First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
The Publisher Discovery team has thankfully been largely unaffected by the effects of the pandemic. Our team was also operating partly remotely anyway, and we actually gave up serviced office space to be almost wholly remote.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I initially had the vision for Publisher Discovery while working with an enterprise SEO platform. I drew on my previous experience in the affiliate network and merchant roles (now over 18 years). We engineered a new tool for finding affiliates to simplify the recruitment part of the affiliate manager’s role.
How does your company innovate?
The Publisher Discovery platform is a proprietary technology founded on AI and using multiple machine learning techniques to enable users to find the most relevant new affiliate partners. Our tech team drives new tools based on user experience and marketing intelligence to ensure our product is the leading technology in our space.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Luckily our affiliate discovery tools are used across multiple market verticals and almost exclusively in the affiliate or performance marketing industry, which thrived at a time when programmatic and other marketing budgets were cut. With the uncertainty in the markets, many of the brands’ and publishers’ activity moved across to the affiliate model as it is purely performance-based. Our increasing numbers of users are looking to our technology to discover new affiliate partners to help them grow their business.
It’s also not returning to the previous market conditions – affiliate is here to stay.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
Being largely unaffected, the toughest choice was to cut the expense of keeping physical office space – the move entirely to messaging platforms was seamless and easy to manage.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We use multiple tools, including Salesforce, Monday.com, Notion, and Slack, among others, running a series of webinars and meetings via Calendly and Zoom.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We have few real competitors, and most do a little of what we provide, or it’s part of a larger SEO platform. Most of the users who find us say, “I wish I’d known about this before!!”
Your Final Thoughts
The Affiliate Marketing industry is at a turning point, largely due to the past year’s changes. It’s increasingly and more fully understood in the board room and among C-Suite marketers and has finally hit the mainstream. The next few years will cement the affiliate model as a leading driver of online advertising.
- Spokesperson: Chris Tradgett
- Company: Publisher Discovery.
- Website link: https://publisherdiscovery.com