How to Crack Modern Affiliate Strategy in B2B SaaS

Tye DeGrange (00:00):

Guess what? Guess who's coming in and innovating affiliate? You do have a ton of opportunity with YouTube and other video influencers and creators that can make this a reality and help boost your video presence. Think about it. How many brands have crushed video? Who's really cracked that code yet in consumer? Glossier comes to mind, the weird one, because that's not really our world, but they did some really impressive things early on to enlist the help of their community. There's ways to do that in technology businesses and in SaaS.

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Tyler Calder (00:31):

This is Get It, Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. In this episode of Get It, Together, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tye DeGrange, the CEO and founder of Round Barn Labs, a growth marketing agency that does some incredible work with some of the biggest B2B brands out there, and we get into all things affiliate, creator, influencer related, and of course we dive deep into AI and how AI is shifting the affiliate world. So I hope you enjoy and I hope you can take away a lot of action items just like I did. Thanks. Hello everybody and welcome back to Get It Together. This is Tyler Calder from PartnerStack, your host, and today I am with Tye DeGrange, the CEO and founder of Round Barn Labs. I am super excited for this conversation.

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(01:31):

Tye, you came dressed up. You are looking sharp. You got the collared shirt, the jacket. I love everything about it. I appreciate it. Tye, we're going to dive in. You have had an incredible career journey. You've spent time with folks like eBay, Commission Junction. You've led growth, you've now started Round Barn Labs coming up on seven, eight years. Is that accurate?

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Tye DeGrange (01:58):

Yeah, 11 years in total, but seven, eight in its current iteration.

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Tyler Calder (02:02):

Incredible. I wanted to start off talking about your childhood. If we can go back there. You spoke at our event Stacked a little while ago and you talked about the cowboy coats. What's the cowboy coat? How did it come to be? Let's talk about that a bit.

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Tye DeGrange (02:18):

Yeah, I was born and raised on a working ranch in Sonoma County. Now we're north of San Francisco and a little town called Santa Rosa, not so little anymore. Maybe it was an old dairy farm and then my grandfather turned it into a dude ranch and summer camp for kids. So you can imagine the richness of a childhood, being able to enjoy and appreciate all that and meet so many great people and learn so many lessons. But yeah, my mom and dad were really into horses and it was their passion. My dad, that's all he wanted to do. He trained horses from three year olds and up sometimes younger, which is kind of a wild concept, but my dad was kind of a horse whisperer and my mom taught at the local junior college there for a number of years and they had a lot of impact on people's lives through teaching about horses, science, the handling, the safety, and they had a passion for showing 'em and all that stuff.

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(03:12):

Hard work was absolutely a huge part of the ethos of the family and instilled in me at a young age and things like if you open the gate, close it, there's all these little aphorisms and one-liners. My dad would be like, the harder I work the lucky I get eight hours before on, eight hours after. I mean they did a good job of walking a walk and put a lot of effort in both as teachers in some capacity, both as horse passionate practitioners and doing it the right way, doing it safely and running a small business, which was kind of wild at a time and they weren't necessarily the best at always checking all the boxes business wise, but the Cowboy Code of doing what you say, finishing what you start writing for the brand, being thoughtful, knowing where to draw the line. There's a lot of fun ones in here that we've talked about and we can talk about, but as silly as the old saying goes or how maybe people associate it to, it's really some good business practice and it's really applicable to partner marketing.

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Tyler Calder (04:12):

And then one of the things that we talked about at Stacked was this idea of trust. And a lot of what you spoke about was really the Cowboy Code and how it is something that you try to live by that you've try to build into Round Barn Labs to really help anchor to trust through the code. And so maybe talk a little bit about Round Barn Labs. Where did the name come from, who are you helping, and then let's talk about how important is it that the Cowboy Code is part of your culture at Round Barn Labs?

