Episode #45 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Brook Schaaf

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:
Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall nyman, founder and CEO of Naimo & 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 Brooke Schoff, founder and CEO of fmtc. Welcome to the podcast, Brooke.

Brook Schaaf [00:00:21]:
Thanks Marshall. Thank you for having me.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:23]:
Of course. Super excited to have you on today and let’s jump right into it. Can you briefly introduce yourself to the audience?

Brooke Schaaf [00:00:30]:
So as mentioned, my name is Brooke and I live here outside of Austin in the Texas hill country with four kiddos and some animals. You may see a chicken walk by in the window.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:40]:
Awesome. And how did you get your start in the affiliate marketing world?

Brooke Schaaf [00:00:43]:
Right out of college, I got a job through my brother at a young zappos.com and I took to affiliate marketing like a duck to water as an affiliate manager. Worked in house for a couple companies including competitorshoes.com, which is a very interesting contrast. And then edmunds.com, the car research company. And then my uncle ran for office and I joined his unfortunately unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign along with my brother, after which we were unemployed and hey, why not start a business?

Marshall Nyman [00:01:12]:
And is that what led you to start Shaft Partner Centric?

Brooke Schaaf [00:01:15]:
Yes, although it started as Shaff Consulting and it was an agency, what was called at the time and I guess still is an OPM outsourced program management. So that was very beginning of 2006 and we had some good success early on. Started out in New Jersey and then we moved back to our native California. We were always a remote company. And then along the way we acquired Partner Centric, which made us Shop Partner Centric. And we acquired a couple other books of business along the way, including that of Sean Collins when he went full full time with Affiliate Summit.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:50]:
So tell us a bit about your journey there at Shaft Partner Centric.

Brooke Schaaf [00:01:54]:
Well, you know, the agency life is not one to be envied, Marshall. It’s great because as an agency or even as a sort of a solopreneur type, there’s always value to add to the marketplace. The vast majority of affiliate programs, in my professional opinion are under managed and could use some expertise and not to mention some hard work because it’s very time intensive. And so building a shop is a big project. It’s a lot of mouths to feed, it’s a lot of specific roles to develop, a lot of politics to play, a lot of sales to do. But it’s very, you know, it’s very Engaging and you can have a business, be it large or small. So in that respect it’s, it’s pretty great. But let me, let me admit I was not sorry to leave the space.

Brooke Schaaf [00:02:38]:
So we sold that about seven years ago to actually our first employee who is still running it now it’s partner centric.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:44]:
So you also started FMTC back in 2007. What led to that creation and who is FMTC? What do you do?

Brooke Schaaf [00:02:51]:
So FMTC was the brainchild of a woman named Connie Burr who was an old time OG coupon affiliate. And at that time she saw that more and more competitors were coming into the space and knew that they would have trouble handling their data and she developed processes for this. And so FMDC was formed as for me to coupon to basically provide the coupon inventory as a commodity to enterprise affiliates. And the business took off right away and we are still around all these years later. Oh, sorry, yeah. Just for clarity, I was a co founder of that business and if you fast forward to today, I’m the sole remaining owner.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:33]:
And how does it work with an affiliate program?

Brooke Schaaf [00:03:34]:
So FMDC integrates as an affiliate with the program. We have about 20,000 integrations. Interestingly we have over 20,000 but the active number is slightly under that because there are so many programs that are offline at any given time. And as an active program member we retrieve the coupon deal feeds. So deal here is any kind of coupon sale category, sale, buy one, get one, any sort of consumer offer which sometimes also includes new product launches and then we also retrieve the product fees. So we basically have three types of data that we’re transmitting. One is going to be the program information, the aforementioned 20,000 merchants. The second is going to be our claim to fame, which is all the deal information which is updating constantly, day in day out, there always changes.

Brooke Schaaf [00:04:20]:
And then the last is the product feed information. So we have well over 100 million products from thousands and thousands of manufacturer brown brands in a unified data feed. And FMDC’s core value function is basically cleaning up the data. You’re not just doing the integration with the different tracking platforms, you are going in and cleaning the data. We can clean it for the deal data and then we have various software processes for the product data. So it’s available as a clean, reliable, unified feed. And if you don’t use us, you’re basically either doing it yourself as an enterprise affiliate or, or you’re not cleaning the data. And some affiliates actually don’t care about having the data be clean.

