2025 affiliate industry predictions: Part 1

[00:00:00] ROB: Hi, Sam.

[00:00:07] SAM: Hey, Rob. Happy New Year.

[00:00:09] ROB: New Year, new you. What's the resolutions that you've been making for 2025?

[00:00:13] SAM: Are you implying I need a new me? Um, this year I don't, I'm not a big resolutions person cause I do think sometimes [00:00:20] you are setting yourself up for failure. But as you know, I'm going through yoga teacher training, not a career change.

[00:00:27] No one's getting rid of me, fortunately, or maybe unfortunately. But I think right now my resolution is to just make it through a 200 hour training. Do you have any resolutions, Rob? Yeah, a lot. It's a lot, but hopefully by the time I'm done, I'll be able to [00:00:40] touch my toes. So do you have any resolutions, Rob?

[00:00:42] ROB: Uh, I'm going to spend more of 2025 unconscious if I can. Sleeping more would be good. Sleeping,

[00:00:47] SAM: that's important, but you clarify. Yeah.

[00:00:49] ROB: Yeah. Not just being kind of like unconsciously drunk or knocked out unconscious.

[00:00:53] SAM: Knocked out by one of your children. Yeah. Not physically anyway.

[00:00:58] ROB: We are back for another episode [00:01:00] of A Win Win Marketing Podcast, our first of 2025.

[00:01:03] SAM: That's right. And while I know everyone missed us over the last month, sadly, our triumphant return is only temporary for now.

[00:01:10] ROB: Yes, we are deep in planning for season two. And remember, if you're interested in being a guest, just shoot us an email to podcast at awin. com. But [00:01:20] in the meantime. Sam and I wanted to first offer some affiliate and partner marketing industry predictions.

[00:01:25] SAM: Split into two parts, we invited some industry friends on to talk all things affiliate for the year ahead. What's going to happen in 2025? Where are there real opportunities for growth? What are the challenges? And what in God's name is Google going to do next to [00:01:40] its search product?

[00:01:41] ROB: Who knows? But today I mean, certainly not you

[00:01:43] SAM: and I.

[00:01:43] ROB: No, today is part one and we'll be sharing the second episode in a couple of weeks time. Now our guest had so much to say and the conversation was so packed that we couldn't condense it into a single 20 minute episode.

[00:01:55] SAM: Nor do we want to overwhelm you with content this early in the year.

[00:01:58] ROB: You gotta pace yourself.[00:02:00]

[00:02:00] SAM: That's what you keep telling me Rob and for once I listened. Let's tell them who our esteemed interviewees are.

[00:02:05] ROB: Well, if you've read the episode description, you should already know, but I will tell you anyway. So, first up, we have Sarah Bundy, a real veteran of the affiliate scene and the founder of the OPM agency, All Inclusive Marketing.

[00:02:18] And joining her is [00:02:20] Mike Malazzo, head of growth at Forum Brands, but also the man behind the widely read, Zero clicks newsletter from Martech Record.

[00:02:27] SAM: And let's not forget our very own Chief Customer Officer, David Lloyd, who steps in to provide an A1 perspective on all of the areas we covered.

[00:02:35] ROB: Who could forget David?

[00:02:36] SAM: Not me.

[00:02:37] ROB: Um, ready to kick things off?

[00:02:38] SAM: Absolutely.[00:02:40]

[00:02:45] Sarah, what's the view from agency land as we enter 2025? Are you expecting any major changes in the OPM space, or do you think things will remain relatively stable?

[00:02:54] Sarah Bundy: So I think there's going to be the strengthening of a lot of established OPMs and agencies [00:03:00] where they're double downing on efficiencies and technology integrations and starting to feed in AI to create those efficiencies of scale.

[00:03:08] I think that there's going to be more integrations, and I should say better integrations. Between affiliate marketing teams and all the other marketing teams, including omni channel opportunities. So online to offline, [00:03:20] all the digital channels from affiliate to email, to social and paid search content in general, branding in general, people are going to start working better together because.

[00:03:29] Historically, affiliate has been quite siloed, but I feel like other channels have also been quite siloed, and I think 2025 is the year that a lot of people are going to start figuring out how to make those things work better [00:03:40] together. A lot of the reason behind that is because of the integration of AIs and tech stacks, but also because the data and the transparency of that data is getting better.

