Episode #63 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Ewen Finser

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:
Hello and welcome to the performance marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Naimon Code. Each episode I bring you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they share their career journey and insights about the industry. Today I have Euan Finser of Scale Physical. Welcome to the podcast. Ewan.

Ewen Finser [00:00:20]:
Great to be here. Thanks, Marshall.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:21]:
Excited to have you on today. Let’s get right to it. Would love for you to briefly introduce yourself to the audience.

Ewen Finser [00:00:26]:
Yep. I’m Ewan Finser. I’m the CEO of Scale Visible, which is an AI visibility service and previously a media company operator. We live in North Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina. Originally from the Northeast, but yeah, that’s, I guess, the TLDR on me.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:40]:
Well, you originally got started in the military and then somehow ended up in the world of marketing. Tell us a little bit about that.

Ewen Finser [00:00:46]:
Yeah, so I think, like many folks in the industry, how you ended up in affiliate is very strange and circuitous. So I was kind of in. I was in the military out of college, did rotc. That was great. I was in the reserves and kind of got a day job working as a recruiter in kind of a Fortune 500 type environment. And I love the work early on, it was great. And then kind of looked around, I was like, I don’t want to be stuck in a cubicle for the rest of my life. And so I started to kind of do side hustles and figure out how you can make money online.

Ewen Finser [00:01:18]:
And that’s really what led me down the affiliate rabbit hole I think I threw together. I think I was actually selling textbooks on Amazon, like buying up initially in college. And so I looked in the footer of Amazon’s, you know, at the bottom of their website, and it has all this other stuff and it says, it says you can make money on Amazon Associates. And so we got started kind of creating those little blogs to drive traffic to Amazon, and that was kind of like the rest was history. Built up. Publishing company ventureforth Media ended up with over a hundred different websites and all sorts of verticals. Bought, sold, raised money to buy and build and kind of was in that publisher ecosystem until very recently. But yeah, that was kind of my entry point into the affiliate marketing world was really as a publisher until Google

Marshall Nyman [00:02:02]:
blew that whole world up. Right?

Ewen Finser [00:02:03]:
Yeah. And that was about kind of like three years ago, roughly or two and a half years ago. Helpful Content Update was kind of like the canary in the coal mine before this whole AI visibility thing was hot. Was like Google started really turning the dial and prefacing UGC of which Reddit was one of the most important platforms. And that’s where we got into the agency world, first with Red Visible, one of the first organic Reddit marketing agencies, which then then dovetailed into AI visibility because Reddit is one of the most important citation sources.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:33]:
Yeah. So you kind of turn the Google chaos into what does the new world look like? And obviously Reddit’s a key piece of that. And so all of a sudden one day you became the Reddit guy. Tell us about that.

Ewen Finser [00:02:43]:
Yeah, well, that was like, that was funny, actually. Martech record story. I guess I. You know, Mike, I’ve been part of that community for a while and there was a point, I think it was August of 24. Before that, it was the summer of 24. Michael’s looking for someone to answer some questions about Reddit. It’s like, do we have anyone in the community that knows about Reddit? Like, we’re getting a lot of questions about this and, you know, don’t have anyone. And I was like, you know, I’m messing around with some stuff.

Ewen Finser [00:03:08]:
Like, I have a couple, like, clients on the side I’ve started with and like, I’ve been trying to figure it out myself. And it’s like, great, okay, you’ll be on the panel. And then he introduces me. As, you know, you and Finns are the Reddit expert. And then I think Mark Stenberg, who was the moderator of that, he works at Adweek. And so after that, that was like all the buzz. Everyone was asking all the questions about Reddit at that event. And then he didn’t want to do a profile, so we did a profile on.

Ewen Finser [00:03:31]:
And I think it was like. And I was like, oh, cool. But one of my other friends who’d been running the agency for like 20 years is like, you don’t understand. Like, you got featured in Adweek. And so I think that was kind of our coming out, if you will, for being the Reddit marketing experts. And then we just had to own it and be the best in the biz at what we said we were doing.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:50]:
Almost sounds like you sold yourself short before you really jumped in.

Ewen Finser [00:03:54]:
Yeah, but again, I think at the time nobody knew. And that’s like, good reminder of where we are, you know, because I moved to AI visibility. Like, there’s no book that’s like, here’s how you start a geo agency or here’s how you start and probably early days affiliate for you. It’s like there wasn’t really a playbook you know, for some of this stuff. And so you just have to go do it and like, you know, figure it out. And that’s kind of like a mindset I keep very close as we’re navigating like a lot of uncertain terrain with digital right now.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:21]:
For me, anytime things are changing, I always try to jump into the new stuff and learn it. And that’s exactly what you did and it turned into a business for you. I think that’s a good takeaway for everybody.

