MarTech360 Interview With Matt Gilbert, CEO, Partnerize

“Partners need better ways to bring relevant content onto their pages without degrading their user experience as a result of increased ad loads, or questionable relevance.”

Hi, Matt, could tell us about you your journey in MarTech? 

I’ve been known to refer to my 20+ years in the digital marketing space as a love affair – and that’s the best way to describe it. I’ve worn many hats and played many roles, but at every stage of my journey, I’ve been continually awed and inspired by the digital marketing and technology space’s endless capacity to evolve and grow. Back in the ’90s, we recognized the potential for this industry to leverage data to improve ad experiences for everyone, and for more than two decades, we’ve never stopped moving in that direction. I’m fortunate to be as enamored with the MarTech space today as I was at the beginning of my career.

In terms of my personal industry journey, I’ve been a board member, raised venture capital, and played key roles in achieving five exits across categories ranging from paid social and search to partner and affiliate marketing. The unifying thread across my diverse roles has been a passion for teaching brands how to leverage data and technology to improve marketing effectiveness and maximize customer lifetime value.

This passion drives me every day in my role as CEO of Partnerize, which is the automation leader in the partner marketing and affiliate space. I entered the affiliate space in 2018 as CEO of Pepperjam, where I was brought in to orchestrate a complete business turnaround that culminated in the company’s acquisition by Partnerize in 2020. At the time I joined Pepperjam, my enthusiasm for partnership and affiliate marketing wasn’t terribly high due to the industry’s legacy of bad behavior. But that’s changed—just as the industry has changed. These days, I’d be hard-pressed to identify a MarTech category with greater opportunities to deliver new and needed value to clients and to digital publishers and creators than that of the partner marketing and affiliate space.

How has the COVID-19 Pandemic reshaped your view of the business environment that your business operates in? 

From a business perspective, we went into the pandemic knowing that there was absolutely no historical roadmap to guide our customers, so Partnerize decided to be the one to provide that roadmap. We delivered our category’s first-ever weekly analysis of critical trends, by vertical category, to empower our clients to make data-driven decisions in an uncertain environment. Today, we called that analysis the Partnership Growth Index, and it has been sourced by the leading independent analyst community as the gold standard for affiliate and partnership marketing globally.

I mentioned the Partnership Growth Index because, in many ways, it’s a symbol of the needs and opportunities that came into focus for the partner and affiliate space within the pandemic. Our category already had strong tailwinds pre-pandemic, and that opportunity was greatly accelerated by the Covid-fueled exponential growth of ecommerce. Our customers, brands and partners alike are looking to us to power new growth that reduces dependence on primary sales and marketing channels. At the same time, we’re looking to disrupt legacy incumbents and dated tactics within this high-growth business sector.

In other words, I don’t anticipate being bored anytime soon.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview With Ronn Torossian, Chairman And Founder, 5WPR

What sets Partnerize apart from the competition? 

Our willingness to disrupt “business as usual” in a long-established space is what sets Partnerize apart in the partner marketing and affiliate space. We pride ourselves on being painfully honest about what has hindered growth in our sector—reputational challenges including fraud, reliance on last-click attribution, supply chain opacity, bad actors, and the manual nature of channel administration—and we challenge ourselves and the industry at large to do better each and every day.

This approach is evident in our tagline, “A better way to partner.” We acknowledge past hinderances, and we’re seeking to overcome them every day and transform the role of partnerships within the marketing mix. Day by day, we’re moving past the constraints of the narrowly defined affiliate channel.

We’re investing heavily in the software automation and service capabilities required to accelerate our channel’s measured ability to drive material growth for both brands and partners. We’re helping to enable the activation and administration of brand-to-brand partnerships. We’re also making demonstrable progress toward using data and predictive intelligence to drive a higher probability of conversion for brands and partners, while at the same time addressing the lingering lack of auction functionality designed for outcome-based models versus impression-based models.

