From Customer to Creator: Your New Growth Engine with Jordan Carter, Senior Manager of Affiliate Marketing at SharkNinja

Speaker A: And so if we make assumptions based off of research, market data, customer feedback, like, we still may get it wrong. And so the ability to tap into affiliates that look at us as partners and say, hey, is this something you think would work in real life? What would you change about this? Would you use this and give them the ability to just share that real feedback, like all you're doing is just amplifying their desire to want to continue to work with you?

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Partnership Economy podcast. I'm your host, Todd Crawford, and I'd like to start this episode with a

Speaker C: question that's been on my what if

Speaker B: your most powerful partners already exist in your customer base and you don't even know it? Well, today's guest is an expert in unlocking those hidden opportunities. I'm bringing on Jordan Carter, senior manager of affiliate marketing, who's been instrumental in scaling the creator and affiliate programs at SharkNinja. Jordan is a leader in partnership growth, specializing in scaling revenue by blending data and creativity. He's built thriving programs across retail and emerging channels like TikTok Shop, making him the perfect person to unpack what's working right now. In this conversation, we get candid about modern marketing. We'll dive into why micro creators can often outperform the biggest names online TikTok shop's explosion and why paying attention to organic posts can open up the most valuable doors for your brand. If you're wondering how to navigate the blurring lines between content, community and commerce,

Speaker C: you won't want to miss this.

Speaker B: I hope you enjoy.

Speaker D: All.

Speaker C: Uh, right, Jordan, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on. How are you doing?

Speaker D: I'm doing well, sir. How are you doing?

Speaker C: Very well, very well. We're in our new offices here in Santa Barbara, but speaking of excited, I am excited to talk to you today. I think first thing probably help everybody is just to get level set on who Shark Ninja is and maybe some of the other business units, just so people understand kind of your world.

Speaker D: Sounds good. Yeah, I know.

Speaker A: So again, appreciate you having me.

Speaker D: I think Shark Ninja itself is not

Speaker A: well known as, uh, one individual company.

Speaker D: I think for avid fans or users

Speaker A: of the product, we are Ninja Kitchen,

Speaker D: formerly and then Shark Clean. So think of your, your vacuums, your

Speaker A: air purifiers, all the way down to

Speaker D: some of your beauty products. And then on the Ninja side, obviously most well known for some of those viral products like the creamy and the slushy.

Speaker A: So those are the main, I guess, pillars within the Shark Ninja ecosystem. Um, I oversee the programs at Canada,

Speaker D: uh, U.S. and Mexico, which is very, very new.

Speaker A: And then uh, most recently again trying

Speaker D: to pioneer some crossover where affiliate and social can play a little closer together.

Speaker C: So how long has affiliate been part of the mix?

Speaker D: The affiliate program in the US has

Speaker A: been um, active only since like 2018.

Speaker D: So it's still relatively new. Consider it just, we'll round up to eight, eight whole years here.

Speaker A: But I took it over in 2022,

Speaker D: the first four ish years uh, of existence. It was very lower funnel, very cookie cutter what you would expect. It was kind of touched and hodgepodge

Speaker A: by PR folks and anyone who had free time essentially. So the US program seen a lot

Speaker D: of growth in eight years, let alone the four that I've uh, had the

Speaker A: pleasure to work on it.

Speaker D: And then Canada itself has been live for, I think it just had its two year mark and in Mexico we're crawling our way to two months.

Speaker A: So it has been here for a while. I think the growth uh, that we

Speaker D: speak to about having programs in Mexico and then now fully covering North America just speaks to the impact affiliate has

Speaker A: to uh, our business and the viability

Speaker D: of the channel um, as a whole, I guess.

Speaker C: Speaking of just North America, when did creators start to come into the mix

Speaker D: and how say they've been around and part of our plan for probably like 10 years at least.

Speaker A: But we recently, and I uh, say recently probably as in 2020, late 2022,

Speaker D: harnessed the power of trying to be more social first.

