Episode #18 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Laurie Cutts

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, the podcast brings you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space, where they highlight their experiences within the industry. Today I have Laurie Cutz, who is head of agency partnerships at Everflow. Welcome to the podcast, Laurie.

Laurie Cutts [00:00:25]:
Thanks so much for having me, Marshall.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:28]:
Of course. Excited to have you on today. It’s great to just see you in Vegas as well. Let’s get right to it.

Laurie Cutts [00:00:35]:
That sounds great.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:36]:
Why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience so they can get to know you a bit?

Laurie Cutts [00:00:40]:
Sure. So I’m Lori cuts. I live on the south shore in the greater Boston, Massachusetts area. I live with my husband, two daughters, and I have two dogs, a chocolate and a black lab. I kind of think Massachusetts has the best of everything because we have both the beach, which is close to where I live, and then you have a short drive to the mountains. I really love walking my dog, skiing, hiking, biking, running, and playing tennis. I also really love traveling. Last summer, I took my daughter to Europe for the first time, and we visited Paris and the south of France.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:23]:
Which was really fun, amazing. I love all those outdoor activities and traveling with my family, too. So I think we got some of the same passions. Well, you were at the early start of search ecommerce mobile social. Really kind of like the beginning of all this digital craziness that we’re in now. Tell us about how you got your start.

Laurie Cutts [00:01:47]:
Yeah, so I’ve been in digital marketing for 20 years, which sounds like a really long time now that I say it. I initially got my start at working for companies like AOL and Lycos, which were sort of the big leaders at the start of the Internet in the early years of the.com boom. So I was working with them on working with most of the ecommerce companies, trying to help drive exposure for them and sales and things like that. And then following sort of my early Internet days, I’m kind of a startup junkie. So I ended up joining a mobile company that was doing text messaging marketing in the really early days of mobile, before the iPhone. So joined this company when it was like ten people. It was called McUbe. We did text messaging marketing for companies like P and G, and we did the voting for American Idol.

Laurie Cutts [00:02:49]:
So it was pretty cutting edge at the then, you know, the advent of the smartphone. I moved on to a different mobile company called Sultra that was doing rich media mobile advertising. Now that we had the iPhone and Android, we could build a whole much better sort of advertising experience. So again, working with a lot of agencies and brands like Visa to help them reach their audiences on mobile. And then following sort of my mobile stint, I went into social media. I worked at a company called Nanagins, which was one of the first Facebook advertising tech companies. And we work closely with a lot of e commerce brands such as Wayfair like Zulilly, as well as gaming brands like Zynga to enable them to reach and advertise on Facebook. It’s really before Facebook kind of had developed their internal tools and then I just had been at a lot of tech startups and one of my mentors at the time really recommended that I kind of jump over to the agency side.

Laurie Cutts [00:03:58]:
I’d always worked with agencies. I had mostly been in marketing or account management or partner roles at all of these different companies. So I’d worked a lot with agencies, but I’d never worked at an agency. So in 2014, I accepted a position at Acceleration Partners, which is like the leading global affiliate marketing agency. They were pretty young at the time, they had about 40 employees, and it was just a really exciting time to join acceleration partners. Affiliate marketing wasn’t a very well known channel at the time. It was a very fragmented space. Not a lot of people knew what it was.

Laurie Cutts [00:04:46]:
So it was a great time to join and become a part of acceleration partners. And then following that, I went to a full service agency called Merge, and then I joined Everflow back in April of 2023.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:04]:
Wow, amazing. I definitely get the startup junkie thing. I’m one myself, so I can see why you chase after those. It’s fun to help build something. So you’ve been with Everflow now for a year. Would love for you to tell us a little bit about Everflow for those folks that aren’t familiar with it.

Laurie Cutts [00:05:23]:
Yeah, so I lead agency partnerships at Everflow, and Everflow is a partner marketing, tracking and attribution platform. We have over 1000 brands, some of which include like Sharecare Class and JG Wentworth. We’re really well known for tracking and attribution. We tracked about $3.1 billion in revenue in 2023. And I think one of the most impressive things that I found it since I started at Everflow and learned a lot more about the company is that we’ve achieved this without any external investors. The company was started in 2016 and they’ve been completely bootstrapped, which is, I think, really impressive.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:12]:
That is amazing. And I’m all about bootstrapping it myself and having no external investors. So it’s the way to build a business. So tell us about your role at Everflow and what you’re trying to build there.

Laurie Cutts [00:06:24]:
Yeah, so I’m leading agency partnerships at Everflow and it’s a great role for me because I worked at a number of affiliate agencies. So I really understand the services that agencies provide and how much they can really help brands to grow their programs. With affiliate recruitment, just managing the day to day operations optimization like reporting and analytics, there’s just so much value that they can provide. And a lot of times agency managed programs grow faster and typically clients are happier with their programs. So it’s really a mutually beneficial relationship and a win win situation. So I’ve been focused on connecting more of our clients with our agency partners so that they can more quickly scale their programs and see more success with their partner programs.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:27]:
Awesome. What has been your favorite part of working at Everflow so far?