Brooke Schaaf [00:05:00]:
But that makes for a bad, you know, a bad user experience. So most of the serious players do processing on the data.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:09]:
Any exciting product updates on the roadmap for your business?

Brooke Schaaf [00:05:14]:
Earlier this year we launched an interesting new product called the Forbidden Feeds. So we actually finally pulled the trigger on this after CJU last year. And for the last few years almost every show, so not literally every show, but just about somebody and not the same person has come up to me as hey, you guys distribute all the valid data. So it’s all the monetized links with the affiliate program and we provide them back as the affiliate’s own link. So you’re affiliate xyz, you enter your credentials, probably your API credentials, we pull all the data and then we hand you back your own links the same way that you would pull them yourself from the tracking platforms. And so that’s a very thorough, very established process. And somebody said to me, or again multiple people said to me, hey, a lot of people are posting this user generated content, quote unquote. User generated content is oftentimes scraped, stolen, fabricated.

Brooke Schaaf [00:06:08]:
But some of those include coupon codes the merchants do not want on the affiliate sites. If everything you guys do is basically permission based, why don’t you tell affiliates which coupons they are not allowed to use? This basically the service on the merchant side. So I put out feelers publicly and got a surprising amount of feedback on it. And we initiated the project as a separate data feed that affiliates can pull. So basically the merchant gives us their coupons and we have thousands at this point with dozens of agencies and in house program managers and they’re handing us all this data and then they tell us which affiliates it should go to. And then the affiliates at no cost to themselves can pull this feed and they have to write logic to remove that data from the display portion. And so we anticipated this would be a pretty slow going project as it has been. But the enthusiasm has been pretty strong, especially on the merchant side, because some merchants, just to be honest merchants and agencies, they don’t care, but a lot of them do care and they go crazy policing this.

Brooke Schaaf [00:07:07]:
Now you can’t ultimately police what somebody else puts on their site, even if you pursue it with legal means. It’s kind of an uphill battle on the merchant side. But at the same time the affiliates want to keep up good relationships, at least if there is a business relationship. And so the merchants are certainly not without leverage. The question just going to be how much they enforce it. And so what we’re hoping is that this leads to a cleaner marketplace for everybody involved. It gets rid of the headaches for the merchants and that it then enables the merchants to put through with greater confidence more coupon codes to a greater number of partners in the affiliate space. I’m actually concerned on the side note that a lot of people, not just professionals in the space but actual consumers, are a little bit disillusioned by the content that they’re able to find on the coupon sites and that they don’t go through those coupon sites as a consequence, which is bad for affiliate marketing overall.

Brooke Schaaf [00:08:03]:
I think that we want to do our part to encourage as much business development as possible and as clear communication as possible about what can and cannot be posted there. I am very positive and optimistic for this, for the future of the space.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:18]:
What’s been your favorite part of FMTC after all these years?

Brooke Schaaf [00:08:22]:
Affiliate overall I think is a really great channel. Whatever your personal disposition, there’s probably space for you in it if you’re a people person. Obviously there’s a lot of business development to be had. If you’re analytical, there’s a lot of numbers to crunch. There’s software programming. Bigger companies have executive teams. So I think just about anybody can find their way in this space with a meaningful career. That career can be engaged sometimes on a part time basis, which can be great for people with certain life situations.

Brooke Schaaf [00:08:52]:
It’s very easy to start something, it’s not very easy to succeed with project, but you can hang your shingle out as an affiliate, as an agency, launch some kind of specialty technical product. So opportunity abounds. I think that opportunity is going to continue to grow significantly for my 2 cents. Affiliate is very much undersized relative to where it should be. It’s just a great space for enjoying the relationships, doing meaningful work and being able to see the rewards of your work.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:21]:
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Marshall Nyman [00:09:55]:
Will FMTC be there.

Brooke Schaaf [00:09:57]:
We will be. We will have a couple team members at Affiliates of the East. Should be a good show.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:02]:
And any other conferences you’re planning on attending later this year?

Brooke Schaaf [00:10:05]:
Well, I think on the regular retail circuit, it kind of rounds out with CJU and PI Live. And so we will probably have somebody at both of those shows. Those are both really, really good shows. I was at PI Live last year and they do a really nice job. A little more of a challenge to get across the pond, of course.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:22]:
Definite. But we’ll be at both of those as well. Why should a brand get started in affiliate marketing?

