Episode #46 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Tom Saulsbury-Hunter

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:
Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Naimon Co. 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 Tom Salisbury, who is the managing director agency at cj. Welcome to the podcast, Tom.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:00:23]:
Thanks for having me, Marshall.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:25]:
Of course, of course. Excited to have you on today. Let’s jump right into it. Can you introduce yourself to the audience?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:00:30]:
Yeah. I mean, you did a good job already. I am Tom Saulsbury-Hunter. I’m managing Director of agency at cj. So I head up the global departments that we have that interact with all of our agencies, whether that is an opm, whether that is internally a publicist group, whether that’s one of the other big four. I’ve been an affiliate about 12 years now. The reason you hear a question in my voice is we’ll probably end up talking about this, but I don’t know whether my first role was affiliate or not. And I’ve been at CJ for pretty much the majority of that, about, about 11 of those.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:01:03]:
So yeah, love the industry, love CJ.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:06]:
Well, that’s quite a run. But how did you get your start in affiliate marketing?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:01:10]:
I didn’t want to be a salesperson and so I tried to automate my job. I was working at a foreign exchange, a fintech firm in London and I was doing a lot of cold calling. And a lot of that cold calling was, I guess, lukewarm calling to realtors, to wealth managers who had clients that might want to do foreign exchange. And I despised cold calling. So I started sending out emails and I started sending out emails with links that their clients could send to us. Sorry, their clients could use when they wanted to do something. And I thought I’d automated my way out of a job. Turns out people don’t like that.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:01:50]:
And I got told off pretty badly. They liked the results, but they wanted me to get back to cold calling rather than, rather than doing this link based thing. So I started looking around elsewhere and just through a huge stroke of luck, a really good friend of mine, who’s still a great friend of mine, had been contacted by a recruiter for cj. He said no, but he came home living with him, he’s my roommate, and said, I think I’ve just found somebody that does what you do. And I said, there’s no way anybody does what I do. Nobody even likes that I do what I do. But he was right. I ended up interviewing with cj I ended up discovering that I’d effectively been doing a very small scale version of affiliate marketing.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:02:31]:
I guess the rest is history.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:32]:
Amazing. What were your initial responsibilities as an account manager when you first got started?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:02:37]:
I was running a couple of the larger accounts in Europe, which I was really lucky to be able to do considering I only found out what affiliate was about four weeks beforehand. And I had a fantastic mentor who’s still in the industry, Owen Hancock, who had been running those accounts. I think his account manager previously, he was director at the time and he really showed me the ropes. So I had a pretty tight portfolio of two very big accounts. We were doing monthly QBRs, so I guess MBRS, which really helped me cut my teeth having to justify what I was doing, having to come up with new ideas and having to juggle a week of building, well, two weeks of building, I guess a month with actually running affiliate programs kind of helped me get that baptism of fire that I think we all need to be able to do everything that’s needed in affiliate.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:29]:
So you started out as an account manager, worked your way up to be VP of Client development. Tell us how you got there and what were some of your key accomplishments.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:03:38]:
Yeah, so I was account manager for about a year, a year and a half I think. Then I took on some team leadership. Then I became an account director. This was all in, in London and the move up there really was I start to work out that I liked. I don’t know if I want to say this publicly, but I liked difficult accounts, but they were, you know, not difficult clients. All my contacts were really nice. If somebody was looking at leaving CJ or getting out of the industry or was not performing as they wanted to be, I liked taking that on and saying, look, this client’s already served notice, let’s see if I can win them back over. Well, this client’s 30% down year over year.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:04:14]:
That’s not going to be fixed for small tweaks. Let’s see if we can revamp the program. And I had a phenomenal team around me as well. As I said, you know, my, my director was, was fantastic but also there were times when I was working with another account manager and we were ones who punching the pod. I had fantastic ARs and AES, so kind of an entry level employees underneath me and we were able to solve most of those problems. My claim to fame before I ended up heading up the west coast in the us which we’ll get to was I’d never lost a client in, I think that was seven years at that point, despite doing all that. And so I guess that that made me a suitable candidate to become an account director in the uk. And then I came over for cju, which I think, Marshall, you’ve been to before, right, in the us And I stepped into Santa Barbara and decided I didn’t want to leave.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:05:07]:
And I told our CEO at the time that I wanted to move over. It took a couple of years, but he made it happen, and I’m forever grateful to him for that. So I came over as an ad and account director in the us setting up again, some larger accounts and travel accounts, some retail accounts, and eventually ended up taking over pretty much the entirety of the west coast team. It was very, very hectic. It was very, very fun. I was getting. I said, you know, I like problems. I was getting pulled into only problems because nobody escalates to their manager when everything’s going well.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:05:42]:
Right. And so I had things to solve, things to fix all the time, which was. Which was a lot of fun. And then about a year and a half ago, Publicis had been acquired by. Sorry, CJ had been acquired by Publicis 2019. 2020. About a year and a half ago, I kind of spotted the opportunity for us to be networking better into Publicis and other agencies and spoke to our CEO again, the guy that moved me over here, mayor, about that as an opportunity. He ended up leaving the company while we were speaking about that.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:06:15]:
And our new CEO kind of pulled me in and said, look, that sounds like exactly what we need to be doing. We need to be working out how to work better with agencies, with other channels, with everything else, and granted me the license to do that, which again, very, very grateful for. So I think the long story short is it was a mixture of little bit of luck and some fantastic mentors, some fantastic opportunities, which I think that’s what the affiliate industry is all about, really.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:42]:
So now you’re Managing Director of Agency Growth. What do you do in your role?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:06:46]:
So I have multiple elements to my role at the moment. We have the more traditional agency team, I guess, who deal with primarily OPMs, at least in the U.S. so, like yourself, like Gen 3, like acceleration partners. Forgive me if I haven’t named your agency here. Right. But that team was preexisting. That team is doing a phenomenal job at the moment of managing those agency partners. And so that’s been the easiest piece to come in and take over.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:07:18]:
The other side of the role is that newer piece that I just spoke about. So the other side of the role is starting to network into the major holding companies primarily and especially internally into Publicis Group to work out how we can educate people who maybe know a little bit less about affiliate but are managing advertising budgets that are 10 to 100 times the size of what we’re used to for major clients. I don’t want to name anybody here just in case I name a client that I shouldn’t. But yeah, that can look like going in and doing some normal education. For somebody that’s got a really standard B2C E commerce program, who is performance focused, that can look like trying to ideate how Coca Cola could potentially get into the affiliate space, how we could do something that’s performance based with them, how we could drive individual transactions. So it’s a new set of puzzles and it’s a lot of fun to be doing so.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:14]:
For anyone not familiar with cj, who are they and what do they do?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:08:19]:
So we are the world’s largest affiliate network. Verified externally I think we might be one of the world’s oldest affiliate networks. We were established in 98, 99 and we have really two elements to the business. One is the platform. We have what I would describe as a SaaS platform, but I think it’s much more than that. You’re able to run the CJ platform for tracking your publishers completely self serve. A lot of our clients who are on the self serve end of the market though will engage with some of our kind of lower end managed services or our lower touch managed services. And so that’s the other side of what CJ does is outside of the tracking and the management platform, we have effectively a fantastic internal agency who are driving strategy either directly for clients or in the case of my team are working with the external partners that we have that are leveraging us more like a software platform to help them get the best out of cj, to help them get the best out of their clients, to help them get the best out of our publishers.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:25]:
Anything exciting on the product roadmap that you’re able to share?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:09:29]:
Yeah, so I mentioned a second ago, one of the new challenges is trying to work out how we can expand affiliate outside of the more traditional direct ecom last click based tracking. One of the ways that we’re doing that is we’re opening up the concept of marketplaces within cj. So we launched a partnership with Amazon recently where you’re able to track any advertiser is able to track sales to their Amazon stores. We are just in the final phases, I think of launching a similar partnership with TikTok. So if you’ve been keeping an eye on how TikTok Shop has been going, it’s been explosive in its growth. It’s gone from being primarily product focused, primarily focused on non brand names maybe two years ago, to being one of the primary growing marketplaces for digital marketing Overall. People can buy from nearly any advertiser there now. And we’re seeing more and more and more growth from that.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:10:31]:
We’re seeing more and more and more influencers, especially driving to that rather than driving directly to the advertiser sites. But also what we foresee and what we’re starting to see within the industry is that more traditional publisher sets and more nascent publisher sets are really interested in that concept of marketplaces are really interested in that concept of saying, look, if you’re going to buy a pair of sneakers, I don’t care whether you buy from the brand direct, whether you buy them from Amazon, whether you buy them from another advertiser or whether you buy them from TikTok shop. And if the publishers don’t care about that, the network shouldn’t care about that either. Right. We should be able to support that, we should be able to enable that. And that should be a win, win, win, maybe a four times win, win, win, win, win for everybody involved.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:12]:
What’s been your favorite part of working at CJ after all these years?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:11:15]:
Do I get to say cju? No, absolutely. The people. I wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t be being fair to anybody if I didn’t say the people. I won’t give that as the only answer because I know it’s a little bit of a cliched one, but the people here are absolutely phenomenal and geniuses across the board. Everybody here is a plus in what they do, which I absolutely love. Everybody seems to understand both ends of the business, the kind of technical tracking. What could we do? How could we adapt this? They’re really technically minded and technically creative, but at the same time, everybody here are phenomenal. Either salespeople or client managers or strategists.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:12:00]:
And strategists as well. I don’t know how we do it. I really would love to be able to extract that secret sauce. So if I ever did leave, I knew how our hiring practices were so, so successful. Yeah, everybody’s great, everybody’s lovely, everybody is beyond great at their jobs. And it makes it just so, so easy to pivot, to iterate, to come up with new ideas because you know that you’re going to be working with people that get It. The other reason that I love working at CJ and I guess this is affiliate overall, is I absolutely love being able to see the results of what I’m doing. I think it helps me to understand whether I’m doing well.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:12:42]:
I think that’s why I said earlier on I didn’t really enjoy direct cold calling sales. And it’s because you’re going to have 100 calls and you might get one of them that’s successful and you don’t really get feedback on what happened with the other 99 in affiliate. If you do something wrong, you see it, your numbers hit immediately and you can test something else the next day and you’ll see how the performance changes, whether your decision was correct, parts of your decision were correct. You can really go granular with data. And so in general, I love working at cj, but I love working in performance because it allows you to evolve what you’re doing, to change what you’re doing, to try new things and to get really immediate feedback on it.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:24]:
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Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:14:08]:
Yeah, we will. I think we’re going to have an executive presence there as well. So you do want to get meeting anybody at cj? Reach out to us.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:17]:
Awesome. And CJU isn’t too far out either. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the event?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:14:24]:
Yeah, like I said, it’s the entire reason that I moved out here. Or at least it was the originating reason that I moved out here. So I wouldn’t be doing CJU justice if I didn’t mention how beautiful it is in Santa Barbara. It’s a great starting point. The conference itself is so good. I always sound like I’m just being a company man when I speak about it, but I really, really am not. I can’t believe how comprehensive of a Conference CJU is every single year. You want to come and learn about our product, we’ll let you come and learn about our product.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:14:58]:
Of course we will. We’ll talk about the new developments. You want to know about TikTok Shop or our creator portal or anything else that’s coming up. There are sessions for that, I would say probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the content. At CJU, it’s really about learning how to grow your business from both the publisher and an advertiser standpoint. It’s about learning about new trends in the industry. It’s about learning about new publisher models, it’s about working out how to to. I ran a session last year, I think, on new attribution models and how that’s going to interact with brilliant.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:15:30]:
We had AI sessions. It’s a great chance to come and learn about us. It’s a great chance to come and meet all those people that I was just ranting and raving about. But it really is a great conference from an overall standpoint for learning about the affiliate industry from an agnostic standpoint. And I think that’s really special. I think that’s really, really unusual for a conference that is run by a network or something.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:54]:
Why do you think a brand should get started in affiliate marketing?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:15:57]:
That’s a great question. I think the question, the answer to that question now is really, really different to what I would have said maybe five to 10 years ago. I think what I would have said five to 10 years ago still exists. There are customers within affiliate customers who are visiting affiliate sites already who are looking for your brand and looking for information on your brand. And if you’re not present, you’re going to miss out. And you know, there are Google studies that back that up something silly like 80% of consumers will switch brands if they’re showing another brand logo, even if they’ve never heard of that brand before. So there’s like there’s a baseline, of course there is, of just people are already on these sites. You can’t stop people from going to these sites.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:16:38]:
So why would you not be present with your best messaging possible? But I think the more modern answer or what’s kind of evolving out of affiliate now is the power that a lot of these affiliate sites have is expanding beyond just their own owned audiences. It’s not just that you’re getting third party verification from those sites or you know, an extension of your reach from those sites as they start to speak to consumers who are visiting. Naturally we’re starting to see those sites Being pulled into things like AI search results, which seem to really trust affiliate sites at the moment for reviews that are well written. We’re seeing affiliate publishers start to partner across the web so that they are powering coupon feeds for other people, or they are taking out programmatic ads to speak to new potential consumers about what it is that they do and how, you know, you could, you could come to their site and discover brands that are on their sites. We’re really starting to see that affiliate isn’t a set of planets anymore where people visit their planets. It’s kind of a solar system, or even it’s people expanding outside of their solar system. And they are reaching, proactively reaching new consumers, new audiences, new people, and then dragging them back into their ecosystem and speaking to them with authority. I don’t see why a brand that’s not involved with that.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:18:04]:
I don’t see why a brand that’s not an advertiser brand that’s not on those affiliate sites wouldn’t see that as useful. Wouldn’t see it as useful to have a second voice, a second way of approaching customers. And the conversion we see as an industry really backs that up. It works. It’s a great reason to get in.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:26]:
What are you seeing in terms of AI and affiliate marketing?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:18:30]:
Seeing a lot of chatbots. I think everybody’s seeing a lot of chat bots, which I think are really useful. I don’t want to dismiss the value of a chatbot, but the. I think the more interesting developments over the next two to three years are very likely to be how we see either LLMs like ChatGPT, like Claude, like pick your LLM here, start to monetize, which to some extent has to be through affiliate, like, there’s no way that they’re going to be able to charge on a performance. And so naturally that’s going to start falling into affiliate marketing. But also how things happen the other way around, how we see publishers, advertisers, networks, start to leverage the underlying technology. So not the chatbot itself, but the ability to take in a load of data and spit out really highly contextualized results into what they do every day. That can look like things like publisher discovery, which CJ is starting to roll into our platform, where we’re using machine learning, we’re using AI to help surface more relevant publishers that can look like publishers themselves, starting to speak to consumers in a much more contextual way.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:19:47]:
Again, not just by using chat or replies or conversations, but showing them pages that have been completely contextualized to Them it’s kind of like programmatic on not even steroids, on way too many steroids. Or instead of you seeing the right ad, you’re going to see the right experience. And I’m starting to see that happen right now. I’m starting to see certainly advertisers doing that, some publishers doing that. I think that’s going to become a lot more democratized as both as the underlying tech providers enable publishers and advertisers to be able to do that more fluidly, but also as things like no code tools enable publishers, advertisers, networks to start to fold that in themselves.