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Tye DeGrange (04:48):

My last name actually loosely translates to "from the barn" in French, so there's that. We grew up, the ranch was just next to the Fountain Grove round barn in Santa Rosa, which is this beautiful old red round barn and just so rare you don't see 'em very often, and so they're kind of cool like architecturally and then they were originally in use because they could use the same amount of material but get significantly more space and efficiency with said material. So they would use it for thrashing weed and having livestock in and animals many, many, many years ago. And that was kind of the inspiration for the name of Round Barn Labs. But over our history, we've done a lot of different things. I was really the T-shaped marketer view. I was really deepest in affiliate partner influencer marketing at first. We were doing a lot of growth experimentation out of the Bay Area for startups and evolved into getting back, flexing more of the affiliate chops, being able to collaborate with larger brands, which was obviously attractive for a lot of reasons.

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(05:49):

Got to do a stay at Amazon, learned a ton by drinking through the fire hose there. But the business has evolved. It's done paid media, paid social, and what we've learned is just the results, the longevity, the retention around affiliate partner marketing is really where we want to be and where we've been for quite a long time. And so we've been fortunate to have a really phenomenal track record in tech. Going back to Nextdoor, MedQuest, Hatch, Hopin, Ironclad. We're now working with Remote, Google Workspace, TikTok, Grammarly, Atlassian to name a few and more to come. And so I think for us, seeing tech is where we want to be. Obviously we were talking a little bit about my beer, your roots and having a lot of great relationships and learnings there and going back there regularly. Austin's a great technology community. Where you are in Toronto is a great technology community, so the business has been really focused much more so now.

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(06:45):

Another one of my dad's sayings, it's like sometimes you have to go through it yourself before you really internalize it and realize it in the back of your mind. We might know that's the playbook, focus wins if you're an external vendor and we were offering a lot to people, which lend itself to some cool things and we got to work with a breadth of practitioners, but I knew at some point we would probably hone in on one that was really working and I think that's where we're at now. We're seeing average of 42 months of retaining. We really like to build those long-term relationships with partners, which is a part of that Cowboy Code ethos. We are polling folks and getting a 9.5 out of 10 the last two quarters and for our clients to know are they satisfied? Are they having good performance? Are they having good service experience? So yeah, that's a little bit about where we're at. Awesome. Very cool.

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Tyler Calder (07:32):

So some big names that you just dropped working with some incredible companies. The bulk of what I think we're going to talk about today is the affiliate world. Influencers, creators, affiliate marketing in some areas still has a negative connotation to it. I spoke to somebody who was interviewing for a CMO job and they turned down the job simply because 80% of the revenue was coming through an affiliate channel and they thought, I don't like it. It was as simple as that because there was this negative connotation to it and the reality is I think a lot of those negative connotations, they're 15, 20 years old, especially in B2B, it's become such a driving force, not just for growth but for building awareness in new geographies, building awareness with new buying groups in increasing AI visibility. Most recently, where I'm going with this is I'd love to understand the folks that you are working with now. What does success look like to them? What is it about the affiliate world that has them leaning in with you folks?

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Tye DeGrange (08:39):

Not to dwell on that negative, I think it's important to talk about the problem. You have this history where there's been major fraud issues, some of which we've been part of literally catching you've had low quality issues. You've had sort of the misnomer that is last click attribution for a lot of affiliate partners and how are they able to tackle incrementality. There's a lot of, I've often said it's the most misunderstood of channels and it's the most underrated and high value of channels, but clients are coming to us reporting regularly that it's their highest efficiency channel. The concerns and perception are not without they're warranted. It's also interesting how many practitioners are, it's hard to get right candidly, I was on a EMA webinar recently where I was just saying this stuff is just also hard. So many nuances and details and understanding the algo and the creative and the testing, but you're in that system.

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(09:40):

You have a playbook, you have various best practices, you have that data, you can get into that all day long. Whereas affiliate by its nature partner influenced or included there is multi-channel by its definition. You literally could be accessing Meta, YouTube in person, a podcast like we're on now. And from a positive perspective, I've heard really reputable CMOs and leaders say those that come out affiliate can sometimes be some of the best marketing leaders out there because affiliate allows you to test, allows you to do some innovative things. So I think when it's done right, which is sadly not often enough, it's really, really exciting and powerful. It can be incremental, it can be measurable, it can be scalable, it can be highly efficient, can make up a high percentage of your business. But maybe putting a bow on this topic of what are clients getting when it's done right, I think it's about really authentic communities of interest.