Brooke Schaaf [00:10:28]:
Yes, if you’re a brand, you’re either a retailer or you’re some kind of lead aggregator. And in short, if you don’t have an affiliate program, you’re leaving money on the table. And your affiliate program will perhaps not be your largest channel. I mean, if you are in the lead space, it actually might be your largest channel. In the retail space, probably not, but it’ll be a significant channel. 5%, 10%, 20%, it seems. The ceiling on that seems to continue to grow, especially with all the influencers and creators that are in the space now, all the hybrid deals that you’re seeing. And also once you have the channel established, which of course takes a lot of time and a lot of work, doesn’t recommend anybody use an agency such as yourself, then you basically got something of a moat, which is very meaningful because anybody else can go in, bid on the keywords you’re bidding on, Google, the ads you’re bidding on, the audiences you’re going after, and Facebook, et cetera.

Brooke Schaaf [00:11:18]:
So affiliate stands out, I think, is a pretty special channel that takes extra effort, for better and for worse, I suppose.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:25]:
What advice do you have for people looking to grow their career within the industry?

Brooke Schaaf [00:11:29]:
I think the first thing I would actually say about that is get a feel for the role that works best for you in affiliate. As I mentioned, if you’re a people person, there’s a lot to do there. If you’re an analytical type or if you’re a software programmer, that’s going to be a different path. That stuff is less visible in our space. Of course, there are executive roles too. Not as many. The first thing that I would say to anybody would probably be to figure out if you are on kind of like as you progress through your career, is your track going to be management, is your track going to be individual contributor, or do you want to do something entrepreneurial? You might not know. In some sense, all three might be options to you.

Brooke Schaaf [00:12:03]:
But I would give that pretty careful consideration and then kind of look ahead. A lot of people complain that people don’t like affiliate marketing because their career kind of gets capped. And I think that probably is true for some people, but it’s not true for everybody. A lot of people are going to do their best work as individual contributors. I think it’s something of a negative pattern for us that people think of going from doing whatever role they’re in to becoming a manager because it’s just not the natural path for all people. Probably not for most people. If you can and you want to do it, have at it. But it might not be for you.

Brooke Schaaf [00:12:36]:
It might not be the most satisfying career for you. It might not also be the best successful. You’ll see it also might not be your hiring highest income potential. So keep your network up, keep an open mind. And we used to say ask a lot of questions, try and observe what you can and get a feel for what you can do. But definitely water’s warm, jump on in and if you’re willing to do work and you can be successful with it, up economy or down economy, I think you’re going to have more options than other spaces. And for what it’s worth, I think affiliate marketing is going to prove a little bit more resistant to some of the AI erosion compared to other white collar jobs.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:16]:
Well, that literally leads me into my next question about AI and obviously a hot topic across the world right now. How do you see AI and affiliate marketing working together specifically?

Brooke Schaaf [00:13:27]:
Well, we’re not working together, right. So I write a weekly blurb. If anybody’s interested, they can come to FMDC co sign up for the email goes out once a week. And my commentary last week and this week was largely around AI in particular AI mode that’s been announced and the contemplation of IP theft. So ZeroClick has been kind of around for a while. I think it was 2019 when somebody first blogged about that. Forgive me, I don’t recall who it was. It was somebody from the SEO space, I think.

Brooke Schaaf [00:13:54]:
And so you got ZeroClick, you have helpful content update which has been in effect for several years, but sites really got walloped last year. Plus you have site reputation abuse stuff’s all Google policies, of course. And then a subset of site reputation abuse was what they called voucher get in where the bolt on subdomains got whacked. It’s kind of interesting because that was not FMDC’s business model. We weren’t providing that data. So it’s sort of an informed observer. I can say it felt a little bit unfair. And so the sturm and drying and this institute of traffic aggregation are only getting worse because you have all the stuff that was just mentioned.

Brooke Schaaf [00:14:33]:
Plus now with the sort of like the AI overviews and AI mode and all that, less traffic going through to the content creators. But the open web can’t thrive without the content creators not going to be synthetic content from AI for I think a number of reasons. One is that seems to turn out garbage like all the dogs end up being the same picture. And it also kind of lacks that human touch. Only humans can assign meaning to something. Only humans can perceive meaning. And with that there’s got to be some other kind of compromise. It might be legislative in nature.