Ewen Finser [00:04:30]:
Yeah, for sure.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:31]:
So tell us a little bit more about Scale Visible.

Ewen Finser [00:04:34]:
Yeah, so I think like we, we have a unique point of view related to third party context, which is different, I think, from maybe most other agencies or SEO Geo agencies, because we have this context of a media company, we have this Reddit agency, it’s already stood up. We have all these different influencers on Reddit communities we’ve built. We, we have a lot of distribution points for the things that are required of AI. And so that’s kind what kind of the reason for ScaleVisible was to really like put an economic model in front of our media assets, essentially. And so that’s basically what Scale Visible is. It’s yes, we do strategy, we do advise on a content roadmap and all those types of things, but we then also go and we execute. And we basically have our media company on the back, a separate kind of structure. But like we have those assets in the back end that we can monetize.

Ewen Finser [00:05:25]:
So that is, I think, fairly unique what we do. But really Scale Visible is about helping brands navigate and show up and strategize and execute a third party AI visibility strategy.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:35]:
What’s been your favorite part of launching the business?

Ewen Finser [00:05:37]:
I think my favorite part so far has been working with all the different challenger brands. They have an opportunity right now to basically take market share from the incumbents in this new channel that hasn’t been evangelized. There isn’t a whole lot of information out on how to optimize yet or what even the measurement is. But that’s also where kind of the opportunity is. And so we have brands that have like 2% market share of the incumbent in SEO. They’re getting 50, 60% parity in AI. And that is, to me, that’s wild. You’re seeing the winners in AI are not necessarily the winners in the old war.

Ewen Finser [00:06:13]:
And for the brands that can lean in, that’s super exciting to take them from nowhere to somewhere. And you probably have the same experience on the affiliate side when you can move the needle for a brand that’s the most fun in the world is that experience.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:26]:
Well, brands are always asking for the same thing, too. What new things can we do? What opportunities are there that we haven’t tested? So this is great. If you really want to be a pioneer at the forefront of something, you can start testing, basically, a new channel.

Ewen Finser [00:06:39]:
Absolutely. And that’s exactly how I think about it. This is a new channel, it’s a new discipline. And yes, it’s similar to SEO. And yes, affiliate contributes. And yes, PR is kind of in and around the edges of it, but it does kind of deserve its own. Kind of its own thinking and its own strategy. And that’s one of the things I often talk to brands about, is like, who owns this? Like, you know, this is a.

Ewen Finser [00:07:00]:
This is a new channel. Like, someone. Like, if it’s important, someone has to own it. And oftentimes we’re that first, like, first leg in the fight, you know, help us create some sort of organizing philosophy around, like, what does this look like? And test a bunch of things out. Because, like, honestly, yes, you don’t have. The playbook isn’t established, but you can learn things pretty quickly with AI. Like, try this. Okay, that didn’t work.

Ewen Finser [00:07:23]:
Try this. Oh, that’s working. Wow. Now, this is an advantage that you have that your competitors do not have, and that could take years for them to catch up to the things that are working right now.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:34]:
I think it’s almost like you have to have a Reddit strategy now. I think a few years ago was something people were like, maybe I will look at it or take a view of where we could potentially insert ourselves. But now brands are like, okay, we have to be involved in conversations in Reddit. Our product has to be talked about. It has to be reviewed. And so what are you seeing as far as brands developing a Reddit strategy?

Ewen Finser [00:07:58]:
Yeah, so I think on the Reddit side specifically, you know, it’s kind of like a missing link in their stack for the most part. Like, there’s no head of Reddit marketing or Reddit marketing specialist is even, like, a new job title that hadn’t existed previously. And so I think part of what the challenge is is brands trying to figure out, where does it fit? Is it social, is it SEO, is it AI? It actually crosses over all those. And it’s definitely PR. I mean, like Joey323 in the comments section saying your brand sucks is a PR crisis now because it has so much visibility. And so that’s kind of like the thing that we’re seeing right now is like just brands know they’re coming to us. They know they kind of need something here they’re still struggling with. Where does it sit at? I didn’t have that question today on a call.

Ewen Finser [00:08:45]:
It’s like, who are you? They’re asking me, who are you typically reporting? To? Which to me says, I don’t know where this fits.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:54]:
Everything was very siloed for a while and everybody kind of worked in their own channels. And then like probably about five to seven years ago, you started to see like affiliate kind of come close to pr. And then it’s starting to get close to influencer. And then like, really the last few years, they’ve almost kind of come together. And now you’re seeing the same thing happen with paid media, Reddit, like, all of the strategies have to be integrated. It’s not like you can really just operate in a silo anymore. I tell brands, in order to have a good marketing strategy, you have to do a lot of things well. It’s not just we do one thing and we do it well.