[00:03:49] The accuracy of that data is getting better, and people are actually investing in things like data analysts and investing in things like directors of business intelligence or analytics, right? So the stories will get better. The [00:04:00] stories will get more accurate, and the technology is going to be there to actually support that, which will then lead into People being able to have better strategies, better conversations, understand how they can work better together because historically that really hasn't been very strong.

[00:04:15] So I'm looking forward to seeing that happen in 2025. I also see a lot more mergers and [00:04:20] acquisitions happening. You know, we've seen a few mergers and acquisitions happening in the past and that's not just going to be on the OPM side, you know, not just affiliate management companies, but brands acquiring.

[00:04:31] Affiliates, affiliates, also acquiring other affiliates, agencies, acquiring affiliates, maybe brands acquiring affiliate management companies, [00:04:40] because they want to have the best and keep it exclusive to them. And they're a very large company, you know, so they want the talent. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with MNAs this year as well.

[00:04:48] I have a lot more ideas, but I'll pause there because that was a long.

[00:04:51] SAM: No, that's great. Thanks, Sarah. Rob, do you mind if I ask one follow up question first?

[00:04:55] ROB: You don't need to ask my permission. Well,

[00:04:57] SAM: I might. Um, Mike, I actually want to ask, uh, you [00:05:00] this question. Before we got started, you were saying you're at a retail media conference this morning.

[00:05:04] As far as this convergence of channels, were you hearing similar conversations at this conference? I don't know how granular the discussions and the content was getting, but good to kind of get your perspective on that.

[00:05:15] MIKE: I think the important thing is, is retail media is 10 times the market size of affiliate.

[00:05:18] Now, 50 billion of [00:05:20] that is Amazon ads. The vast majority of that is just search ads, right? As much as Amazon has invested in DSP and other things, they're sort of a rounding error in the business. But the just sheer amount of capital flowing into retail media right now is incredible. At the same time, retail media has a massive mid funnel problem, right?

[00:05:37] It's pretty good for cheap scale. You can kind of [00:05:40] run off site display ads and other kinds of things to reach millions and millions of eyeballs. And it's very, very good for capturing low funnel search intent. Retail media struggles in mid funnel because there isn't a lot of there there in a lot of ways in terms of kind of moving somebody along the purchase funnel.

[00:05:53] So both worlds need each other. Affiliate needs some of the TAM that's rolling through retail media. They just need the dollars. Retail media [00:06:00] needs some of the mid funnel juice. Um, so if we think about M& A for next year, I think there's a lot of interesting deals that will be done because of that kind of dynamic.

[00:06:09] And yeah, my, my thought is anybody who's an affiliate should, should really start to understand retail media deeper because there's a lot of lucrative jobs in that space right now. Um, and I think that space needs the skillset that a lot of [00:06:20] people in this community have.

[00:06:21] ROB: Do you think there's like, um, a dissolution of historic legacy categories going on in terms of businesses?

[00:06:27] And that speaks to the point you were making, Sarah, around M& A activity of brands buying publishers or buying agencies or kind of integrating some of that expertise into their own wheelhouse. And then I guess retail media [00:06:40] itself, you've got brands operating like publishers suddenly kind of monetizing their own platforms.

[00:06:43] And it's all about selling eyeballs on their own properties because that's where actually there's a lot of demand really close to the conversion. And it feels like there's a trend here that where in the past there was a sense like, I'm a brand, I have one role to fulfill, I'm a publisher, I have one role to fulfill, and I'll do that [00:07:00] as well as I can.

[00:07:01] Now it feels it's gotten a lot more murky in terms of that categorization. And that feels to me like a trend, but maybe I'm wrong.

[00:07:07] MIKE: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think there's one other data point that kind of builds on the story you just laid out as well, which is from roughly, call it 2016 to 2021. A lot of the biggest enterprise [00:07:20] brands existentially wanted to be more direct to consumer enterprises.

[00:07:24] Nike, Samsung, Adidas all had goals that they wanted to be 25, 30, 50 percent D2C by 2030. Brands have peeled back on that a lot. They've realized that there's still a lot of value to being Omnichannel and collaborating with their retail partners. So whereas you might have seen a few years [00:07:40] ago, entities like, you know, sort of a Samsung really doing things in the market and working with partners that could help them win direct customers.