Brooke Schaaf [00:15:02]:
There’s a lot of lawsuits right now related to the ip. There could be an exchange where robots Txt becomes a legally enforceable restriction on spider sites, AI trained data, or if it appears perhaps in some kind of listing. There’s a lot of fuzziness and uncertainty around some of the legalities, but I think something meaningful has to go into that direction because the content creators have to have some possibility of revenue generation. Now. It doesn’t have to be affiliate, it could be open web programmatic advertising that they’re doing, could be subscription revenue, it could be whatever. But have to get traffic to their sites in order to make that happen. And the the answer engines led by Google have been a bit bloodless, one could say, in terms of their consideration of all the content creators out there. Now, on a more positive note, I do want to note that I think the coupon and reward portion of the Internet are going to be very, very robust.

Brooke Schaaf [00:16:01]:
They have the best content, people seek out this content. They have very advanced business development, they have very advanced functionalities with browser extensions. Like it or not, consumers love browser extensions. Consumers love coupons, it’s a big part of the shopping game. They love rewards. And so to me that’s the backbone of the affiliate marketing ecosystem. But with that you have more influencers and creators than you can count. And I think the monetization through affiliate or through hybrid deals, which you want to remember, typically anchored to affiliate deals because affiliate are the tracking links.

Brooke Schaaf [00:16:38]:
Googlesys has bought a couple of influencer networks. There have been various other partnerships with tracking platforms where the traditional affiliate networks and tracking platforms bring the brands and then the influencers have the influencer index. But it anchors more to the former than the latter because you want the accountability, you want the dollars to flow they’re getting the dollars from the brands and then that accountability is just critical. So the infrastructure really exists with the legacy platforms and that’s just a burgeoning, massive. I mean it’s already burgeoning, but it’s still a massive, ever expanding area. And then I think you’ll see a lot of other things like tech platforms that can monetize through affiliate. Hopefully that’ll be sort of a separate pathway. I think that’s actually on a side note, something we’re going to see more of in affiliate is multiple pathways that multiple affiliates can be commissioned.

Brooke Schaaf [00:17:30]:
If we don’t see that, I think you’ll see more of a split specialty influencer networks which would be obviously disadvantages of big players that otherwise have the same tracking capabilities. And it’s going to be kind of fair. And heck, if you’re buying ads in the walled gardens, you’re already paying them regardless of whether or not there’s an affiliate commission. And most of the time, Interestingly, there’s only one partner click path, at least in the 24 hours preceding the typical transaction or one type of qlik partner. We’re playing with a pretty decent hand. But go back to the AI stuff. It is definitely concerning and my hope is definitely that some kind of new legally enforceable fair standard is created.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:14]:
Well, it kind of led into answering what my next question is. What are some of the challenges the industry is trying to tackle? I think obviously AI as you mentioned is a big one and then tracking is another thing. But is there anything else that you’re seeing as major industry challenges right now?

Brooke Schaaf [00:18:30]:
Yeah. So aside from AI going on tracking for a second, you got Moonpool out of the UK and they do the monitoring for the correct cookie placements. And you also have James Little from Top Cashback often talking about how tracking just breaks. He’s very sensitive to it because they have a cashback site, they get feedback and complaints from users. It’s a real problem. I think over the long run the industry is going to be moving more towards server to server or batch tracking that’ll be much more reliable. You’ll still have a cross device issue, but we really have many miles to go before we get to a more stable place. The pixel based tracking is just easier to implement, which is a lead into another challenge that we face inherently as an industry that affiliate is just more work than other channels.

Brooke Schaaf [00:19:17]:
I saw a complaint from, I think it was Ad Exchanger which largely covers Open web, Programmatic and also the walled gardens. And the comment was that the open Web programmatic websites lose out because people just push the easy button, that is advertisers with their spending within the walled gardens, those being Facebook and Google. I thought it was very ironic because to me the walled gardens are the easy button. Yes, but so is open web programmatic. Affiliate is the hard button. You got to implement it, you got to configure it, you got to make a lot of business decisions. You’re very uncertain how to do that. You got to do a ton of work.