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(10:35):

Similar to our conversion rate optimization days and our in-house growth days and our paid media days. We take an approach of like we really want to dig into those customer personas and segments with you. We really want to understand the psychology, the age, the income, the thoughts, the pain points. The partners are the ecosystem. They are the currency that drives the ecosystem. We're the guide the quarterback that's helping facilitate that for the B2B SaaS brand for you all. If we can get that persona information really dialed in, we can go after communities of interest. We can get connected into a really great coworking space or an incubator and surface a B2B SaaS offering there. We've had a lot of success in YouTube for SaaS brands that are trying to make sense of how does this stack up to their tools, how do we get set up?

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(11:20):

What are some of the tips to optimize the SaaS tool or project management software. For example, I've done this massive explosion of newsletters and quality niche content on these communities that are talking about real things and people are actively opening in these and reading these, again, podcasts run now audio has worked extremely well for a lot of brands across enterprise B2B consumer and LinkedIn influencers in general, but in LinkedIn in particular for your area in the B2B SaaS world and the tech world, it's sort of a no-brainer. So it's, I think a lot of people get stuck on what's in platform, what are the top 10, what are the top 50, what are the top 100? Here you go. And it's like there's so much more out there to think about and to offer and you can't do it all at once. It's not easy, but if you're doing it the right way, that is going to come back in spades long term. So I think that's what we're seeing as the big aha moment for partner marketing.

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Tyler Calder (12:20):

Very cool. We've mentioned the word trust and I think some of what I've seen in terms of why B2B brands might be hesitant to look at affiliate is sometimes there's a view which I think is an incorrect view, that there's a lack of trust within affiliate, right? Affiliates are just kind of these anonymous people trying to hack algorithms to try to drive traffic that may or may not be qualified and they're just in it to make a buck and that's all they care about. And I think that is so far removed from reality that it's leading to so many brands miss out on the opportunity and the reason that's the case is these aren't typically just anonymous people just pumping out stuff to try to manipulate an algorithm somewhere. These are folks that have built an attentive audience. These are folks that have built a great deal of trust in their audience and their audience is looking to them for advice, for guidance, and to your point, sometimes they are pure play communities themselves.

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(13:27):

Sometimes there are folks that are leaning into newsletters and maybe they're leaning into video and have a YouTube channel, but all of it comes back to the fact that they have built a great reputation for themselves. They have the trust of the audience. You're trying to gain the trust of, they're like the r and d of the internet. They're constantly testing and experimenting and yes, they're building these really attentive audiences, but they're also doing it in leading edge ways and innovative ways. I think the world of being able to hire as full-time employees, the best marketers in the world, I don't actually think that exists anymore. I think the best marketers in the world, they're working agency side, they are becoming creators, influencers, affiliates themselves, and so a really well scaled out affiliate program, you have this army of folks that help you scale out your brand, scale out trust, do it in a way that drives pipeline more efficiently than just about any other channel, and you're tapping into some of the greatest thinkers in marketing because they're incubating themselves basically. They're constantly experimenting. And so I'll pause there for a second. It's not really a question, but it's sort of a roundup of a lot of what I'm seeing and a lot of what I feel passionate about.

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Tye DeGrange (14:50):

I love it. It just echoes so much of what we've talked about and these are a lot of hardworking entrepreneurs. Some of them are in massive corporations and some of them are out of their parents' basement. The whole misnomer that they're all in their parents' basement, for lack of a better term, is not accurate and there's a lot of real practitioners, the freedom it provides and the remote nature of it, there's a small business aspect to it, obviously a major driver for many economies. Going back to the trust piece, you've got a brand trying to reach an audience on a television ad, radio ad, anything, LinkedIn, Meta. That's a hard thing to break through to in where we are in the world. The trust has eroded to a point where I talked about in my Cowboy Code talk how so many scandals, so many business issues have led us to where we are now.