[00:07:46] They're now, you know, sort of thinking about. How can we bolster our direct brand, but also how can we drive more efficient sell through on Amazon, at Walmart, at Best Buy, et cetera, et cetera. I think that dynamic could also lead to some M& A in the space as well, because there isn't a ton of infrastructure to support co [00:08:00] op today, at least not so much in the performance driving channels, which I think will be a sort of another sort of interesting piece where some of these, uh, potentially legacy software companies might find some new life.

[00:08:10] DAVID: I think there's something interesting in what you were saying, Rob, about whether it's the sort of dissolution or the You know, brands and publishers somehow merging and crossing over because if you think about brands, [00:08:20] you know, brands really know their audiences, you know, they spend decades of them building up.

[00:08:24] This is my consumer. This is who I'm talking to. This is who I'm selling to. And now they have an opportunity to say to other brands to other businesses, particularly non competing businesses. Here's my consumer. They may also be relevant to you. And by the way. They're in a moment, right? Uh, I've just sold you a fridge.

[00:08:39] You know, [00:08:40] Mike was talking about Samsung. I've just sold you a huge fridge. You want to put some stuff in your fridge. So let's go and find a brand who sells you things that you can put in your fridge, right? And that's a brand marketing opportunity as much as it's a performance marketing opportunity. So I think you're seeing those brands realize the value of their audience, not just for them, but for other brands as well, particularly non competing brands.

[00:08:57] And I think that's a really interesting moment. And [00:09:00] I think the other thing you're seeing, and this is why also retail media becomes so powerful, Whereas everything used to be about brand, everything used to be about audience, and you know, that's still very important. Marketing over the last couple of decades has also moved through to moments and intent.

[00:09:12] You know, I am in this particular moment, I'm ready to buy this, I'm interested in this, show it to me. And brands have that great [00:09:20] opportunity, either post purchase or during the purchase process, to kind of Delightfully interrupt consumers if they get it right. So I think it's a really good observation.

[00:09:27] It's something we're going to see a lot more of in the channel.

[00:09:29] ROB: Now, Mike, I wanted to turn to you. I'm a big fan of your zero clicks newsletter. Um, really, really interesting insights and opinions that you've articulated there that I've been kind of subscribing to for a while now. And [00:09:40] particularly around like some of the.

[00:09:41] takes you've got around big textbook gardens and how they often want to prevent sending traffic out into the open web. And obviously that has big implications for our industry. We're talking in the wake of the various Google updates that have specifically targeted affiliate sites in 2024. It feels like given that context and the direction [00:10:00] of travel that appears to be emerging there, how optimistic would you say you are that the affiliate industry at least can continue to thrive in 2025?

[00:10:07] MIKE: Yeah, I think there are two segments of the affiliate industry that will do exceptionally well in this new world that we're headed to. The first is, if you are 99th percentile at creating content, um, I think you're in a beautiful spot. I would love to be Consumer Reports or [00:10:20] Wirecutter right now. Um, write companies that deeply review products, that have diversified businesses, that have a ton of direct traffic and brand ethos.

[00:10:28] I think those companies are in an absolutely brilliant spot, um, and are going to grow immensely and find enterprise value in ways that people haven't even imagined. Conversely, I think the 99th percentile arbitrage players are also in a really good spot. The people that [00:10:40] are absolutely exceptional at buying search and social traffic.

[00:10:43] As organic declines, that skill set is going to drive just a tremendous amount of volume. I think in the, in the years ahead. The folks I'm worried about is everybody that's in the middle. The people that kind of write good ish content, they kind of do a little bit of ARB, they kind of like, don't have a super clear race on Detra, other than [00:11:00] relying on a lot of Google SEO traffic.

[00:11:02] Uh, that's a really hard spot to be in. And unfortunately, I think that comprises a decent amount of, if not the GMV of our industry, a decent amount of the players in the industry. So that's, that's gonna be a tough, tough segment. I think the thing that I'm watching the most, you know, when it comes to some of these arbitrage players is, The team behind Forbes [00:11:20] Marketplace, who I don't know personally, or I don't know their strategy intimately, but they almost seem to be like daring Google to delist Forbes.

[00:11:26] com right now. They keep playing these different subfolder games and stuff, and they're basically saying, what are you going to do, take out Forbes, tough guy? I don't have the stones for that, right? Like, I haven't built 100 million paid search arbitrage businesses, so who am I to talk? But I [00:11:40] think some of the players in the space are taking on an enormous amount of risk right now, that if it works, they may come out of this exceptionally.