Brooke Schaaf [00:19:52]:
I was teasing a friend of mine who actually works in the open web programmatic space about why he doesn’t do more direct buys. And he made the reveal, which is that he doesn’t want to email 30,000 websites, which is exactly what affiliate marketers have to do, which is the mode that was mentioned earlier. But that’s just an inherent challenge that we have. It’s like we get the short ends of both sides of the stick. It’s harder and it’s more work then on the other side. We’re judged by a higher standard in terms of what the ROI from affiliate is compared to the walled gardens, for example, which are allowed to grade their own homework. Basically ditto for open web Programmatic for most integrations those guys get away with murder. Now affiliates can too, but it’s very much within the program manager’s control.

Brooke Schaaf [00:20:39]:
And any good program manager, again somebody from an agency or somebody who’s good in house, will be able to control a program to even the most exacting standards because technology is very much there. The big challenge there is how does affiliate break out? If you look in the retail space, by my math, if you add up a couple numbers, it looks like we’re probably getting around 3% of the spend in say the US market, but we’re probably contributing to 10 + North. It could be 15% of the revenue generated. At least that’s something that we touch. So I would argue that’s a wild discrepancy. But it’s hard for us to bring up the spending level to where it really should be. I think that’s something that we should think about a lot as a channel. I think we should be aware of the criticisms of affiliate.

Brooke Schaaf [00:21:37]:
They’re fair, but we tend to be very self flagellating as a channel and very unaware that the criticisms that apply to affiliate apply writ large to other channels. So for example, if you look at coupons, a lot of merchants will say well no coupon sites, as you might imagine. My favorite coupon sites. I think it’s silly not to work with them because you can control the business terms as the advertiser with very advanced commissioning rules and all sorts of other levers that you have to pull. So you should be very happy to work with everybody because all of your concerns should be allied by these control mechanisms. But setting that aside, if you say, well, close to the purchase, user would have bought anyway, et cetera, et cetera, those criticisms very much apply to retail media networks, like if you buy ads on Amazon, but retail media is the easy button and it’s five times as big as affiliate in the US market right now. So if you were to apply that structure of success and consideration equally, either affiliate would be way bigger or retail media would be way smaller. Now, I’m not saying there’s no value to making the retail media buys.

Brooke Schaaf [00:22:51]:
It should be considered like any other advertising buy. But I am saying that it’s an example of a double standard that works to the disadvantage of affiliate. So I think one, we all in the space should really be aware of this and we should be able to articulate these arguments when we have a chance to reach the ear of somebody who would be a decision maker, a director of marketing or a CMO inside of an advertiser. For example.

Marshall Nyman [00:23:19]:
I see that you recently started writing a book. What is that about?

Brooke Schaaf [00:23:25]:
Yeah, so the book covers some of these themes. One, a big part of the book is the argument that some content is best monetized through affiliate links. Indeed, can only be monetized through affiliate links. Right. Because affiliate is not necessarily, but is inherently contextual. And so any kind of inline content could be hyperlinked. A category, brand name, a store name, you name it. It can be associated with advertising, copying, including coupons, promotional offers to customers, et cetera.

Brooke Schaaf [00:23:57]:
And so we have not tapped into what the potential for that is. So a little bit of it is about advertising. Why advertising exists, the advertising ecosystem, explanation of the affiliate ecosystem, explanation of the criticisms and narratives around affiliate marketing, criticisms of other channels, which as I mentioned, I think is very important to be cognizant of, and then kind of a vision for the future of affiliate, which is very big. I think our channel should be multiples, larger and I think if we play our cards right, that it will be.

Marshall Nyman [00:24:33]:
And final question, what’s been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Brooke Schaaf [00:24:39]:
You know, I think it’s a great way to a great place to spend your career. You know, you’ll find a community, you’ll find people that you like, you’ll find being in business as meaningful. You can probably engage on your terms. You can engage from many angles, you know, switch roles, try something else out if it’s not working. So I think affiliate is just a great space. And as evidence for that, if you look at some people who leave affiliate, they often come back. So it’s kind of like what they say about the city of Prague. Affiliate has claws.

Marshall Nyman [00:25:12]:
Well, a big thank you to Brooke for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into his background and how you can take advantage of fmtc. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you? Brooke?

Brooke Schaaf [00:25:22]:
Yeah, you’re welcome to email me. It’s B r o o KMTC and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

Marshall Nyman [00:25:31]:
Again, thank you to our sponsor, affiliate Summit East 2025, our guest, Brooke Schoff, 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 off. Thank you and have a great one.