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(15:39):

It's a little brief history tour of business that people's ears perk up when they buy a vehicle and Volkswagen tells them their emissions are this and then they're not. The trust has been eroded so many times in so many places that for you to say, Hey, Tye, you should definitely take a look at this tool to manage your team online and document and project manage. It's amazing. I've had a great experience with it. Obviously that's going to resonate heavily in an environment where we're even more skeptical of brands telling us that they should consider X, Y, Z product. On top of that, you've got paid media, which through algorithm, through supply demand, through their dominance, through all other things is prices continue to go up, results continue to go down, not in every case, but in a lot of these cases. And so it makes sense that you're seeing brands kind of go, wait a second, we need other ways.

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(16:31):

We need diversification, we need better efficiency. We need to tap into third party voices and communities that can genuinely say like a following SaaS tool is really interesting and really helpful to help me do the following, check it out. And I've got more helpful information around it here to my community where that community goes to learn about things from a voice they have credibility and trust and some degree of authenticity with. So I couldn't agree more. It's a really exciting place to be. It's fun because you still get to be a multi-channel marketer in some aspects. I always loved that.

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Tyler Calder (17:10):

I want to shift into the hot topic of the year. It'll probably be the hot topic for the next couple of years. AI, of course, maybe the decade. I had three calls today and in all three calls they all said the exact same thing, which is the past month, the amount of top-down pressure that I am getting to improve our visibility in the LLM, so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, it's astounding. I am getting questions every single day from our C-suite from investors, Hey, I just looked for this or that on ChatGPT, I'm not seeing you folks pop up that well, what's going on? And what they're looking to is third party content, trusted content to help them increase that visibility. And that's sort of this new value prop that we're seeing come from affiliates, affiliate marketing. Historically it's been pure performance based paper lead, maybe rev share, and now we're seeing the shift of all of that is great.

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(18:17):

We still need that. We still need highly measured pipeline, but I also need you to help me create content that is going to get cited in the LLMs and that extends into I think very strategic conversations around, I need you to help me break into new buying groups. We have a new product coming out that is in a totally different category that we need to build awareness for. Are you seeing any shifts in how people are thinking about affiliate? What role are you seeing it play in AI visibility and kind of this growing market of AEO, GEO, all that?

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Tye DeGrange (18:51):

Yeah. When something like this comes along, I think there's a lot of misnomers, hype, clickbait, charlatans that pop up for lack of a better term. There's smoke, there's fire, there's a validity around trying to figure these things out in a new way. If we've seen these waves before, whether it's internet, mobile, emerging channels like Facebook as a growth lever, these have all been around and they come and when they hit, you need to be riding that wave at a reasonably good time. There's getting into early, which is really a bad thing in some ways for a marketer. And going back to the value of affiliate, if you're R&D, if you're an innovator, you're probably going to be early on that wave. The sentiments shifting in a really positive way for affiliate, my estimate is in particular in the last six months, brands are taking notice and asking us to help assess that macro question of AI visibility, independent of affiliate, independent of partner and influencer marketing. I think the perception and the reality is that it's a pillar and a part of the three legged stool or a stool to support AI visibility for a brand and SaaS and technology. So it is shifting and by all measures from our guides and talking to competitors, colleagues, partners, the partners that are the R&D, the ecosystem, it is a material part of the AI visibility. Just similarly how it was historically with search. It certainly is now some may say even more so I love the word charlatan and I think sadly they exist in our world.

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Tyler Calder (20:24):

Well, I think you go on LinkedIn today and you are going to be just blasted with advice from seemingly very credible people and the advice is very black and white. If you want to increase AI visibility, you must do this thing. It's one thing. Then you hear from somebody else on LinkedIn, it's like, well no, if you want to improve your AI visibility, you have to do this one thing. And then if you go and look at who they are, it's like, oh, that's just the thing that you have specialized in for the past 10 years and you're just trying to repackage it. And so I do think there's a lot of just kind of critical thinking that needs to happen right now as people are trying to figure out their way and you're trying to figure out, well, who can help?