[00:11:46] But if it doesn't, you may see some very, very large entities. You know that that almost get get eliminated next year. So I think that's interesting But yeah I think that the thing that people are missing in a lot of the doom and gloom is again I think the top top echelon of content creators is in a [00:12:00] great great spot

[00:12:00] ROB: Does that lead to like a bifurcation in the future then of like that 99th percentile you're talking about doing really well monopolizing attention traffic in theory and prominence in the serbs And then there's this massive, like, a longer tail than we've ever witnessed before, essentially, of just trying to scoop up [00:12:20] whatever crumbs you can, you can get.

[00:12:21] MIKE: Yeah, I mean, I actually think the best possible outcome for the internet writ large would be that there's three or four very large generalist product review and service review companies. That have a, you know, commitment to editorial excellence, like there's three or four consumer reports that are broad and just do exceptional journalism.

[00:12:37] And then there's a bunch of sort of [00:12:40] independent kind of subscale, but very sort of passionate community based media entities that fulfill the rest. The challenge to that future right now is, is Google is just eviscerating some of those, you know, indie media companies. That's where I and a lot of other people in the ecosystem fault Google the most.

[00:12:54] But like the unspoken sort of thing in our industry is nobody needs to read 10 reviews of a dishwasher. We [00:13:00] don't need the best dishwasher to have three pages of serves. Like that's not, doesn't provide value to anybody. We need two or three outstanding dishwasher articles and then we need, you know, a bunch of other sort of, you know, niche content.

[00:13:11] And I think at its core, kind of Google realizes that. And it's trying to make some changes in that direction. That's why I wrote kind of a moderate defense of some of their [00:13:20] actions. They're just first steps have been incredibly clumsy because they don't know our space, which is incredible that a company that has 2 trillion in market cap and unlimited resources can't learn something as sort of.

[00:13:33] Simple as affiliate marketing and commerce media, but that's the reality of Google right now. So I think their ethos is in the right place, but the [00:13:40] execution leaves, leaves a lot to be desired.

[00:13:45] SAM: Just interrupting Rob for a minute to tell you that a win, win marketing podcast is brought to you by a win. You might be listening because you're an e commerce retailer struggling to grow your brand awareness, generate additional sales. Or, maintain your bottom line with marketing and [00:14:00] advertising. Using the Awin platform, these challenges go away as you unlock pay on performance partnership opportunities and promotional spaces that reach consumers everywhere.

[00:14:09] Choose which affiliate partners best match your marketing objectives. Control your costs by defining how you pay these partners. And, customize your affiliate marketing program using Awin's tech to mirror [00:14:20] your unique goals, whatever they may be. Visit A1. com today and start growing your own way with the A1 platform.

[00:14:34] Sarah, I would imagine from like your agency background that Google's probably not alone [00:14:40] in being such a large company that just can't grasp affiliates. I

[00:14:43] Sarah Bundy: mean, the bigger you get, the more complex it gets for us, right? And it's like, how do you get the right eyes and ears on the value that affiliate marketing provides when either it seems to be less prominent or less of a revenue driver compared to what's more mainstream?

[00:14:59] And I don't know if [00:15:00] that's true, right? You look at SMBs and the percentage of affiliate contribution is really high. But when you look at large companies like Samsung, you know, they're not going to generate 20 to 30 percent of their revenue through affiliate marketing partnerships because they have so much paid media spend opportunity and these opportunities for larger B2B partnerships.

[00:15:19] For [00:15:20] example, the question for us is how do we get in front of the right eyes and ears and the right people and the right decision makers within these large enterprise organizations to see and understand the value of affiliate, put the money and time into it, dedicate the teams into it, do the tech integrations that they need.

[00:15:35] And when we can maybe tell a better story or to Mike's point, more [00:15:40] players come into the space that have that type of influence over buyers, then that's how we get the eyes and attention of these larger enterprise. It's not to say that they're not doing affiliate because they are. It's just, how do we scale that with these larger players?

[00:15:54] I think Mike's point on, you know, having these prominent content creators and these prominent [00:16:00] review sites is true. And we do need more of those. And I do see sort of this long tail of these nano and micro influencer and content creator type of guys. I think where the value is going to be as more in video content.

[00:16:13] In the future. So yes, there's going to be a lot more written content and people are going to be reading newsletters are going to be [00:16:20] reading really well written articles are going to be reading things that are properly researched and it's authentic and it's fact based and they've done the research and people are also going to be consuming video format.