Marshall Nyman [00:09:30]:
You really have to be executing across the board.

Ewen Finser [00:09:33]:
And we even see that in the performance channels. Like when there’s a negative Reddit thread, for example, the impact that is having on all the paid spend, it’s not showing up in any report. But we’ve had plenty of examples of brands have come to us. They had a bad product run three years ago, but that was what stuck in Reddit. Someone had a bad experience because negative stuff gets shared and the positive stuff rarely gets shared. And so that stuck in their LLM kind of database. And it’s impacting everything because someone’s like, oh, is this legit? And they’re seeing this negative Reddit thread in Google. They’re seeing it in the AI overviews, they’re seeing it in chat, and it’s impacting their entire marketing funnel, but no one’s really paying attention to that specifically.

Ewen Finser [00:10:17]:
And so it gets lost. Even though it’s kind of almost like an existential crisis for the brand, there’s kind of like a missing integration component there.

Marshall Nyman [00:10:26]:
To your point, is there anything you’re trying to solve for that keeps you up at night?

Ewen Finser [00:10:32]:
Yeah, I think the big challenge is what’s the future of the open Web and tragedy of the Commons? And is this the dead Internet? At my heart, I’m a media company operator. I’ve become an agency operator out of necessity. It’s not growing faster than the old business ever was. But I still really care about media And I just worry about the economics. And we got to figure this out as an industry. I mean, OpenAI doesn’t seem to be incentivized to give everyone royalties for their context. So unless that happens, we as an industry have to figure it out. So that’s like, keeps me up at night in a kind of like a more of a good human kind of like, way of like, how do we actually carry the industry forward? I think another thing that keeps me up at night in a good way is like, I think there’s an opportunity for owned media right now.

Ewen Finser [00:11:25]:
So we’re actually in the business of we’re acquiring other media companies and assets. Because I do think the future of a future of content is actually bright. Once we figure out the incentive model. I think there’s a need for net new information, there’s a need for original content more than ever. AI is insatiable in that regard and it doesn’t want regurgitated slop. And so it’s really in the zeitgeist. But the question really is, are they going to figure out the economic model or not? And that’s my big question.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:00]:
I agree with you on the first part. And that’s what’s keeping me up at night or not keeping me up at night, but maybe keeping everybody in the industry up at night is how are the LLMs going to give attribution to publishers that are creating content? And this content is clearly training and feeding the LLMs. And we’re seeing that the affiliate content is very, very important. So there’s gotta be some sort of benefit for the publishers to create this content. And that’s the kind of like the holy grail right now for me. I mean, it keeps me up at night, but it’s not something I can kind of solve. Like, it’s greater than me.

Ewen Finser [00:12:41]:
Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s also like, one thing I glean is like, ultimately the brands, what we’re seeing on the front edge is brands are willing to spend on AI visibility right now, even though they don’t have all the information. They’re like, probably coming to you on the affiliate side being like, hey, have you thought about this? Or how can you get us more visibility here? And so the brands want it, the publishers have it. It’s the stuff in the middle that needs to change.

Marshall Nyman [00:13:06]:
Yeah, we’re in that middle part, trying to help them measure it, and it’s hard. And you talked a little bit about there might not be an ROI on some of the stuff that you’re doing. Early on. And it’s hard to measure everything because it’s all so new and there’s so many tools and technology that are popping up and the ray that solutions that are getting created are so much faster than they were in the past. So it’s almost a little bit of whiplash for everybody as all this is going on.

Ewen Finser [00:13:32]:
It’s hard to keep up with it really is. Yeah, it is. And yeah, it is hard to keep up with. And also I think that means that when you do figure something out, like these little insights, like one of our brands started doing post purchase surveys and again without a lot of context on how users were navigating chat, they just asked the question, how did you find us adding chat interfaces as an option? They started surveying those users that answered chatgpt or whatever and then asked them to share their chat history for a discount code or a promo code or something. That is super valuable information. They started to see all our context that was influencing. They’re like, all right, now we know enough. When do you know enough to make this investment? They know enough.

Ewen Finser [00:14:18]:
They know more than their competitors know about how this is working right now. And so that’s their advantage.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:24]:
Hey, the first time someone told me a few years ago they found me via ChatGPT, I had to do a double take. I was like, wow. And that was the moment where I was like, okay, now I need to invest in having a strategy around it. It’s real. People are actually using this and it is going to be a discovery tool so you can’t turn your head anymore. You really have to dive in and just figure it out. And everybody is at the same thing. We’re all the front line trying to figure it out.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:50]:
Nobody really has the strategy. We’re all building it on the fly.