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(21:11):

Who should I be listening to? But really what I've seen is it does come back to a lot of first principles thinking, are you producing content that has depth to it, that has credibility to it? Are you working with people that have a trusted and engaged audience already? Are you focused internally, intrinsically on building your own playbook versus just trying to rip off someone else's playbook? And so very tactically what I'm seeing is there's really four pillars around AI visibility in particular, what I'm basing that on is our own testing and experimentation at PartnerStack where we are heavily cited in the LLMs, we're typically 2 to 3X the share of voice of our next biggest competitor. And a lot of what's being cited is actually our own content. And a lot of people say, well, they're not going to cite your own content.

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(22:09):

They're going to cite third party content. They're going to cite both. But it's dependent on is your own content properly structured? Do you have enough clusters around? Similar themes are using the right type of schemas to make sure things are easily crawled and understood. And we've seen our referral traffic that converts at a really high rate from the various LLMs, it's 10X since July of 2024. It's wild. Then you start to layer on actual third party content. So to me, pillar one is your own website technical execution. Reddit is kind of the main user generated content pillar. And then that third party content is what we've been talking about, affiliate content, influencer creator content, and then what I segment out as the fourth pillar is just video, whether that's your own video, whether that's third party video. We're seeing video become so heavily cited that it almost feels like it's own pillar. So that's kind of what we're seeing as the four main pillars that you're really need to tap into.

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Tye DeGrange (23:17):

Yeah. Have you seen Reddit over YouTube?

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Tyler Calder (23:19):

We've seen it be case by case.

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Tye DeGrange (23:21):

And you need both too.

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Tyler Calder (23:23):

Yeah.

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Tye DeGrange (23:23):

One thing we've tried to do is take a very specific data audit approach similar to how we would look at a lot of these challenges, whether that's forecasting, whether that's hitting goal, whether that's recruiting, whether that's launching into a new region. We've been very fortunate to go really deep with someone on the team that we've been trying to work with for years that has deep and organic and paid experience. That of course has gone all into some extent on the LLM research algorithm research, understanding how to show up on citations in a very effective way. And so using a lot of the newer tooling that we've talked about that's available to track citation visibility in ChatGPT and others, you can actually stitch together a pretty good picture for a brand if you're doing that work, if you have the knowledge on onsite SEO, some of the paid search levers, the algorithm and how they operate very in a very detailed level and seeing where your competitors are showing up traffic, you're getting the opportunity.

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(24:25):

Brands have come to us very quickly in a fair amount of volume and then those that we bring it up to have really resonated with this. And so I think we're seeing an exciting shift that it's not really assuming anything. It's really looking at a very detailed dive of the data to your point to say, here's where the opportunity is and isn't B2B your competitors? And again, it wasn't like they're waving the affiliate influencer banner ever. They probably saw value in it generally, but as the data came back and the research came, it kind of just made a lot more sense for us to collaborate with their very, very deep technical knowledge. And so it's been a really positive outcome I think for clients to be able to look at and say, what is the audit telling us? And then based on that, we can go forth and make some specific suggestions on Reddit, YouTube affiliate.

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(25:14):

I mean the cool thing for us, and I've shared this with a few others, is that affiliate is a really surprisingly high piece of the puzzle and pie. I was not expecting it to be as much, which has really been a pleasant surprise and I think that it bodes well for now in the current environment, and so taking advantage of that, I don't think it's going to go away given it is a trusted third party that's really been resonating to really get highly technical, take an audit database approach, which gets thrown around too often and then know how affiliates can come in and actually have an impact done the right way is I think a big piece of it.

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Tyler Calder (25:50):

Audits are when done well, which I know you do them well are such a valuable asset that agencies can produce for folks. When I was agency, the bulk of our business came from doing audits and just trying to do 'em really well and it kind of expose what the playbook might look like. How would you suggest somebody does at least a surface level audit on themselves knowing that they can always work with somebody like you to go a little bit deeper, but I do think there's value in sharing how people can go do this, like I said, at least at a surface level, to give themselves their own baseline understanding. Maybe they can do some of their own tests and experiments coming out of what they've learned from that audit. How could they jumpstart this themselves and just start to look at what's going on in their business?