[00:16:31] So the question for me is, will these larger players like the wire cutters and the consumer reports in the Forbes in the future. Be able to communicate [00:16:40] through that video format in a way that resonates with the buyers and with larger brands and with the people who are holding the purse strings, or is it something else that's going to happen?

[00:16:49] Yeah.

[00:16:49] MIKE: One thing that I don't have an answer to, and we'd love to speak to smarter people in the space is will video be more of a winner take all market? Like, Marcus Brownlee is well on his way to being worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. A [00:17:00] number of other consumer gadget influencers who I know personally struggle to make a living, right?

[00:17:04] And they still have pretty big audiences. And so like the difference between being a have and a have not in the video space, like I, I'm intrigued to see if it becomes like, is there a larger middle class of content that gets built there? Or does this become an even more sort of power law based market [00:17:20] where you have people like Marcus and five other folks that have a ton of influence over the market and then.

[00:17:25] a bunch of people fighting for crumbs at the table. I could see that argument go both ways. Um, I could probably argue both sides of that, but I think that'll be a really interesting dynamic for the, for the space.

[00:17:34] DAVID: Things do tend to go that way, right, on the internet. It sort of coalesce towards one or two big [00:17:40] winners.

[00:17:40] You know, we saw that with live streaming in China, where live streaming became this extraordinary phenomenon, but you had people like Deya and Austin Lee, who just became these super Influencers, right, who are, you know, on their own worth, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. Underneath them, though, there was this healthy ecosystem of kind of micro influencers, people who had real niches where they [00:18:00] built kind of authenticity, credibility, people actually really believed in the authority of their opinions, and I think that can happen.

[00:18:06] Uh, we're seeing that as well when we look at the influencer work we do with brands of all different sizes. There's those kind of massive, massive influencers who do command a lot of space and attention, but they're often there to, to build brand connection as much [00:18:20] as they are to build performance. Then you have the micro influencers, those people with authority in a specific area, who can build incredible performance for brands.

[00:18:27] And so we're seeing both, right? But look, I agree, for those smaller video content creators, it is harder to monetize, right? They have to work pretty hard. To get the scale. So I think it's, um, it's much harder coming back to something Sarah said as well, though, you know, [00:18:40] I was relatively new to affiliate. I joined a one in 2022, hadn't really worked in affiliate before.

[00:18:44] And one thing I find fascinating is you have some big global brands who have fully embraced affiliate and actually Samsung's a good example of a, a global brand who have really embraced it, uh, do a great job with it, use it for innovation, for performance, and for scale. But then you have a bunch of other brands who [00:19:00] are, it would be less polite to name right than a, a successful brand who really haven't.

[00:19:04] Who are just scratching the surface, who don't quite get it. And so I think for the industry as a whole, there's this massive opportunity to go and speak to those brands and really help them understand the diversity and the power of the channel.

[00:19:14] MIKE: You know, it's the same on the creator side too, right? I mean, if you're a large creator, you're always going to have to go after the big [00:19:20] six and seven figure strategic direct partnerships.

[00:19:23] But affiliate can just be a nice monetization layer underneath it. Um, where you can reserve at least, you know, 50 to 75 percent of your content to be organic and still make something back right with, with affiliate links for the products or services you're featuring without having to sell your entire content calendar to [00:19:40] brands.

[00:19:40] There are some very large influencers in the space that get that primarily a little bit more of the folks on YouTube than Instagram and TikTok, but it's framed as like an either or in the space a lot, which is strange, right? If I was lucky enough to have millions of people that would watch me unbox a phone or whatever, you better believe I'd be doing well.

[00:19:55] Which I think still not a ton of content creators fully, fully realize.

[00:19:59] SAM: [00:20:00] Yeah.

[00:20:00] ROB: If it's of any value, Mike, I'd happily watch you on Boxer phone. So ,

[00:20:04] MIKE: I'm probably not a good choice. I still have an iPhone with a button. There's an iPhone seven that I still work on. ,

[00:20:08] SAM: well, David's just switched to that Android life too, so might be a alienated from group chats.

[00:20:14] Sam, I've

[00:20:14] DAVID: been, I've been Android my whole life. This is, this is my, my dirty secret, I'm afraid. . I was, uh, I was at Google [00:20:20] around the time that smartphones really came to market, so I. I've been Android since 2007, I guess. Wow.

[00:20:26] SAM: And we have that on record, folks. I've never been tempted. Let's put a pin in the influencer conversation, at least for now.

