Episode #52 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Matthias Stadelmeyer

Marshall Nyman [00:00:01]:
Hello and welcome to the Performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, Founder and CEO of Naimo and Company. Each episode I will be bringing you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they share their career journey and insights about the industry today. I’m Matthias Stoudelmeier from Trade Doubler. Welcome to the podcast, Matthias.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:00:22]:
Hey, Marshall. Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be here. Thank you.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:27]:
Excited to have you on today. Let’s jump right into it. Can you briefly introduce yourself to the audience?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:00:33]:
Yes. I’m Matthias. I’m CEO at Trade Doubler. Trade Doubler is a partner marketing technology company based out of Sweden. We have a European heritage, but we’re globally now. I’m CEO since 2014, but having started in the company already in 2007, so I’m there for quite a while now.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:54]:
How did you get your start in marketing?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:00:56]:
Basically a little bit out of chance. So I was at university, I studied business engineering and then I was working part time at a IT services and hardware and software selling company and I ended up working in their online shop team. And that’s basically after I finished university, I continued working with them. I was responsible for this online for this online shop and online marketing itself was the part that was most interesting for me all the time. So affiliate marketing, search we did. And then finally there came this offer from Trade Doubler focusing on performance marketing itself and I took that and since then I stayed. So I like how dynamic, innovative our industry is. That’s why I always stayed there.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:43]:
So you’ve been at trade doubler for 18 years now. How did you get your start?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:01:47]:
I started as an account manager in the Munich office. So I’m German, I’m based in Munich. I was responsible for our private network product where we license our platform to clients who want to set up their own affiliate program, managing them themselves. I was doing that for Germany. I was then shifting into sales, working in sales for Germany, got my first international role. I moved to London and I was always going back and forth between client services and sales until 2014 I became CEO of the company.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:20]:
Now in your role as CEO, what are you most excited about?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:02:23]:
Well, I’m here for a long time. We have a very good time at the moment. When I started it was not so super easy, so there was a few difficult years. But I feel quite attached to the company. Right. So I love it a lot. And then being CEO from the beginning and basically up until now is a real honor for me. I love my team.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:02:49]:
When I became CEO. It was kind of like my team. It was my friends, partners, colleagues, working with them, them being accepted by them to lead the company and push for us going forward all the time, as that is an honor, as a pleasure. And then it’s very dynamic, right? The industry itself, our company that keeps me going.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:12]:
For anyone not familiar with Trade Doubler, who are they? What do they do?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:03:16]:
Trade Doubler was founded in 1999 as an affiliate marketing company. The first one in Europe, maybe. Funny side note, it was founded by Martin Lawrenson, who later, later on founded Spotify as well. So many people know him. Quickly afterwards, we expanded across Europe already. So we are one of the largest affiliate marketing networks in Europe. A few years ago now, we started to expand globally. So today we have an office in Sydney as well.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:03:47]:
We have an office in Miami, and we’re just about to open offices in Mexico and in Brazil as well. We have a bit more than 3,000 brands we’re working with. We have a partner network of around 180,000 partners and we can work in basically any country in the world running performance marketing campaigns through them.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:07]:
And as you mentioned, you’re now in the Miami market. What led you to expand there?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:04:12]:
We like, as such, we were kind of like always focusing on Europe and I honestly can’t really tell you why. So why none of the CEOs before me has decided to go beyond Europe. The same with me then. In the beginning, right, we had a lot to do and we have people, people on the ground and basically all the European markets. So we were quite busy. But around three years ago or so, we had a special moment. We lost two or three larger clients just because we were not present in the United States. That was global brands that were active in Europe, but coming out of the United States.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:04:51]:
So American companies, where the US market obviously was their biggest one. So they decided to go for like they did some consolidation and they decided to go for one network. And we were out and that hurt. And then we were thinking about, okay, what to do now? And we started to build a little bit of business in the United States from our London office. So we said like, okay, like, who of our clients is working internationally? Who of them is working in the United States? Maybe we can start programs for them. And that worked much, much better than we expected. So up until the end of last year, around that time, we had 150 brands for who we ran programs, affiliate marketing programs in the United States. And then we were coming to another bottleneck because obviously we need all the large partners as well.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:05:41]:
And some of them didn’t want to work with us because we didn’t have a legal entity. So that we solved now. So we created a US Company. We set up the office in Miami. We have now seven people on the ground in the United States now. We work with around 200 brands, so it’s growing quite nicely. We have almost all important partners on board by now. So we are quite pleased with the progress we’re making.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:09]:
What do you think makes Trade Doubler stand out from your competition?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:06:12]:
I think there is two ways. Either you have technology companies, you can license their platform. They’re very good technically, they have a lot of functionalities, very state of the art innovative, often lacking service and this personal touch. Then on the other hand, you have traditional affiliate networks that have good technology as well, and they have service too. We position ourselves a bit in the middle, so we think that we have a very good platform. We have different interfaces based on the roles of the different brands that we have. So you can either license our technology and run it, do it all yourself, or you can use our service. As said, we take this service part very seriously.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:06:55]:
We have offices in all the countries where we have relevant business. We have local people on the ground. We know the local markets, we speak the languages, we know who to connect to. So we position ourselves as the ones that have a really good technology and can provide you the service as well. And in a mix of these two that you can basically decide yourself, you can do it all yourself on our technology, or you can have all the service based on our technology as well. That’s how we differentiate and that’s where we have the feeling and the feedback from the market. It could really be a good need for that.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:34]:
Any product updates on the roadmap that you can share?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:07:37]:
Yes, we worked a lot, especially on our interfaces. So we have done a completely different new backend where we have all the different functionalities, which means that we can now create interfaces based on the needs of a specific client. The latest outcome of that is the agency interface. That is, for example, for agencies like nymo, when you run with us a higher number of brands, then you can go into this agency interface, you see all the brands, you can go into the different programs from this one point and manage all these different programs. And we give the agencies the ability to basically change everything that is relevant on this program. So you can change, for example, the commission, you can even create new programs, you can create new users that can have login rights. So we basically Give agencies full control while at the same time having one interface from where they can manage all the different programs. That’s the latest what we just released now in summer and are rolling out continuously.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:45]:
It’s been a long run for you at Trade Doubler after all those years. What’s been your favorite part of working there?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:08:50]:
The team, the whole industry. Our industry is compared to ours may be relatively small. I’m here for a long time, so I know all the 400 people that are working at Trade Doubler but obviously many people in the industry as well. I think we overall we have a very informal culture both in the industry as well as within Trade Doubler. So it’s super easy to connect. It’s very innovative. There’s a lot of dynamic and energy and just like being able to speak with all these people all the time, shaping ideas, doing something, connecting very internationally as well, getting to learn all these different cultures. That is.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:09:36]:
That’s giving me so much energy back. So I’m having a good time.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:40]:
We originally met in person in Miami at PI Live and just had the chance to see you in Santa Barbara for a nice little event you hosted. Are you planning on attending any other conferences or events this coming year?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:09:52]:
We will go to all of them I guess. Right. So everything that is industry related. We will be at the Martech event in New York in December. We were at ASE in New York as well. We will for sure go to aswell in Las Vegas in January. There is PI Live in London in two weeks where we have our own stand. Then we’re thinking as well like this is all industry events.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:10:17]:
So you will find us there. You will most likely find me there on most of them. But we will attend as well some hours like E commerce conferences or ad tech conferences, something like that. Because I think that’s kind of like relevant. It’s very important we learn something but at the same time get in touch with interesting people. We’ll be all over the place here.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:39]:
Why should a brand get started in affiliate marketing?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:10:42]:
I think that’s it’s because of the most. Being the most innovative channel in the whole industry. I think that’s the most important point, especially nowadays with the rise of AI when like I’m in the industry for 18 years now and when you look at the network that we have, compare it to the network, what it looked like 10 years ago, it has fundamentally shifted which I think underlines the strength and the resilience of affiliate marketing. So through affiliate marketing, connecting to all these partners, you connect to all the new ideas, you connect to entrepreneurs and you connect to all the new advertising models that will be important for the future. Which I think is our key role, right? Connecting, being innovative. And then besides that, I think it’s a no brainer channel. It’s usually pay for performance only. So it’s very, very low risk.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:11:38]:
It’s easily scalable. So it comes with a number of advantages. But this innovative character of the network in affiliate marketing, I think that’s the most important one.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:51]:
You’re someone that’s worked their way all the way up within a company. What advice do you have for people looking to grow their career in the industry?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:11:59]:
Well, firstly, I think it’s super important to always have fun. That’s been important for me. I can’t continue somehow if I don’t have fun, right? But I’m there for so long because I’m having fun all the time. The other thing, maybe more from a professional perspective, I always focus to stay in roles that are relevant. So where the revenue is, where the clients are, where the budgets are, this is what in the end then really counts. And once you’re there and if you, if you, if you take this responsibility, then I think you will always be able to make a difference.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:34]:
What are you most excited about in performance marketing right now?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:12:38]:
AI. Obviously we are really busy with that. We work with AI for over a year. When saying that, we realized that we had a lot of groundwork to do because we wanted, when it came up, when it got really relevant a year ago, we wanted to jump right into it. Then we realized that the way how we store our data, it’s not really possible because we used to store our data in a structured way and AI then can’t read and work with that. So we spent some 7, 8 months to completely restructure our databases. Where we have now created a data lake where all the data is in there, where we added external sources or external applications like Power BI for example. We’re using and add this data as well.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:13:26]:
And then in spring this year we started to really work with that basically in free different ways. The first one is internal efficiencies. There is a number of challenges that we had that we never really were able to solve with product development. Like one is how we handle product feeds. Like we get product feeds from 3,000 brands. We get them in all kind of different formats, all kind of different sizes, all kind of different qualities. And then we need to work with them and we need to map them to our structure, we need to integrate them into our systems. Some of them get updated like 3 times an hour or something like that.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:14:09]:
That is something that is very difficult to tackle with product development. With AI, we have now created a process that’s taking us two weeks actually. So we get the product feeds in AI scans, Jira, where these tickets are created, takes the product feeds, analyzes them, maps them to our structure and integrates them into the system. That’s just like crazy. That’s the topic that I know for 15 years has always been a problem and is now solved. So we focus on these internal things. We focus on getting AI functionalities into our interfaces, which is why this front and back end I mentioned earlier was so important for us. Because now through this back end, we have access to the data and we can quite quickly release AI functionalities into the interfaces.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:14:59]:
So based on the data, like publisher recommendations, optimized reporting, all these kind of things, the third one that is really keeping us busy is then obviously the traffic side where we speak a lot with our partners, obviously mainly those as well that acquire traffic from Google. Like where we do analysis, where we see, okay, where is the traffic coming from? Is that having an influence on them? Are clickouts decreasing from Google? Google claims they are actually increasing. Is that true? Is the quality really higher? So go, will conversion rates go up? And then obviously thinking on what will be the future models, what should we focus on, what kind of partners should we push? That’s exciting because we have no idea how it will turn out. There is something new basically every day. It’s fascinating. So I think that consumes like maybe a third of my time now almost every day.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:59]:
Any predictions on the future of where performance marketing might be headed?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:16:03]:
I don’t know is the honest answer. I think nobody really knows, but we are very excited about it. We’re very optimistic about all these changes that are coming. And especially because partner and affiliate marketing has this history. Like whenever there was any changes in the last 20 years, there was a change every year. And every year somebody said partner marketing. Is that the same with SEO? Right. Whenever Google changed something, okay, SEO is that we’re still here, we’re very healthy, we’re growing.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:16:35]:
Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing channels in online marketing done. And I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to make another big step forward.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:47]:
In order to make that step forward, are there any challenges the industry needs to tackle?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:16:51]:
I think that’s the same that we are already tackling, but where we need to continuously be on the forefront, that’s the quality of the traffic, transparency, how we deal with data, how we deal with fraud, all these kind of topics. I think this is essential, that we need to be just like really, really good at. But it’s so exciting to be able, through our industry, through our business, to be into that. But then in the end, it’s the people, right? So I go to America again next week. I meet very exciting people. Then there is PI Live, all these events, speaking, sharing ideas. It’s great. It’s good fun.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:35]:
Well, that’s a great place to end our conversation. A big thank you to Matthias for joining the podcast this week. Some really great insights into his background and how you could take advantage of Trade Doubler. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:17:50]:
Either LinkedIn or directly on my email address, which is matthiasaydoubler.com I’m always here, I’m happy to connect. Just shoot me a message.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:59]:
Again, thank you to Matthias for joining 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. Thank you and have a great day.

Matthias Stadelmeyer [00:18:18]:
Thank you, Marshall.