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Tye DeGrange (26:36):

I think with starting at a place of the AI and LLMs and understanding what the presence looks like there, tools like Profound have been extremely helpful. I think those core AI LLM tools are generally been preferred over others in terms of what we've seen. I know people have a lot of loyalty and excitement around the legacy SEO tools, which are helpful for that, and they have added a lot of technology to them. There is ways through SEMrush and others to get that information, but I think in our experience, Profound and some of the others in AI specifically have been really good to see where are you showing up vis-a-vis your competitors from a citation perspective, so that initial review at a high level, where are you showing up versus competitors? Where are you ranking there? What kind of traffic volumes are you expecting? I think those types of even initial views can be not extremely difficult to get a sense of and know where you're at right now.

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(27:29):

I think you made a really good point earlier around the technical onsite stuff is far from going away and the old days of webmaster tools and understanding technically what is happening on site is certainly not a bad thing to look at. For us Ahrefs for onsite SEO, we're looking at little signals for our business and trying to stay on top of those and make sure we're wrapping up things as you should or cleaning up things technically that are fixable. I think that for a lot of brands in the review and some of the specific queries, you can get a sense within Google within some of the search tooling, what kind of queries are you showing up for more readily and how does that tie in an overlap? Right, so are you seeing trends that are consistent on AI chats as well as Google? That's certainly an area to drill down into.

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(28:18):

I think for a consumer brand, you're obviously going to look at different things slightly than on the B2B SaaS side. I think there's tooling even around how visible are you, what's the position versus your competitors is the sentiment. When you talk about things like YouTube and Reddit, knowing that consumer perception from a review G2 crowd sentiment perspective I think is really important as well. You have diehard evangelists on certain parts of your product. Do you have power users? Do you have people that are detractors or their kind of issues with certain parts of the product based on sentiment? I think that's really something that's really interesting. Looking into select pages of your site versus your competitors is something we're thinking about things often from a partner gap analysis basis, so we can say, okay, if your competitors are working with the following partners, we can get you the rest of the universe and at some point or at least attempt to, if that matches back to what the AI and search audit is providing, there could be some exciting opportunity to say, wow, there's some overlap here in terms of what you're missing out on the partner level that might align or not with what you're missing out on in AI and in search, so it could make for a good strategic alignment and kind of bring people together as opposed to operating from siloed perspective, which obviously can happen internally at teams, sometimes.

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Tyler Calder (29:43):

And I love your call out on the sentiment piece because I think although the conversation and chatter around AI visibility is quite a bit larger than the actual traffic being generated, that traffic is growing exponentially, which is important to note, exponential growth, you cannot ignore, and as that exponential growth turns into really meaningful numbers, we already see the traffic is it's high intent in nature, it is converting at a much higher rate when it does come to your website than other channels, and if there's negative sentiment around your brand, that's going to hurt you quite significantly as more and more buyers turn to the LLMs as their first step of discovery or one of the first steps of discovery. And so again, going back to affiliate has always been viewed as you're paying for performance, it's kind of transactional in nature. Yeah, it's there to build pipeline and it's very performance oriented, but it's also a way to make sure that you're really bolstering where you have positive sentiment and you're helping to reverse maybe where there's negative sentiment. Again, I think that's a highly important and strategic area that folks need to be aware of.

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Tye DeGrange (31:06):

For me, if you step back and think about it, and some of it's hindsight's 2020, but it all sort of makes a lot of sense if we talk about affiliates being the r and d of the ecosystem. If you think about some of the writings and information shared by like Brian Balfour at Reforge and Andrew Chen on law of shitty clickthroughs and the waves of innovation that come, this is clearly a wave. We're not at the super mature phase, obviously it's still reasonably early, and so that's where there's debate, there's controversy, there's all these numbers are smaller than the aggregate, but they're the fastest growing to your point, so guess what? Guess who's coming in and innovating affiliate? It's not necessarily obvious when it started or not necessarily clearly going to happen when it was predicted. It wasn't predicted per se, but the fact that you can access this video is such a huge part of it.

