. And it’s been really fun just being able to meet people and even spread the word if they’ve never heard of it before, who doesn’t like free anything? So free content, free education is always appealing to people that we talk to. And this year, like this half of the year, we’re really looking to do more in person stuff, so keep an eye out for in person PXA Led trainings. We’re really excited about that.

Coady Joy [00:27:15]:

We’re doing a lot of live webinars now, even still, Impact just launched our creator software, Impact creator, so you can now manage your influencer program start to finish with us too. So we’re doing live demos of that every month. So that’s available if you have questions about that. And I’m going to be starting in this next month live webinars for people that are new to Impact, so if they’re getting up and running with the software, they can join this and learn how to use it, ask their questions in real time just to kind of help as much as possible. Our whole point is to help people and meet them where they’re at and give them what they need to excel in this profession and level up their careers if it’s a promotion thereafter, if they’re new to the space. We were just at ASE and Affiliate Summit East, and we get a lot of people that are new to the affiliate space there or interested in joining the affiliate space there. And that last conference was really helpful to be able to sort of spread the word and talk to people who are new and have questions and do our part to educate. So it’s very fulfilling.

Coady Joy [00:28:20]:

Like you said, I never thought I would be in education in any way. My mom was a teacher. She’s retired now, but she was a teacher growing up and I always admired her and thought like, oh, it takes such a special person to teach. It’s not me. But it is. I guess it turns out it is. You just had to be the right topic.

Marshall Nyman [00:28:39]:

I guess it was in your was. Yeah, well, that’s definitely good. I think, you know, as somebody that’s taken the course and you know, it’s definitely helpful for people that are just getting started. I was in a cab for ASE and one of the driver was asking me about affiliate marketing and he said it was something that he’s familiar with but wanted to get more skills in. And I said, well, you could take this course and level up a little bit and use that to help you try to get more. So I think, yeah, it’s great. And then the other point that you hit is there’s definitely a lot of complexities to the Impact platform that lets you do a lot of things that are unique. And by having that education, it definitely helps you with some things that maybe you’re not as familiar with because it’s a new tool or tech that you haven’t used before.

Marshall Nyman [00:29:33]:

So I think there’s a lot of benefit for people that are users of the platform and a lot of benefit for people that are just trying to get more education in the affiliate space and maybe they aspire to be an affiliate manager or whatever that we’re kind of role they’re cracking into. It’s definitely a good way to kind of help get you started. As I said, and as you said as well, when we first started, we had no clue what we were doing. Somebody tried to explain to me, affiliate, I had no idea. This is a way where it’s a little more digestible for people that maybe don’t know as much about the space.

Coady Joy [00:30:03]:

Yeah, I mean, how helpful would this have been back then?

Marshall Nyman [00:30:07]:

Well, maybe that’s what gave us the leg up though, because I think what you were saying really resonated with me. I kind of didn’t know a lot of stuff about affiliate marketing, but I didn’t care. I just tried to absorb as much as I could. I went to conferences, I met with other people, I tried to learn. So I think that was kind of what gave me the opportunity because now it’s way more competitive because the information is out there and it’s not like you can just kind of go and learn it on your own. It’s public where before you had to be in a good company to really get that information.

Coady Joy [00:30:39]:

Yeah, definitely.

Marshall Nyman [00:30:42]:

So just kind of switching over to last couple of questions. What is one of the biggest challenges that you’re seeing currently in the performance marketing industry?

Coady Joy [00:30:53]:

I think we’re still struggling with Attribution a little bit. I think there’s so much chatter about multitouch commissioning and looking at the funnel and compensating based on that, but I think we’re still not quite there where we figured out the secret sauce to it. Some companies have, some brands are starting to dabble in it, but it’s not as widespread as I feel like maybe it should be. I think we’re going to get there. It’s just taking a little longer than I would have expected. And I also think there’s some education that still needs to happen on the publisher side of that you can get compensated differently and here’s how it works and here’s what to ask for and that kind of thing. But yeah, I think we’ll get there. It’s just going a little slower than I anticipated, I think.