[00:20:33] Going back to the changes Google is making. Aside from Google's own AI overviews being further introduced to [00:20:40] narrow the opportunities for publisher sites and organic search, other LLM search platforms like Perplexity are becoming increasingly popular for users. Um, question for all of you. What is likely to happen to affiliates?

[00:20:52] as a form of monetization if this new approach achieves mass adoption. And where do we think then affiliates will sit in this journey, if, if at all? David, do [00:21:00] you want to go first maybe on that one?

[00:21:01] DAVID: I think it's pretty early with all this. I mean, it goes without saying, right? We're only a couple of years into it.

[00:21:06] And when I look at the search experience that Google's rolling out, it's not so different from the one box, right? Uh, if I look back in time, I think the mission of that business was always to get people on and off the site as quickly as possible. Then on certain search queries, they were saying, well, actually, no, we [00:21:20] want to, we don't want you to leave.

[00:21:21] We want to give you the answer before you leave. That's very easy. You know, but I still sometimes just open my phone and say weather, right? Because I just want, that's all I want. I just want to know what the weather is going to be like, right? Like

[00:21:31] ROB: a philosophical, yeah,

[00:21:35] DAVID: there's no end to that sentence, but um, But that's a very easy [00:21:40] query that, you know, I do just want the answer immediately, right?

[00:21:42] When you come then to, to say, product queries, monetizable queries, it's still different. You want to click off. I think what we're seeing now is this experience where they're pulling on a lot of different sources and giving you, you know, often quite complex answers in, in a relatively condensed form. And what I couldn't tell you, right, is [00:22:00] whether that's the majority of people are going to say, okay, that's all the information I needed.

[00:22:02] I'm done. Or when they see the source, they're going to say, okay, now I want a bit more information. Going back to Mike's example of dishwashers, right? They might give me a bit of info about a dishwasher, but if it's the right source, I might click through and then get a bit more information. So I think the high quality content sites, actually, they may get a bit more [00:22:20] opportunity from this.

[00:22:20] In the long run, we may want to see a bit more information about where this came from. For a lot of other sources, particularly lower quality sources, I suspect it will be a bit tougher. And then if I think about, you know, what does it mean for affiliates, then they're going to want to build an ever stronger, and this is natural anyway, with or without LLMs, they're going to want to build an ever stronger relationship to their customer base.

[00:22:39] Give people [00:22:40] a reason to go direct to them. Give people a reason to Google them, rather than Googling a term which they show up for. If they can do that, and if they can achieve loyalty with that customer base, then they're still going to be strong. It's definitely a risk. But I actually think it's a very big opportunity for people to up their game and create more loyalty with their audiences.

[00:22:56] SAM: Yeah, I think it probably depends on like the age and demographic of the audience as well. [00:23:00] Not to like embarrass anyone in my family, but at Thanksgiving had someone that anytime they needed an answer to anything was like, let's just chat GPT. Let's chat GPT. And it depends too on like the behavior of the consumer, kind of the age demographic they're in and their own like shopping habits as well.

[00:23:15] Some people are happy just to be told this is what I I have one place I go to for that [00:23:20] information and that's it.

[00:23:21] Sarah Bundy: I was just going to speak to the piece on perplexity and just the creation of content and by AIs. Uh, I actually use perplexity at least 10 times a day. I love perplexity. That's my go to for things like quick answers.

[00:23:35] If I'm doing some research and I just need like a starting source, uh, if I need an opinion [00:23:40] piece, you know, I'll be like, Hey, what are like the top 10 dishwashers I should know about? The thing I like about it is that it does. link the sources. So to your point, David, you can kind of go down the rabbit hole of being like, Oh, did this come from Wirecutter or did this come from the site directly?

[00:23:54] Uh, so you can sort of go that route. The challenge for me is when people are leaning [00:24:00] on things like perplexity and AI and chat GPT to create content. And I'm using this as an example because I see a lot of affiliates starting to do this. And I don't think it's going to end well. I also see a lot of brands starting to do this for their own brand content.

[00:24:14] And I don't think it's going to end well. I think that they're risking losing the connection, the authenticity that they [00:24:20] have with their customers, and eventually they're going to get penalized from that either because consumers can see that a robot wrote that and it'll turn them off or when it comes to things like search or it comes to things like.