Marshall Nyman [00:20:29]:
What makes you bullish on affiliate and partnership marketing over the next few years?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:20:33]:
What makes me bullish is I don’t think we are going to escape the fact that consumers want to verify what they’re looking at from somebody that is not trying to sell themselves. It doesn’t matter whether the consumer considers that the place that they’re trying to buy a vacation from is telling them that it’s the best vacation or whether it is ChatGPT, which is, you know, five years time going to be monetized, telling them that it’s the best vacation. They’re going to want to go somewhere else and say I need to read other opinions, I need to read other verification that you know, the one I’m about to buy is the right thing to buy. And while that sounds really fluffy, I think what that fundamentally means is we’re never going to escape the concept that consumers want 2, 3, 4 places to read and not just first party or second party opinions on this. So affiliate, that’s what affiliate is, right? Everything that we do is just additional information, whether it’s a blog site, whether it’s a coupon. You found a coupon on the advertiser site, but you want to go and check whether there are better coupons available, whether it’s if you’ve got the best price via price comparison website, via a cashback website. People want to go elsewhere and make sure that they’re not just getting the information from the horse’s mouth that they’ve gotten spoken to the other animals on the farm. I don’t know if that is a saying, but let’s use it.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:22:03]:
And what we are going to see over the next five years. The reason that I’m particularly bullish about this is we’re going to see more and more and more people are used to going and searching for information. Not just googling best vacation, going to ChatGPT and speaking about it and reading that and understanding that’s come from four or five different places. I think it’s inevitable, as I said a minute ago, that those opinions are going to come from sometimes affiliate sites. But even if they don’t, consumers are engaging more and more in a way that’s conversational, that’s promoting research, that’s promoting them going out and discovering that information. So affiliate is going to be inevitable within that. The other thing is. Sorry, this is a long answer.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:22:46]:
Trim it if you need me to. But the other other thing is we’re still in a relatively economically unstable time, which I know is a cliche, but I think we have been for a long while now. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to clear up anytime soon. I don’t know whether it’s going to get any worse anytime soon, but I don’t think we’re going to suddenly in the next two, three years have a market that everybody feels is really stable. I don’t think consumers are going to particularly feel that things are stable. And inherently what affiliate does really well, again is it helps you to decide on whether what you’re doing as a consumer is the most valuable way of spending your time and money. Is it the best product? Is it the best way that I can price things? I think we’re uniquely positioned as an industry to help consumers make really economical choices, really value based choices. And we’re going to see advertisers as well wanting to be doing that.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:23:43]:
And so the last click model or the, the performance based model of affiliate is going to appeal to them too.

Marshall Nyman [00:23:48]:
Well, a big thank you to Tom for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into his background and how you can take advantage of cj. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:23:58]:
You can grab me on LinkedIn at the moment or I have the easiest email address in the world and I don’t mind listeners emailing me. It’s tshj.com if you want to chat, you want to ask a question. If you want to do anything, you can drop me an email, drop me a LinkedIn or just reach out to CJ.

Marshall Nyman [00:24:16]:
Thank you to our sponsor affiliate Summit East 2025, our guest Tom, and to our producer Leon Zonkin. 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 Nymo & Company.

Tom Saulsbury-Hunter [00:24:33]:
Signing off.

Marshall Nyman [00:24:34]:
Thank you and have a great day. Sam.