The New Era of Affiliate Marketing with Charlie Calabrese

Charlie Calabrese (00:00):

People come to affiliate who don't know it. They come to it and they say, "Oh, it's just like this other channel I know, " whether that's search or social. I can just throw some money at it the way I throw money at Meta. Affiliate is not an on-in-a-minute channel. There's some setup work to do so that you get your tracking right, but you get data that you can't get anywhere else.

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Tyler Calder (00:23):

This is Get It, Together, the podcast where partnership and go-to-market leaders share the real stories behind programs they built and scaled. In this episode of Get It, Together, I sit down with Charlie, the president of All Inclusive Marketing, who is a great partner agency of ours here at PartnerStack. Charlie has spent the past two decades working across affiliate networks, across SaaS, and now agency leadership. We talk about how software companies should actually be working with agencies as true partners. What it means to be a true partner. We talk about how buying behavior is shifting and shifting very quickly with the rise of AI. And we talk about how affiliate programs are far more relationship-driven than some folks might think. Enjoy. I welcome everybody to another episode of Get It, Together. Today, I'm very excited for our conversation with the one and only Charlie.

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(01:26):

Charlie, welcome. Charlie has an incredible background, one I'm very excited to get into. You've spent two decades or so in affiliate marketing and partner marketing. You've been network side, you've been agency side. I'm excited to get into all of it. How you doing?

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Charlie Calabrese (01:45):

Oh, good, man. Yeah. And thank you for reminding me I'm old. I appreciate that as a warmup. Yeah. 20 years in this.

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Tyler Calder (01:53):

Yeah, you're welcome. My daughter throws it to me every day, a reminder of how old I am, so I'm just trying to give it back to people.

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Charlie Calabrese (01:59):

Hey, look, you got to get it out somewhere. I get it, man. I get it.

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Tyler Calder (02:02):

Exactly. Let's dive right in. I'd love to talk a little bit about your background because I do think it's an interesting one. Like I mentioned, a couple decades across both network side, tech side, now agency side.

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Charlie Calabrese (02:14):

Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (02:15):

Let's walk through that.

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Charlie Calabrese (02:16):

I was with the M&A team at Time Warner and AOL. And yes, once again, proving I am old. I worked at AOL, America Online. We were in the process of acquiring an affiliate network and I got pulled in, sort of helped with the numbers. And I think I got started with an affiliate network out of England called BuyAt. And it was a different world once you got into the details. Man, affiliates just, you hear a terminology about a marketing challenge, but then you get into the details. And at the time, when I was looking at it, so much of it seemed to rely on relationships. Affiliate performance and it was very much this world of who you knew. And I'm coming from this world of programmatic and trying to buy inventory. And I loved ... As I met people, I loved how everyone seemed to know everyone at events.

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(03:06):

I would go to these different events and we weren't just numbers on ledgers. People really knew each other. They knew their kids, their pets, their favorite drinks. We weren't just names of peoples at companies. We were like genuine humans. And I was at BuyAt and then AOLacquired at BuyAt. And I was lucky enough to be able to see how these partnerships could just both be creative and data-driven, which I still think is true. Affiliate's amazing because you can test ideas and you can measure output and you get to play with all these cool things, right? Whether you're a publisher, you're a network, you're an advertiser, you're a SaaS these days. Everyone just feels invested and empowered in affiliate. Everyone just feels like we're competitors, but we're friends. Who are we working with today? It's just what makes affiliates so unique. It's a big village.

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(04:02):

And I really love that about the industry. Coming from AOL through multiple networks to now be the president over at All Inclusive Marketing, it's been a whirlwind, man. It's been a crazy 20 years. I'll say that. Yeah, yeah.

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Tyler Calder (04:15):

One of the things that you touched on right at the beginning of that was you were brought in to help with some of the numbers.

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Charlie Calabrese (04:22):

Yeah. Numbers and I get paid for it. It's great.

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Tyler Calder (04:25):

I'd love to talk about that for a second because I think it's probably obvious, but numbers, important. And especially when you get into the world of all things digital where everything's highly measurable. Where do you see the collision of the analytics and the creativity? How do you merge those two when, for a lot of people, those are two very different skillsets.