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(31:55):

Guess who can help with that? You do have a ton of opportunity with YouTube and other video influencers and creators that can make this a reality and help boost your video presence if you're video presence is a three out of 10 now versus your competitors, or if you've done nothing, I'm not saying that's your silver bullet going back to the audit and rankings and prioritization of a custom view, but that in itself, think about it, how many brands have crushed video creator who's really cracked that code yet? I'm sure there's examples in consumer Glossier comes to mind, the weird one, that's not really our world, but they did some really impressive things early on to enlist the help of their community. There's ways to do that in technology businesses and in SaaS. I think video, it is just ripe for these innovators to help support you in that. I think you can point affiliates in a lot of directions if it's done and are given all the right parameters, inputs, comp rules, policing, monitoring. It's really kind of thrilling to see that it's coming to fruition to this extent. They're very much of a seat at the table when it comes to AI.

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Tyler Calder (33:02):

Yeah, no, I certainly agree with all of that. We've talked a lot about affiliate's ability to impact AI visibility. What about your thoughts on the world we live in with AI generated content and how that's impacting the affiliate world?

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Tye DeGrange (33:22):

I think that it's an interesting one, especially when you talk about B2B. My hypothesis is that where there's trust gap, where there's a trust in terms of what the consumer and the buyers millennials increasingly becoming important, as I talked about, if they're getting hit with AI generated content that isn't resonating, it's going to only erode and make that gap worse. I'm not saying it can't work and I can't saying it can't be presented in a way that lands. I think generally, and this is kind of maybe touch on some other questions for us as an organization for operational work, I think there's so many efficiency gains to AI that can be gleaned, and I'm skeptical of it leaning into it as the creative arm for the reasons of the trust gap, for the reasons of human psychology. I think it's certainly is already a big place in the paid social efforts and creative building and testing and experimentation, and it feels like we're kind of on the edge of that right now where there's still a lot of learnings to be had.

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(34:24):

I think it goes back to the value of affiliate that you have actual humans telling their story about your product, not you telling your story about their products for B2B. That even extends into the concept of community, which is a little tough to wrap your arms around, but it extends into what Round Run Labs is trying to do. It extends into what PartnerStack is trying to do. A lot of what we do on the B2B side is definitely a human element to, it's an in-person element to it. As data driven marketers, you and I, that can sometimes be surprising or fuzzy, but it's still there, and so not to give you a word salad, philosophical answer. I think that it's a tough one for me to pin down and partially my hypothesis is very based on the trust building aspect of it, and I haven't seen a lot of creative that the trust jumps out at me yet, and I'm just like, oh, man, I want to learn more about that from a B2B software perspective in particular, I don't know, maybe you disagree with me.

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(35:17):

We can have a little spicy debate on it, but it feels like something under the hood operationally pumping into my veins all day long. Let's go. Let's train people. Let's reward people. Let's give them space to test these tools to come up with documentation to come up with methodologies at work. We've done that internally in our team and excited to do more of it, but yeah, long-winded way to say on the creative side, I'm not as thrilled by it, especially when you can have someone alternatively, like you get on a podcast and say, oh, I tried a clay out which happened on my pod, or, oh my God, profound is just light years ahead of the others, which I don't know for sure, but I've heard good things that we've had good experiences with, so yeah. What are your thoughts?

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Tyler Calder (36:02):

Yeah, it is such an interesting topic because I think as a person working for a brand PartnerStack and talking to a lot of other heads of marketing, there is internal pressure for brands to be leveraging AI to find efficiency, so why do we have writers if AI can pump out content, just have them do it or have the robot do it, and so I think there's a stark difference between the pressures of brands and the pressures on an affiliate or a creator, and so to be far more specific, what I mean is I think you're going to see a lot of companies lean heavily into AI generated content, and then you're going to see those folks split off into, they're literally copying and pasting. They are viewing it as content that is just sort of good enough. It just barely passes that good enough kind of benchmark, and to them it is checkbox marketing.