[00:24:32] Being able to rank or things like being able to connect with different partners, uh, backlinks and things like that, they're not going to have the same [00:24:40] traction that they got when they were writing that content themselves. So I'm a big fan of things like perplexity and chat GPT when it comes to trying to understand things, but it still requires.

[00:24:51] Customers and companies to do their own work. And when it comes to content creation, they're going to need to be authentic still, because they're going to risk losing the connection with their [00:25:00] customers, as well as potentially being penalized by companies like Google, who don't want to see that because it's not authentic to the person.

[00:25:05] MIKE: Yeah. So I'm going to build on that a little, cause I'm playing around a lot in this space in my day job. I think there's a huge opportunity with brands and sort of AI generated programmatic SEO. If, and only if, their training data is super long form [00:25:20] best of web content that is on brand. On the broader LLM point, I think two things need to happen before people really need to worry about this.

[00:25:26] The first is, we need to see the consumers actually want LLM driven experiences in commerce, right? We know that Amazon and some others are going to really test it. It'll take a few months of like, seeing people say they want this, but, um, when push comes to shove, what people might actually want [00:25:40] is search bars and product pages in 2015 Google.

[00:25:42] If it clears that bar, which I happen to think it will. The next big question is, can the big platforms monetize LLM commerce as effectively? Like, you better believe, even if people love Rufus on Amazon, if it leads to lower revenue per visitor for Amazon. Not just when you think about their commerce business, when you think about their ads business as well, you [00:26:00] better believe they'll roll back LLMs just as quickly as they rolled them in the door.

[00:26:03] So I think you have to see those two things, right? Do the people want it and can the big platforms monetize it as well as conventional search experience? I think we'll see that. Data sometimes here. If it crosses those bars, then I think it's like, holy shit, this could be, this could be big. So I think we're [00:26:20] about like, I would say probably 9 to 12 months away from knowing if this is going to be something that like has to be sort of like in your existential OKRs or if it's more sort of business as usual.

[00:26:28] I think in most cases business as usual for at least Q1 of 25. But yeah, if perplexity commerce starts to take off again, if you start to see Amazon put Rufus front and center on a larger percentage of traffic, if we see Google [00:26:40] start to expand AI overviews, keep in mind, they're taking away some of their juiciest AdWords inventory when they do that.

[00:26:45] So if we see them continue to go down that road, then it's going to be like, okay, if I own an affiliate business, I really, really have to think about this.

[00:26:55] SAM: And that's where we're going to pause the conversation right now. We're leaving you on that cliffhanger [00:27:00] for Mike regarding Amazon's rollout of Rufus.

[00:27:02] ROB: By the way, Sam, do you know why Rufus is called Rufus?

[00:27:07] SAM: I don't, but I'm assuming you do.

[00:27:09] ROB: No. No, I do. So, fun fact, it turns out it's named after a Welsh Corgi dog that two of the company's earliest employees had.

[00:27:19] Now, this [00:27:20] was Eric and Susan Benson, who were among the first 20 hires at Amazon. And when they were working long hours at the startup in his earliest days, they started to bring Rufus the dog into the office so that they could keep an eye on him and he quickly became part of the team. Now, fun fact on top of a fun fact is that he was apparently the face of the very [00:27:40] first error page that Amazon users would see if something went wrong.

[00:27:44] SAM: That is a very fun fact. I think that might be the best fun fact you've ever told me since You know, I love dogs and that goes right up there amongst all the pointless trivia you've shared with me.

[00:27:55] ROB: Wow, that's an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

[00:27:58] SAM: It actually is. It's a [00:28:00] big list for our listeners, so it's really up there.

[00:28:03] In the meantime, for any of those of you that are still listening, we'll be back in a couple weeks time with the second part of our chat. Mike, Sarah, and David share their opinions on the biggest opportunities and challenges in the affiliate industry in 2025.

[00:28:15] ROB: Yeah, so don't miss that and subscribe to the pod.

[00:28:19] And as [00:28:20] always, we'd love to have your ratings and reviews on whichever platform you are using to listen

[00:28:25] SAM: and remember. You can listen to all of our previous episodes from season one of a Win Win Marketing podcast by visiting a win.com/podcasts, or on Spotify, apple Pockets, or wherever you get your podcast.

[00:28:38] You can also send Rob and I [00:28:40] an email if you're interested in being a guest for season two at podcast@aone.com.

[00:28:45] ROB: We'd love to hear from you, but for now, it's goodbye from Sam and I. Bye.