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Charlie Calabrese (04:46):

My brain has always been a numbers brain. And creativity has always been secondary at best. It's not where my strength lies. I'm good at figuring things out, problem solving, and getting creative in that way, but actual design and coming up with ideas behind campaigns and the hard pushes. I've just been lucky enough to work with a lot of good people who have sort of that side of their brain working. One of the things I love about this business, you can share all these ideas and you can lean on people to be more creative when you're a little less ... And I am, I admit that. I'm a numbers guy, which is also why I like performance. I love affiliate because I can see this creative led to these clicks, which led to these transactions and what verticals did it work in and what verticals did it not work in.

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(05:34):

So yeah, I mean, I'm very lucky because I get to work with really smart people who are just a little different in terms of the way their brain works. I wish I could tell you I've suddenly become a creative. I can't. In this industry, if you're not playing on both sides where you're being a little creative with how you put your ideas out, how you put your brands out there, how you find the right publishers. I would say creative and content relate very closely. And in the world of influencer, which has become a big part of affiliate, it plays a big role.

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Tyler Calder (06:05):

I think that's the lesson there, right? Is know what you're good at, surround people that kind of round you out. I think that's great. So you spent 13 years at PartnerRise, great org, great network, now you're leading AIM, All Inclusive Marketing. What's that been like moving agency side and not just moving agency side, but leading an agency?

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Charlie Calabrese (06:24):

I've been network side or SaaS side, sort of depending on how the networks define themselves. Most of my career, I got to see sort of firsthand where partnerships thrive and where they break down. AIM's been around for 15 years. I didn't build this place. I've been lucky to sort of inherit it and become a part of this team. It's full of really experienced folks who've been kind enough to sort of welcome me to the fold. And I've sort of done my best to take what I've learned at the networks and in my operational career to shape the agency, but in a way that's collaborative, right? The most important part of which I would say is we don't treat affiliate as a siloed vertical. We look at affiliate and we look at how it plays into pipelines, the LTV, the multi-channel mix, and just sort of started playing and bringing some more of those thoughts to this world.

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(07:16):

AIM is part of a broader organization called the Plus Company, the Plus Company Media Team. We have access to paid, creative, influencer expertise, and we tap into our sister agencies in that media group. When the client needs a little bit more of that full funnel alignment, we have a really amazing sort of opportunity to work with all these really smart people. Since I got here, my personal goal is really to help clients stop thinking of affiliate marketing as this plug-and-play tool and start seeing it as like that lever for growth, right? When you need to grow part of your marketing portfolio, your revenue, you can pull on that affiliate lever and just really start to see this uptick. So I really think that my background from the networks has given me this sort of operational perspective. And then the folks here have really shown me how to think about a culture and the importance thereof.

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Tyler Calder (08:11):

Can you expand a little bit on something you just said, shifting affiliate from maybe being thought of as this plug-and-play thing. What does that mean? What does it look like to treat it as plug-and-play and what does it look like to evolve it and mature around it?

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Charlie Calabrese (08:24):

Yeah. I would say this is something that's been true throughout my career. People come to affiliate who don't know it, right? As brands, they come to it and they say, oh, it's just like this other channel I know, whether that's search or social and it's, I can just throw some money at it the way I throw money at Meta and it's just going to work. And overnight it's going to be like on and it's magic. An affiliate is not an on-in-a-minute channel. There's some setup work to do so that you get your tracking right, but you get data that you can't get anywhere else. You're going to see what items are selling, where those items on sale, where the customer's new, are they returning? You get all this robust data that you're not going to get anywhere else. So it takes a little while to set up, and it takes a little while to find the right publisher mix, right?

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(09:11):

You want to find the folks who really get your business. So that in and of itself is just different than these other channels. And it puts you in this place where if you understand your LTV, then affiliate can be part of the lower part of your funnel, and you'll hear the term like last click. But as you get people writing about your product and creating that content, it's also higher in the funnel. It becomes part of that discovery process. And in the world of sort of AI and LLMs, that discovery aspect is really important. So I like to think about affiliate and performance marketing as more than what people have thought about historically, where it's just they come to it, it's this plug that they just turn on and it's great. It's not. It's so much more. And in recent days with the influence of AI, it's become more and it's going to become more because how you get found in the future is going to be dependent on the content that's out there.

