Episode #42 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Vanessa Lawrence

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 Vanessa Lawrence, Chief Content Officer at Linkby. Welcome to the podcast, Vanessa.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:00:24]:
Thanks so much for having me. I’m a big fan, so it’s nice to feature on an episode.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:28]:
Of course. Excited to have you on today and let’s jump right into it. We’d love to know a little bit about you.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:00:36]:
Yeah, well, I mean, if the accent didn’t already give me away. I am Australian, but I live here in New York, so I’ve been living stateside for just over two and a half years now. I came over from Sydney to build up Linkby’s New York presence. So, yep, I am, I’ve been here for a little while now and still loving it. And I think a fun fact that I keep up my sleeve for things like this, that everyone’s always like, that’s a bit weird, is I’m a collector of very niche Christmas ornaments. So the weirder the better. And I collect them like year round to the point where I actually have a spreadsheet where I kind of keep an inventory so that I can like cross reference and say like, okay, do I already have a ufo? Do I already have a Coke can? Do I already have, I don’t know, like a Miranda Priestley ornament? So that’s a little, little fun fact about me.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:39]:
I gotta ask a question. Is there any ornament that you’re searching after right now? Top of your list?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:01:44]:
Oh my God. If anything, I need to pull back. Honestly, I feel like living, living in New York, it’s just like a mecca for niche Christmas ornament. So I’ve been going absolutely insane the last two and a half years and yeah, I really need to pull back, but I wouldn’t mind a little bit more in the space category, you know, like maybe like a cool astronaut, maybe like a better UFO than the one I currently have. So, you know, I’m keeping my eyes peeled. Marshall.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:17]:
So how did you end up getting into content and performance marketing?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:02:20]:
What a segue. I basically my entire career has been in publishing, obviously predominantly in Australia, though I did work in the UK for a couple of years. So essentially I started out in print and I worked for a lot of the kind of big name magazines that, you know, we, we’ve all read especially as women, lots of women’s lifestyle titles Grazia, Cosmo, et cetera. And then from there I segued into digital and started working at Pedestrian tv, which I’m sure we’ll talk about throughout this episode. And I stayed there for quite a long time with a break in between when I went to a content marketing agency in Australia who had the contract for Qantas, which is, if you’re not familiar, Australia’s national airline. So I was there for just over a year and a half and then I went back to Pedestrian for a kind of second stint and then from there on the Linkbyr.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:24]:
So you’ve been at Linkby for two and a half years. What led you to make that move?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:03:30]:
Yeah, so I essentially a little bit of history there. So Chris Rosina, who’s the CEO and founder of linkbee, is also the co founder of another very successful business which he ran with one of his friends from university or college as you would call it, for 18 years. And that was called pedestrian TV. It’s essentially was Australia’s kind of answer to like a vice, but a little bit, kind of, I would say like a little bit less serious, more kind of Aussie humor and I guess bringing news to like young Australians in a way that they could digest. So he actually reached out to me on LinkedIn while I was the features director at Elle magazine and said, hey, we’ve got this role going at my business, Pedestrian, are you interested? And I looked it up and I was like, I mean this feels tiny. And it was, it had like a very, it was well known, but in smaller circles. Anyway, Fast forward met with him and his partner at the time, got the job, spent many years helping build that out. By the time that I left on the second stint we were at, you know, 130 odd employees total.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:04:52]:
And he actually sold the business to Australia’s largest digital media company for, you know, a pretty significant sum. And he left to found Linkby. So he and I, obviously, after those many years of working really closely together, stayed in touch. We’d have lunch kind of once a month and he told me about linkbee and even ran the name past me, was like, what do you think about this? I was like, well I feel like people are going to pronounce it link by but and spoiler, I was right. But I think we’ve got enough name recognition now for people to, to pronounce it correctly. But anyway, we kept in touch. He was telling me all about linkbe, the growth that the business was saying and eventually it got to the point where he Sort of said, hey, look, I need this role, but I need it to be in New York. And at the time I just wasn’t 100% on like relocating at this point in my life and career.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:05:50]:
But if I, you know, I’ve hitched my wagon to cruise very successfully once before and if anyone can kind of build another super successful business, it’s him. So took the leap of faith and yeah, here I am kind of 2.5 years later in New York.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:06]:
So what is Linkby and what makes them unique?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:06:09]:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I feel like we mean different things to our different partners. Whether you’re kind of a publisher that uses us or a brand or an agency, but in the kind of most basic of terms where an ad tech platform that connects brands with premium publishers on a predominantly cost per click or CPC basis that allows them to secure super valuable, highly contextually relevant editorial coverage with no upfront costs. So we founded, Chris founded the business with two other people about five years ago and now we operate in North America, the uk, Ireland, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. And actually we just launched with our first publisher in Europe, in France. So yeah, lots of expansion planned for later this year.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:58]:
And what do you do in your role as chief Content officer at linkbee?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:07:01]:
Yeah, so essentially my role is to oversee our whole network of publishers globally. Like I said, we operate in a multitude of markets and so there are different departments in my team. One of them is the kind of publisher management team. They are the kind of day to day liaisons with our publishing partners and you know, they range everyone from, you know, Wirecutter to a News, to New York Post to Hearst and Conde Nast and kind of everyone in between. They liaise with them day to day and help, you know, ensure their success on the platform. Then there’s a business development team, as it sounds. Their job is to kind of recruit new publishers and also help scale publishers who have, you know, more potential than what’s being realized on the platform currently. We also have a content team in house who help to produce content for one of our products, which is called Pub Feed, which is kind of our answer.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:07:58]:
It’s like a more premium end of page experience than say like a table or outbrain. And last but not least, we also have a performance marketing team that sits in my remit who’s essentially in charge of putting space spend behind certain publisher campaigns to help them kind of reach their full potential when required. So a bit of a mix of teams under my remit, but essentially broad brushstrokes responsible for those 250 plus premium publishers across our global network.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:31]:
Why should a brand get started with linkbee?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:08:34]:
Yeah, it’s a good question. I feel like the beauty of linkbee lies in the fact that it really does support the widest range of brand objectives. Like whether you’re looking for coverage to support say a product review. We secured a great piece of coverage on CNN underscored for like Cole Friedrich, which is a luxury luggage brand that was launching a new product. Maybe it’s a sales activation so you know, like Athleta is running a 20 off sale or maybe it’s just a general brand awareness campaign which we do a lot of. Basically we can guarantee the right kind of authentic exposure across, you know, the right publishers at the right time. And I think that aside from being able to meet a lot of, you know, brands and agencies objectives, they really value the fact that with Linkby, you know, there’s a lot of variety there. So there’s really no limit to the number of publishers that you can work with.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:09:44]:
On linkbee we have a lot of like repeat spenders who try certain publishers for a while, see great results and then move on to like you know, another batch of 10 or whatever it is. There’s also like super fast turnarounds. Like content can go live in as little as say 48 hours depending on the publisher. And then of course like brand cut through. Obviously there’s still a place for like those great earned media placements but publishers are incentivized to optimize affiliate content. Right. So that often makes it a lot more effective in terms of like really delivering your message. And then of course the obvious one which is no upfront costs.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:10:20]:
So brands are only paying for you know, genuine clicks, genuine engagement as it happens, not just when a sale is delivered.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:31]:
What types of brands are seeing the most success on the platform?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:10:35]:
Yeah, it’s been an interesting evolution and I think we’re continuing to see like we say dozens of new brands join every week. But we have a really good mix, I think of those kind of like buzzy D2C brands that you see all over like your Instagram and TikTok, right through to those kind of household names that, that need no introduction, like you know, Rugable, Dyson, Hilton, Aesop, like Maduri, Charlotte, Tilbury, Anastasia, Beverly Hills, you know, the list goes on. So I think you know our originally our bread and butter was those kind of mid tier data Cs and we have a ton of those still. But we also have a lot more kind of, you know, large scale blue chip companies joining the platform all the time.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:24]:
You now have the ability to do reverse pitching on linkbee. Tell us what it is and how it works.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:11:31]:
Yeah, so reverse pitching is essentially as it sounds. So if you’re not familiar with Linkbeat, I know you are, but for those who are listening and are not, essentially the way the platform works at the moment is that brands will come to us with a specific objective in mind. Like I said, it could be a product launch, a sales activation. They’ll put together a brief, so not dissimilar to say like a press release. They’ll nominate the cpc, they’re happy to pay out the timeline that they want to work towards, and then from there they’ll get to select from our list of publishers in terms of who they really want to work with. And from there it’s on the publisher to consider that opportunity and accept it if they feel it’s a good fit editorially and then of course produce the content. So the whole concept of reverse pitching is to kind of flip the script, right, and be able to give publishers the opportunity to pitch to brands directly with compelling concepts that they know are going to perform really well with their audience. And that’s regardless of whether or not they’ve been pitched by that brand to begin with.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:12:33]:
So it just opens up the, you know, the lines of communication so that it goes both sides and publishers don’t have to kind of sit back and wait for brands to come to them. They can proactively pitch to brands, which is especially great for forward planning. So it’s like, okay, if the scheme knows that they’re going to be doing like a gift guide in Q2, for example, or hypothetical, they could be submitting a reverse pitch now that drums up commercial interest with linkbeat brands so that they can kind of secure those opportunities and forward plan and fill out that gift guide, if that makes sense.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:14]:
What’s been your favorite part of working at linkbee?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:13:20]:
Well, a personal point of pride was opening the New York office. So I obviously was the first US employee and came on my own, like no apartment, no bank account, nothing. Like, you know, just literally the desire to make it work. And about six months ago, we opened our first office globally, like, you know, physical footprint office near the Rockefeller Center. So that was awesome and I think was a really nice illustration of how far we’ve come in like those 2.5 years. So being able to spend time with the team in person, I love because I always just look around and I’m like, oh my God. It was just me a hot minute ago and now look. And then I think we’ve done a really good job of hiring genuinely nice people.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:14:08]:
That’s one of the pieces of feedback we always get when new starters are onboarding. At the end of the onboarding we’re like, do you have any feedback? And everyone says everyone is so helpful, so responsive and so passionate about linkbee that it honestly just makes work a joy. And I’m sure you can attest to that because I know your team is, is awesome and very friendly and very cool as well.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:33]:
So you’re just a speaker at ASW in Vegas. How was your experience at the conference and any other conferences you plan on going to this year?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:14:41]:
Yeah, it was a great conference. I always leave a little bit overwhelmed just by like the scale of the event and the opportunities that are kind of running, running around. But it was awesome. We had the biggest presence that we’ve had to date at the conference, which was three from the publishing side of the business and two from sales. We definitely got a lot out of it. I mean, I unfortunately got home and went down with Norovirus, which I blame, which I blame Vegas for because I was shaking so many hands and also probably playing too many slot machines. But overall it was a great conference. And I think the rest of the year.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:15:23]:
I’m personally attending the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail next month, if any listeners are attending that. And then we’ve also got, you know, and in this is in no order but like IPX PI Live, obviously Affiliate Summit east, we’ll probably do cju. So yeah, definitely a few events on the calendar. For sure.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:43]:
You’ll be hitting the circuit.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:15:45]:
Hitting the circuit hard. For sure, for sure.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:47]:
Any predictions on the future of performance marketing?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:15:51]:
Oh, that’s a hard one. I feel like the prediction that I have kind of ties into, I think like one of the challenges that the industry is facing. And you know, this is nothing new, but I think it does the whole, you know, first versus last click attribution, like the honey controversy. I think all of that plays into the sense that, you know, publishers really need to be able to control the monetization of their own content. And I think we’re seeing that more and more certainly over the last 12 months. I mean, how long has it been that newsletters have been like such an overlooked distribution method? Like years, right? It was kind of like, oh well, you know, we’ve got search and we’ve got social, so who cares about newsletter? Will the flip the Script has definitely flipped on that Only be alone. We’re seeing enormous growth across publishers who are growing their owned and operated audiences and really prioritizing those channels. So much so that we are kind of diversifying the business by going after creators in the newsletter space.

Vanessa Lawrence [00:17:16]:
So like substack creators are now signing up to linkbee and we’re giving brands the opportunity to tap into what are extremely highly engaged, niche, but targeted audiences. And so, yeah, I think as a long winded answer to your question, I feel like there’s definitely a trend towards the prioritization of O and O more than ever before. And AI plays a big, you know, we need another hour to talk about that. But essentially, yeah, that’s, that’s one of the trends that we’re seeing. And I think that plays into one of the challenges which is that, you know, you know, more and more dollars are flowing down the funnel into like coupons and cashback and all these browser based commerce tools. And certainly what we believe at linkbee is that like high value publishers and creators should have a much more direct route for being paid for the, you know, the results that they drive for brands and that kind of, you know, halo effect that they give brands from the years and years of building like that trust piece out with their audience. Right.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:26]:
What has been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:18:31]:
I think honestly, just connecting with so many different people, people. I feel like we all exist in our little bubbles sometimes and it’s going to conferences like ASA and ASW where you realize like how enormous the industry is. Right. And how many, you know, facets there are and businesses and side businesses and growth areas. And it, it always just makes me excited when I kind of step back and look at this, like the scale of the industry and how many pockets there are and opportunities for growth that always, yeah, really excites me.

Marshall Nyman [00:19:10]:
Well, a big thank you to Vanessa for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into her background and how you can take advantage of linkbee. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Vanessa Lawrence [00:19:20]:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Essentially, if you want to connect and learn a little bit more about what we do at linkbe, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or my email is vanessainkbee.com and our website is just linkbee.com.

Marshall Nyman [00:19:38]:
Well, thank you to our guest, Vanessa Lawrence and our producer, Leon Sonkin. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and a 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.