Marshall Nyman [00:31:41]:

Yeah, I think it’s a hot topic and I definitely think there’s a lot to kind of unbox there. And it seems like when I ask this question, a lot of people go to Attribution. I think with the different mix of publishers in a program, attribution is different for certain types of publishers than others. And so is first click best? Is last click. Is multi touch best. Should you have separate conversion lines set up for certain publishers? There’s a lot of discussions that we have here internally because I don’t think there’s one approach. And I think that’s the thing with affiliate is every program is different. It’s not like totally something’s working for one person, it’s going to work for everybody else.

Marshall Nyman [00:32:18]:

So also just kind of like goes into that testing phase. But I think Attribution is something you want to talk about before you set the program up and really understand what your goal is. Are you trying to find new customers? Are you trying to just credit anybody that’s in the click stream, really knowing what your strategy is there? I think a lot of times people are just kind of used to doing Last click and that’s just easy and they don’t want to think about it. But I think having that discussion with the brand and really understanding what their goals are is good. And yeah, there’s still a lot to come, I think, on Attribution and handle it, since it’s a hot topic. I don’t think it’ll be anything very quickly, but yeah, I think definitely a lot there to kind of figure out as we go forward.

Coady Joy [00:33:01]:

Yeah.

Marshall Nyman [00:33:03]:

And ultimately you just want to make sure everybody’s getting the credit they deserve. That’s really what it is.

Coady Joy [00:33:07]:

Yeah. And I think brands get scared too when you mention like, oh, we could commission two people in this. Oh, no, that’s not what I signed up for. I signed up for last click. Very low commission. That’s it. So again, it’s back to more education of what can be done and why.

Marshall Nyman [00:33:23]:

All right, and then last question. Any predictions on the future of performance marketing, where things might be headed?

Coady Joy [00:33:31]:

I think honestly, we’re going to see a lot of shifts from and I think some people would probably disagree with me, but I feel very strongly that we’re going to see a lot of shifts in creators from flat fee models to CPA based compensation. The reason is because historic, not that they don’t deserve it, but flat fees can get hefty with creators. I mean, they are well compensated a lot of the time and again, they’ve earned it. But I think as we see what’s happening with the economy and although Taylor Swift is saving us from a recession, we were going to see more budget cuts. It just always is what’s going to happen. And I think I’ve seen brands start to question what flat fees are for creators and with this option of CPA, it’s very appealing to advertisers, obviously. And I think creators are going to have no choice eventually but to kind of get on board with it, at least in a hybrid sense, if nothing else. So I think we’ll see a lot more of that.

Coady Joy [00:34:28]:

And my hope is that at least with us. At PXA, we can help creators understand why it’s still a good option for them and how they can use that to their advantage to grow their own income on a more evergreen basis. Outside know campaign promotion for sure.

Marshall Nyman [00:34:46]:

Great point. Well, great having you on. Really appreciate the insight and sharing your history with everybody. So big thank you to Cody from Impacts PXA for joining the podcast this week. The certification is a great addition to any performance marketer’s repertoire, so if you’re thinking about boosting up your knowledge, definitely check out the PXA. Some really great insights on how to boost your affiliate knowledge through the academy. What is the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Coady Joy [00:35:18]:

Yes. Please find me on LinkedIn. Codyjoy C-O-A-D-Y-J-O-Y or PXA impact. We offer like free even. If you want to grab 15 minutes with me on my calendar, you can do that and ask me any questions, and we’re always available and super happy to chat, so please find us.

Marshall Nyman [00:35:36]:

I can attest to that. You said the same thing to me, and we got on a call right after.

Coady Joy [00:35:40]:

Absolutely.

Marshall Nyman [00:35:42]:

It’s not an empty promise. I think it’s definitely a nice offer for anybody that’s looking to level up.

Coady Joy [00:35:48]:

Want to meet with you.

Marshall Nyman [00:35:49]:

Yeah. Well, again, thank you to Cody. I’m Marshall Nyman, host of the Performance Marketing Spotlight. Signing off. Thank you for joining us. If you’ve enjoyed this content, give us a like or follow. Thank you.