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(10:17):

And in the world of performance, you can have content be made at very low or no cost because it's a performance channel, right? And reminding people of being part of the bigger pipeline and reminding people that it's not just come in, flip the switch, it's come in and make it work, find the right people to make it work. I will say new folks in the industry don't always get it, so you got to start to do some education.

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Tyler Calder (10:47):

Yeah. I think all of that's fair. I think PartnerStack's kind of in an interesting spot. Our platform helps manage affiliate programs, influencer programs, creative programs. We're very much supporting AI visibility through third party content now. That's half of our business. The other half is PartnerStack as a PRM, supporting co-sell, resell type of programs, a little bit more of traditional kind of partners. But the interesting thing in everything that you just said is I find a lot of folks, inclusive of kind of traditional partner leaders, still view affiliate a little bit through a negative lens. I think part of that is it's their experience with affiliate and the negative connotations of it 20 years ago, 15 years ago. And I think to your point, it's where education comes in. The other thing that I hear often is it's just transactional, which I think speaks to a little bit to what you're suggesting is like, it's plug-and-play.

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(11:46):

I just want to turn it on. There's no real relationships involved. It couldn't be further from the truth.

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Charlie Calabrese (11:53):

Couldn't be further from the truth, unfortunately. That's a fairly narrow vision of the channel. We keep talking about the funnel, right? From discovery to sort of interests to those transactional ... Look, transaction is a big part of performance and affiliate. You get to see this amazing data. You get to tie things back. How cool is that? To see it as that's it is really lacking in vision. Just thinking about the content that gets created and in the world of performance, it's evergreen content. It's not like it was up for a day. A lot of the content that we create is evergreen. So people are going to be able to look up your brand forever, which adds this value to brand discovery. And for a long time, that was the search engines, the Googles of the world. But if people don't have an appreciation for the value that this content is going to bring to agentic discovery, LLMs, answer engines, I think they're missing the boat.

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Tyler Calder (12:53):

Yeah. I find myself having a lot of conversations with folks on our side, prospects, customers around the holistic value of affiliate, publishers, affiliates, creators.

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Charlie Calabrese (13:03):

Publishers, affiliates, content creators, influencers. There's a lot of different types of partners.

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Tyler Calder (13:10):

Totally. Yeah. Right? And I'm going to shift into what you're seeing in the B2B space, but I find this conversation is particularly important for B2B because they're longer sales cycles, there's a little bit more complexity. To your point, you can start to bring in partners to support different parts of the funnel. And I find ourselves having a lot of conversations around, yes, the transaction is important. It is a performance-based channel. We got to align to pipeline revenue. However, we're missing such an opportunity if we're not working with these partners to help us move up market, move down market, break into new geos, help with breaking into a new category. There are highly strategic priorities companies have that these types of partners can help with. And if you only ever treat it as, "Eh, you know what? I'm only going to pay you every time you flip me a lead," you're kind of missing out on the bigger opportunity.

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Charlie Calabrese (14:04):

I think you're dead on. Totally agree with what you're saying there. It's more than just a transaction if it's a good program. If it's a robust program, it's bigger than just transaction tracking, for sure.

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Tyler Calder (14:16):

Cool. Let's talk about B2B because I know I've heard you mention in other pieces of content, podcasts, the need for affiliate marketing to move beyond just kind of traditional retail and move into areas like B2B. Why is that the case?

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Charlie Calabrese (14:34):

I think it's two things. It's opportunity and it's necessity, right? There's a lot of B2B and SaaS brands out there that have just untapped potential in affiliate. And traditional models for getting out there, the cold calling, it's just not working for them, right? You need deeper funnel tracking because you have longer sales cycles, as you mentioned, and you need a different partner mix if you really want to grow these opportunities. And you need to be in LinkedIn groups, you need to be on SaaS review sites, you need influencers who drive demos. It's not just clicks. And in the world of affiliate, in the world of performance, we can dig deep. We can see more than just clicks. A lot of it comes down to in B2B lead generation. I think PartnerStack does a great job of sort of helping people understand their leads and qualifying those leads.