Today, we are the only platform of its kind to deliver a fully integrated, comprehensive suite of discovery, recruitment, optimization, payment, brand safety and fraud prevention capabilities for marketers seeking a highly transparent and scalable way to ignite growth beyond their primary sales and marketing channels.

What direction do you envisage Performance Marketing taking in the years to come? 

At the time I entered the affiliate marketing space, I saw a category that had become complacent. Today, I see the partner and affiliate space poised to redefine performance marketing as we know it. Partner channels have always offered well-understood opportunities for incremental revenue growth. Now, they’re delivering the underlying automation and attribution capabilities needed to lead, rather than just supplement, revenue growth.

Today’s marketers are faced with a myriad of new challenges. From the deprecation of the third party cookie, the attribution challenges tied to Apple’s tracking transparency initiative, and consumer’s growing mistrust of traditional advertising, brands desperately need alternatives to channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google and the other bread-and-butter ad spends we commonly see among performance brands. Partners need better ways to bring relevant content onto their pages without degrading their user experience as a result of increased ad loads, or questionable relevance, and creators need evidence that attribution models will identify and reward them for the role they play in a conversion journey, regardless of where in the path they may reside.

Solving for all of these needs drives us every day at Partnerize, and even in today’s challenging macroeconomic environment we are bullish on the opportunity in this segment for years to come.

As a Business Leader, what is the one piece of advice you would give to those who aspire to the C-suite?

As a leader, there are quite a few lessons that I wish I’d learned earlier. For one, especially given the space in which we play, I’d encourage aspiring leaders to always look beyond the shiny tech. It’s far too easy to get distracted by the over-hyping headlines and to lose focus on what really matters: the customer.

In that vein, don’t obsess over your competitors. Just be aware of them. Rather, spend your energy obsessing over your customers. The customer is your everything. Find them. Listen to them. What are their challenges? What do they need? Forget about what you’re doing for them today and think about the problems you can solve for them tomorrow. Look through their eyes and communicate with them on their terms.

Above all, operate with integrity and honesty and build enduring value. Short term decisions and optimizing for near term financial reward rarely results in the intended outcome. Don’t let the day-to-day pressures of running a business ever convince you that doing otherwise will help you get ahead. It won’t. The golden rule of treating people the way you want to be treated applies in all facets of life, customer relationships included.

How do you see the Creator Economy evolving, especially with reference to tech?

I have kids in college and both of them completely ignore traditional advertising. They don’t trust it. They seek authenticity and brands that align with their social value system. This dynamic is changing the methods by which brands will communicate with their next generation of consumers and there is no greater beneficiary of that than what has been named the “creator economy.”

Part of our responsibility is to enable both the brand side and creator side of our marketplace to fully realize the opportunity that this fundamental shift creates. To do that, we have focused on innovation that allows brands to use their first party data to identify and recruit creators, to remove friction from the activation process for all involved, attribution technology to ensure equitable distribution of commission payments based on the role a creator plays in the conversion journey, and analytics that provide evidence of more tangible metrics than simply relying upon “softer” upper funnel metrics like “engagement.”

Your top pick for a book on marketing that everyone should read? 

I had the opportunity to hear Jim Collins talk about Good To Great at a management offsite many years ago and that has stuck with me ever since. While perhaps a leadership book vs a marketing book, the concept of Level 5 leadership is something that I aspire to every day.

Could you name one other industry leader (or more) that you would like to see featured here? 

John Nardone, President Mediaocean

Can you name some apps that you use for business? 

1. Slack
2. DocuSign

As a Business Leader, what metrics do you use to define success? 

As a business leader, I’m of course beholden to all the standard revenue, profit and growth metrics that dictate the health and trajectory of a business. But the ones that mean the most to me are the ones that speak to the strength of our company’s relationship with its customers. Metrics like Net Revenue Retention, Logo Retention, NPS Scores, and also Employee Satisfaction scores are all critical in defining success. No matter what your balance sheet says, if your customers and employees aren’t happy and succeeding in their own right, your business isn’t heading in the right direction.

Thanks, Matt!