Ewen Finser [00:14:54]:
Yeah. In the fog of war, it’s all the same fog, like where if you have a little bit more understanding of what’s out there, that’s a huge. That’s a, comparatively speaking, a huge advantage.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:06]:
Definitely. Well, I know I just saw you at Awin’s think tank in Chicago and you got to lead a panel there on AI. Tell us a little bit about the session.

Ewen Finser [00:15:18]:
Yeah, it was fun. It was good, actually. My first think tank, it was a great, I thought it was a great venue, great event and it was good. I think it’s like to give credit to the platforms, which I sometimes give them some flack for, like, hey, you guys are sitting in between at this intersection. It’s kind of like, can you help us figure this out because you have both sides of the marketplace. I do feel like they’re leaning in and they’re actually trying to solve some of these problems. And having that panel, I think was great. It was like the perspectives of.

Ewen Finser [00:15:49]:
Everyone is aware of the problem now. It’s not like I think we’ve moved beyond will ChatGPT be the. Or will AI search impact publishers and affiliate to. No, it’s impacting and there are ways or good stories here for the industry, but it’s this moment where you can choose. It’s like you could either bury your head in the sand and be like, well, we’re just going to squeeze the juice out of this smaller industry as it declines, or you come out with some new attribution model or some new integrate the right partners and start describing the value differently. And so I think that’s really my takeaway from awin was people at the highest levels are thinking about this and we’re having the conversations that you need to have as a precursor to the solutions coming now. It could also be that it doesn’t happen in time or there’s some sort of big disruption that happens. But I had a good feeling coming out of it, like, oh, the industry is waking up to this reality.

Ewen Finser [00:16:53]:
It’s not like we’re going to ignore what’s happening.

Marshall Nyman [00:16:57]:
The industry needed this disruption. I think there was a lack of innovation for a while and so this just forced innovation pretty much across the board. It really goes back to what we talked about in the beginning with the changes with Google and that just kind of from there caused a lot of chaos. And the dust hasn’t settled.

Ewen Finser [00:17:19]:
Yes, no, it hasn’t. And it’s still a lot to figure out, but yeah, 100%.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:25]:
What other conferences are you thinking about attending this year?

Ewen Finser [00:17:27]:
I’ll be at ipx. I’ll be on a panel at IPX with Bryce Wiedelitz and some other great panelists. So I’m looking forward to that in June and then I’ll probably be back up for Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Summit east and the other strap hangers that try to tag along with asc. So, yeah, those are the ones. And then I haven’t gotten into November yet, but I’m sure I’ll be on the conference circuit.

Marshall Nyman [00:17:55]:
Yeah, we’ll be at both IPX and the team will be at ase. Looking forward to those. Well, one final question. What’s been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Ewen Finser [00:18:09]:
Ooh, favorite part. I think, honestly I feel like our industry, like we’re A little bit like cockroaches in the best way. Like, we figure stuff out, we survive. And I think that’s coming from the, like, early on. Think about the early performance marketers. Like, they were just the people that were scraping and scrapping and figuring out Google. And yes, maybe there were some spammers and hackers back in the day, but like very much a figure, like, let’s figure it out mentality. Whereas, like, I feel like maybe some other industries don’t have that.

Ewen Finser [00:18:38]:
And so I think that’s been why we’ve kind of leaned into that world. Like, as we’ve launched these agencies, we could have gone different routes, we could have tried to like, go the more of the PR angle or try to go in the SEO agency turf. But we actually want to start partnering with our other affiliate agencies and brands and platforms because there’s an openness to figuring it out. And change has been part of our industry. With all those Google updates, everyone’s used to it. Everyone’s seen people five years later come back to the conference and they have a different business. Like, oh, I didn’t know you did that. Yeah, because we figured it out.

Ewen Finser [00:19:18]:
And I think that’s been my favorite part of this industry. Yeah.

Marshall Nyman [00:19:22]:
And just like cockroaches can’t get rid of us, we’re not going anywhere. Well, a big thank you to Ewan for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into his background and to his work with Scale Visible. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Ewen Finser [00:19:41]:
Yeah, I think you can follow me on LinkedIn. It’s probably pretty good. I have a little newsletter, a red visible newsletter, which if you want to know what’s like, what’s happening, it’s kind of like a play by play of the latest in Reddit world. Also in the process of launching my more of an AI visibility newsletter, but I think just following on LinkedIn where I post some of my stuff and if you want to subscribe to my newsletter and yeah, just appreciate I try to share some like, new information, not just, you know, some of that clickbait.

Marshall Nyman [00:20:09]:
Yep, definitely make sure to look up Ewan Ew en check them out on LinkedIn. Again, thank you for joining our podcast and thank you to our producer, Leon Zonkin. 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 Naimo and co signing off. Thank you and have a great day.

Ewen Finser [00:20:35]:
Sam.