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(15:32):

And I think the qualification of those leads is super important. Are they marketing qualified? Are they sales qualified? In B2B, it's all about action beyond those first click steps. And the world of performance and affiliate really allows for that. You can see the journey that the buyer is going on as the advertiser. So you can change your random pages, you can change your homepage, you can create unique landers for the partners that it makes sense for. And at AIM, we saw an opening to build a framework around that and it's paid off. Our programs in the finance and SaaS space have really shown the power, as it were, of what a B2B affiliate engine can be. And when we designed for the realities of that sales cycle, we saw real potential. I would argue any B2B player who needs to start to grow that funnel or that pipeline, if they're not looking at affiliate, they're missing out.

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Tyler Calder (16:34):

What historically has been the reason they haven't looked at it? Is it just lack of knowledge? Is it misconceptions? What would you say to the people that haven't leaned in?

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Charlie Calabrese (16:44):

I think a big part of it's lack of knowledge. They don't put affiliate in that B2B space because B2B is very focused on that lead creation in my mind. A transaction and a lead are sometimes not the same thing in people's minds. I do think also, I don't love talking about the history of affiliate. If you go back far enough, leads weren't great. The world of lead wasn't the nicest place. There was some scamming going on out there, but those days, I'd like to say are past by a long shot. So people's negative thoughts about affiliate as it relates to lead, I'd love to get their minds thinking differently. And that's sort of my focus when we talk about our B2B aspects.

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Tyler Calder (17:27):

I love to talk about one of the things that I hear quite often working with our customers, their B2B brands, and a lot of them have agency programs that's a key partner type for them, but a lot of them struggle to really activate the agencies, get them truly engaged, turn it into a predictable program. Sure. You've been on sort of both sides of it, but now through the lens of being an agency, what do you look for out of network, SaaS companies, technology providers that you partner with as an agency? What are you looking for that drives you to really lean in?

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Charlie Calabrese (18:09):

For it to work between an agency and any vendor, you ultimately are looking for a partner mindset. You help us and we're going to help you in every ... It's going to be a wonderful relationship. And I think this is true throughout my career. It means open communication. It means flexibility, whether we're talking about the technology, program structures. In the case of a network or a tracking tool, I'm looking for reliability and to a certain extent, shared accountability, right? Things break. We all have to just be adults and say, "Let's get through this. " And just being able to talk with a vendor and a partner in a way where we're all understanding of the business we're in, that to me is a big deal. We've had great experiences with PartnerStack because it's been easier to onboard. It's been able to scale. We've been able to manage our payments to our clients very efficiently.

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(19:13):

All the things that matter in my world, the best vendors treat us like an extension of their team, not just users of their tech or worse, just another line on their expense sheet or their finance sheet, like a billable line item. Look at us like somebody who's part of your team and wants to sing your praises, but you have to give us that opportunity. So talk to us, help us make your products better. And for what it's worth, I've seen all of those wonderful things at PartnerStack. So I'm very thankful for them as a partner and to you for giving me this opportunity to sing your praises.

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Tyler Calder (19:52):

Hey, anytime.

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Charlie Calabrese (19:54):

Yeah, man. Yeah. It's never a bad thing.

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Tyler Calder (19:57):

There's a couple things in there I'd love to get maybe a bit more tactical on. The first is you mentioned right at the outset, transparency and communication is important. In practice, what does that look like to you? How do you operationalize transparency?

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Charlie Calabrese (20:13):

Tell me when things are working, but tell me when things are broken. Tell me when something new is coming. Meet with me on a regular cadence. And it doesn't need to be every week, but meet with me or my team to tell me, "Hey, new stuff's coming." Or, "We're deprecating something." That happens. Are you going after new product types or new verticals? What's your roadmap as a business for the next 12 months? Because maybe we can help play in that world. And at the same time, when I want to learn from you, I want you to learn from us. It's, "Hey, this thing isn't working." Or, "Have you considered building a product that looks like this? " And when we do see things break, and they do, being able to submit a support ticket that gets responded to, or talking to an individual who understands what's broken and can fix it quickly.