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(37:11):

We got content out the door, we got it out the door really, really fast. It didn't cost us a lot. It hits the topics we wanted to talk about, and that is success. It kind of ends there, and I say that because you saw it with SEO, right? You saw, oh, we do SEO. It's like, well, no, you just kind of pump out content that's just sort of good enough, but it's not actually driving business outcomes for you. It's just like a checklist every month that you got it out the door. Again, I think you're still going to see the exact same thing, but now it's just cheaper to do. I then think you're going to see the marketers internally at brands that are doing a lot of their own testing experimentation. They're figuring out how it amplifies their creativity, it supplements it. I think you will see people do really interesting things with video and imagery, not just text.

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(37:54):

I'm seeing some cool things now. I do think there's a wall of frustration you have to break through when you're testing those things, especially with video. It's like, oh, the video, it's almost perfect, but I can't get their hands to look right if their hands could just look right. Everything else is perfect, and then I'm just repoing all night to try to perfect it, and so I do think people kind of break through that and put together some really interesting things. On the affiliate side, the creator side, I go back to the fact that they are like the R&D of the internet, and so I actually have far greater confidence in a network of partners, my ecosystem, to really figure out what the right use cases are for AI to drive business outcomes. Then candidly, most internal teams, right, because I think most internal teams, as much as we're all being measured for pipeline, there's still a lot of checkbox marketing that happens. Just getting it out the door, that's the outcome. That's not the case for the affiliate. They have to drive far greater outcomes for their own livelihood, and so I think there'll be like, yeah, their butts on the line, and so I think there'll be just a lot of really interesting things that we see coming out of that affiliate world created world, influencer world where they're just constantly iterating on different use cases for AI created content.

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Tye DeGrange (39:27):

Using it as a springboard or refinement mechanism to crank out a hundred videos instead of two is a no brainer, but I love that, just in this conversation, we've had some internal conversations that are very technical, very deep dive audits with brands where the conclusion is literally, you need to double down on video. You need to double down on affiliate. Here we are, and it's like, boy, isn't that the best thing? That's what you want to hear, and yes, obviously we have a stake in that, but a lot of the data is hard to refute, and so that gets me excited about where this is going. I have no doubt that affiliates are going to continue to be that R&D and that hard charging, try test it mentality with all of these things, especially as different partner types are rising and falling every day and week and month and whatnot, so it's a really thrilling opportunity.

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Tyler Calder (40:22):

Yeah, I agree. We're coming up at the end here. I've got one last question for you. Cowboy Code. If you had to look at your Cowboy Code and the principles within, what is the one part of that Cowboy Code that day to day you got to anchor to? What is it?

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Tye DeGrange (40:43):

There's about 10 of 'em, and I can happy to put 'em in the show notes or whatever, but I think keeping your promise, keeping your word, I think you want to extend that to yourself, your colleagues, your family, your team, your clients. Imagine the trust gap we would be in if more people in the business world did that and actually followed that part of the Cowboy Code wouldn't be, it's a blessing and a curse. Maybe we benefited from the lack of trust in the business and marketing community requiring affiliates, but that's one of my favorites and one that's important to remind myself of.

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Tyler Calder (41:15):

I love it. That's great. Tye, thank you so much for spending time with us. How can people get in touch with you if they choose to?

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Tye DeGrange (41:23):

I appreciate it. I'm reasonably responsive and active on the LinkedIn, so if you want to send me a message there, you can. If you want to drop me a note directly at tye@roundbarnlabs.com, you can email me directly and happy to get back to you and appreciate it.

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Tyler Calder (41:38):

Awesome. Well, Tye, thank you very much. Thank you to everybody listening and check out the show notes where we'll break down the Cowboy Code.

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Tye DeGrange (41:46):

For sure. I love it. Thanks so much, Tyler.

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Tyler Calder (41:49):

Alright. Take care everyone. Thanks for listening to Get It, Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools at partnerstack.com/getittogether.