Laurie Cutts [00:07:30]:
I really love the team at very. It does have kind of that startup feel where it’s very innovative, people are really supportive, there’s a lot of new initiatives and ideas. So I really just love the people and the culture is really strong as well. We have a lot of great features. We’re in all remote organizations. They do a lot to kind of build rapport and connections with the employees, which I’ve found really helpful, especially being a new employee last year.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:09]:
Awesome. What are some major challenges that affiliate networks are currently facing?

Laurie Cutts [00:08:16]:
I think for some of the traditional networks, what I see is that the needs of advertisers and publishers are really evolving. And I think it’s hard for some of these traditional networks because customers are demanding more, whether it’s granular reporting tools, cross channel and cross device tracking, multichannel attribution. And I think it’s challenging for some of these networks that are trying to do both technology and services well. They’re competing with SaaS platforms in the space that are just solely focused on investing in product and technology. And I think that professional services requires really different skill sets, resources and resources than product development. So I think it’s challenging for them because the staff and technology focused solutions have the advantage of kind of focused on developing those best in class features and tools that clients are really looking for. So that’s one big challenge that I.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:24]:
See what has been one of the favorite parts of working at Everflow.

Laurie Cutts [00:09:29]:
I really like the sort of cross team alignment. It’s really easy to work with our customer success team. We have a world class customer success team that is really dedicated to helping both our agency partners, our clients, our publishers be successful so everyone’s always willing to help out. And then even our business development team is super supportive for trying to help connect an agency with a new prospect that is looking, that needs sort of help getting onboarded to the platform and kind of scaling up just the alignment between all the different departments and just being able to work with everyone to accomplish the company goals.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:22]:
Great. What is one of the most common misconceptions you’re hearing about affiliate marketing?

Laurie Cutts [00:10:29]:
I think the biggest one that I think about when it comes to affiliate marketing, one of them is that you can just set it and forget it. It really requires brands to actively manage their programs, making sure they’re leveraging all the reporting and analytics to make intelligent, data driven decisions so they can motivate partners and reward them appropriately for the activities they are driving. I think another misperception that I see a lot is that affiliate marketing is riddled with fraud. There’s bad affiliates looking to exploit the system, but I think when it’s done correctly you have the right terms and conditions, you vet your affiliates and you have a strong technology partner that has good fraud detection measures in place. I think that this is something that brands can really overcome.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:22]:
Any predictions on the future of affiliate marketing or where things in the industry are maybe headed?

Laurie Cutts [00:11:27]:
Yeah, one opportunity that comes to mind would be that I think there’s just going to be much more overlap in partnership marketing as it relates to other channels, whether it’s pr influencer, paid media channels like search, social, SEO. And I think that this is a really big opportunity because brands will be able to leverage affiliate and partner marketing to reach customers across the entire funnel with sort of collaboration and insights from all the marketing channels. And I think this will ultimately help lower customer acquisition costs, allow them to embark on sort of new campaigns and opportunities, and just drive overall growth for a lot of brands. So I really think that it’s going to be less of a siloed channel and really more of a channel that can help across the entire customer journey.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:28]:
Awesome. And one last question before we wrap. What has been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing space?

Laurie Cutts [00:12:37]:
I think the innovation and I guess pace of digital and performance marketing has always excited me. There’s always something new, it’s always changing, there’s just a lot to take in. So it never stands still. So I find that all that innovation and change just really excites me, especially as it relates to technology and new features. And then I also really like the people. I think the affiliate industry seems really small a lot of times because you’ll run across people that you knew at one company and now they’ve moved to a different company, but you work for them before, so it’s great. A lot of the people in the industry are really great. And I really do think that everyone has each other’s best interests in mind.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:34]:
Yeah, I love the innovation in the industry and I think that’s one thing that makes affiliate special, is that we’re always finding new ways to bring other elements into affiliate. Whether it’s elements of other channels or even leaning into influencer, we’re finding ways to make affiliate continue to evolve. And I think yes. So that’s a key piece of why affiliate is such a great channel. I think that’s a great note to wrap on. A big thank you to Lori Cutz from Everflow for joining the podcast this week. Some really great insights into her career and how you can leverage everflow as your affiliate network. Laurie, what is the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Laurie Cutts [00:14:16]:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Marshall. It was really great to be on the podcast. To learn more about Everflow, you can visit our website, everflow IO. You can sign up for a demo or feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Lori cuts and yeah, I would love to continue the conversation.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:39]:
Again, thank you to Lori. I’m Marshall Nyman, host of the performance marketing spotlight, signing off. Thank you for joining us and give a like or follow if you’ve enjoyed this content. Thank you.