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(21:10):

It's that open line of communication that goes both ways. And for me, the best vendors are the ones who are eager to listen.

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Tyler Calder (21:21):

Let's just assume you're meeting with your partner once a month, that's your cadence. You're meeting for an hour. What does an ideal agenda look like if you were to structure it?

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Charlie Calabrese (21:33):

Yeah. The first 30 minutes of any meeting like that is, "This is what we talked about last time. Where are we? And these are the things that we need to talk about in the next 30." Giving updates, right? Like, "Oh, this client has really helped. We've got all their terms and conditions set up. We're doing the recruiting. We've got everything rocking and rolling, but it also may be you telling us this new thing's coming out. " Or, "That thing we talked about last session is resolved." So it's sort of the catch up and then it's new business as it were. So I think that 60 minute meeting is really valuable, but at the end of the day, sometimes those 60 minute meetings are, the world is on fire. There are definitely 60 minute meetings that I've been in where it's, the sky is falling, we need to fix this and this on our side and we need you to help us by doing that and that.

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(22:24):

So sometimes those 60-minute meetings are not particularly well agendaed.

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Tyler Calder (22:29):

Yeah. No, that's totally fair. One of the things, again, that I find ourselves talking to a lot of our customers about is as you're working with partners, agencies certainly inclusive in that. The importance of really understanding what a joint plan looks like. Why are we even working together? What does this look like? Let's document it. Let's get it down on paper. For you, what does a good version of a joint plan look like to kind of kick off that relationship and keep coming back to it?

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Charlie Calabrese (22:58):

Yeah, man. 20 years in, that may be the only thing that hasn't changed. It's all about aligning upfront, otherwise you're just going off in a million directions. I'd say the best plans start with really clearly defined roles because we as an agency have our role, PartnerStack has its role. If we're using another tooling, those vendors have theirs roles. But the most important thing is how we define success. We define success as this, your role in that is that, and you may tell us how you define success, and that's wonderful. And then when we're setting up the standard program, it's who's setting up the terms and conditions, who owns recruiting, where can we do this? But once we sort of have that alignment, we just develop the timelines and say this by that date, that by that date, here's the content associated to it. Here's the incentives or plans that match our brand's personas.

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(24:02):

We set up those clear timelines, guidelines. We might pair platform enablement like webinars, like how does the platform work? Let's plan those webinars. Let's do the warm outreaches. How do we set up those dedicated landing pages? But working with and having those really clear upfront alignments is what matters. And it sounds super cliche, but as long as we're all rowing in the same direction, we're going to be fine. We're all sort of at a point from day one where we see where we want to get to. And yeah, we might get out of rhythm at some point, but that's okay because we still have that alignment of here's where we're trying to get to. And I think that's the most important part of this is if you can early days upfront say, "Here's everybody's responsibilities. Here's what we're trying to get to. " That alignment is all that matters.

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(25:00):

Everything else is sort of, things change. Unfortunately, we just got to get there at some point, right?

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Tyler Calder (25:06):

Yeah. Cool. Talking about change, AI, I don't think we can leave the conversation without getting into that a little bit. We've talked about not necessarily the usage of AI, but we've talked about how buying behavior is changing a little bit. The first step in discovery used to very much be the search engine. It's kind of shifting seemingly to the LLMs to a certain degree. You've talked about the importance of aligning partners to the buyer journey or the funnel. So I suppose question one is, are you seeing what I just suggested, which is buying behavior shifting, kind of the first step of discovery shifting?

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Charlie Calabrese (25:49):

I actually just did a panel on this at Affiliate Summit where I had a B2C and a B2B marketer talking about when did they see a shift start to happen? And both of them were very upfront that there was just this sudden shift to direct leads, right? So direct buying. Every paid channel that they were playing with, they were spending money and suddenly they're seeing people go direct to their website without that referring UTC or telling them, "Oh, it came from search, it came from social, it came from..." How does that happen? And across the board, the belief in all of their teams at these brands, that's coming from AI, the LLMs. People are discovering the brand and then they're going direct to that brand. Again, historically in the LLMs, you wouldn't necessarily see a link to that brand. You'd type it in. You just, "Oh, perfect.

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(26:48):

That's the one? Great. Going to go there." So yeah, the biggest indicator from their perspective was significant increases in direct

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Tyler Calder (26:56):

Traffic. Within all of that, you go on LinkedIn and there's so many different opinions, a lot of, I think hyperbole to a certain degree around it. One of the things you'll see people debating is whether or not this is similar to SEO 15 years ago. It's not at all the same. It's totally different.

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Charlie Calabrese (27:18):

There's similarities. I think there's a similarity if you look at when mobile became a thing. It's not exactly the same though, because the methods of presenting you with knowledge are just all different now. It's not inherently about the words matching the words you were looking for. It's intent behind the content. The large language models are reading those texts and saying, "This is valuable. This has meaning as opposed to the right number of words match." I also think it's evolving at a pace that I've never seen. Also, it's a really narrow knowledge base, but it changes so fast that what you were doing six months ago means nothing anymore. It's a tough comparison, but I understand why people think that way. There's a lot around language, there's a lot around discovery, so I get it, but just really the speed of change is just so significant.

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Tyler Calder (28:20):

Yeah, I would agree with the speed is wild right now. Looking forward, all things AI, maybe specific to affiliate publishers, where is this all going?

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Charlie Calabrese (28:30):

The most important thing that we all have to realize is that AI is changing this industry. It's changing the game, period. Whether you talk about affiliate or anything in the world of marketing, AI is changing it. We talked a little bit about discovery, visibility. We're seeing more and more influence happening without a click. You'll hear that term, zero click. Consumers are reading AI generated summaries. They're asking tools like ChatGPT or Gemini for recommendations, and then taking action in a new tab or search or in the future, probably not even having to leave that tab. The challenge is how do we define value for our advertisers, for our brands? And in the affiliate space, it's always, always, always been tied to that click, the click to the conversion. That's how we show our value in performance, and that's changing. At AIM, we're really working closely with our clients to build frameworks to show accountability, not just last click results.

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(29:35):

It's not perfect yet, I will say that, but the brands that figure out how to reward those early touchpoints, think the higher in the funnel, the discovery stuff, the partners who are contributing to that discovery, those brands are going to win long term. And I think that's true across all of marketing. Internally also, I have to admit, we're leaning into AI to make ourselves more effective, whether that's for partner discovery, writing briefs, doing campaign testing. AI is helping us in a whole lot of ways. It's helping our teams move faster without sacrificing quality. And I think that's the real bonus. The goal isn't to replace people. It's to free them up so that they can go do deep strategic work. So I think everyone that's looking at AI needs to be smart and say, make people's time more valuable. So it’s two things, right? Helping partners create more AI friendly content.

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(30:43):

So are they getting discovered? And helping our clients evaluate the impact that AI has on the whole of their funnel. It's going to take better data, better collaboration, and a lot of testing, but I really think the industry is heading for this new growth time and I'm super excited to be a part of it.

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Tyler Calder (31:05):

I love that. Also very excited. I agree. I think everybody should be. This is great. I appreciate the time. How can folks get in touch with you, get in touch with AIM if they want to follow up on anything?

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Charlie Calabrese (31:15):

Come on down to the website, allinclusivemarketing.com. I'm Charlie at allinclusivemarketing.com. Get in touch with me anytime direct. And again, Tyler, can't thank you enough and the folks at PartnerStack for making the time, educate people on what a good agency can do for you. So yeah, thanks, man. This has been wonderful.

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Tyler Calder (31:34):

Sweet. Love it. Appreciate it. And I'm sure you'll get some people emailing you. Chat next time.

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Charlie Calabrese (31:40):

Looking forward to it, man.

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Tyler Calder (31:41):

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/getitogether.