Speaker A: Um, and so now we almost don't

Speaker D: launch products without there being a very aggressive creator strategy as part of that play. And the first place we're going to go is through, you know, know, less

Speaker A: of a traditional social approach and we

Speaker D: go to those third party, you know,

Speaker A: social Personas that we can have tell

Speaker D: that story on our behalf.

Speaker A: And so um, I've seen the evolution of that from Flex Style, which is

Speaker D: a product that we developed and launched

Speaker A: in 2022 that you know, rivaled that

Speaker D: of Dyson and he launched Shark Beauty and ultimately became uh, I guess the, the beginning of um, our way of saying hey, we're going to go into

Speaker A: social as a viable channel tactic, um, and try and layer that into every

Speaker D: other piece of media that we touch. Whether that's boosting, whether that's layering on an affiliate commissioner a kicker on the back end. So for four strong years we've been really dominant on putting social first.

Speaker A: And then you talk about TikTok shop of it.

Speaker D: All right. I think that's kind of just unleashed Beasts. As far as people really understanding that you don't have to be this um, uber creator with a mass following. You can be someone that's just got an opinion and can tell a story. And so I think at the crux of what Shark Ninja does with the products that develop, we're all about telling

Speaker A: stories and trying to better people's lives.

Speaker D: And I think we've built a community

Speaker A: and we're trying to develop and grow

Speaker D: that community to continue to do that on our behalf. So it's been a very unique ah, progression of how creators have evolved both from dedicated influencers all the way now to like the software, social commercial lens.

Speaker C: Yeah, so it sounds like um, most of what you are doing in creators, uh, in the beginning kind uh of going creator first was paper post clearly right, traditional. Yeah, you know that's separate obviously from affiliate. How was that being measured? Was it just kind of more brand exposure and that was good enough.

Speaker A: It took its pretty atypical spot in being awareness, uh driven upper Funnel solely um, SharkNinja is unique in the fact that prior to probably the last six or eight months like the M bulk of what we've done on pay to post has been used to get the rights to that content essentially and then be able to boost it and whitelist it on our own platform. So that's where we've found the bulk of our strategy is, you know, lean heavily into creators that have big avid followings and then double down with our own media budget. And I think again like the TikTok shop of it all is said, uh, like hey, you don't have to be a big creator with a lot of following to be able to tell the right story. And so we don't necessarily go for macros like there's a lot of uh, there's a lot of value in a micro that's just loves your brand but can sell. And I think one thing that's had to change internally here is like our influencer team, you know how to have these specific KPIs like reach and impressions and weighted engagement rate and all the, all the metrics that they look at. And so even as we start to play together a little bit, they've started to say okay, maybe the impression goal that I'm going for or the CPM doesn't have to be the specific mark if they can sell. We've met more in the middle to understand that there is common ground, um, especially if we're able to like educate up on what commission can do at the retailer level. At the dot com level, um, and the unlocks that it does by more revenue you drive, the better you chance you have of being more than a one hit wonder pay for post creator.

Speaker C: So TikToks been a big, big success. Um, like you said, the smaller ones are able to not only um, reach an audience I think I've always felt, and I think other people see this too, is that under a certain number, whatever that number is, there's more authenticity, more engagement and not as much just brand building um, than uh, if you're just uh, some huge giant um, influencer that it just seems like you're getting paid.

Speaker A: TikTok has opened the doors of hey, even if we say shark partner, what's the difference of doing that or tagging a product in a video, like at the end of the day it's the same thing, right? Like it's just a matter of like how you perceive your value to your following. And if you've got a big following you may want that may impact you a little differently than someone that clearly is there to promote a product and they're not hiding it. But uh, they don't need to be mutually exclusive anymore.

Speaker C: We talk about blurred lines. How do you see overlap or potential, uh, I guess coming together, confluence of affiliate and creators within the company.

Speaker A: What we're starting to see is that our CEO, our cco, like a lot of these heavy hitters in our ELT team are very eager to understand what's working from a, a content style perspective. You know, clearly it converts but like is there learnings we can take as we go? Cast other creators that say hey, you may be very specifically focused on, you know, this style of content because that's what your audience is used to, but if you're tagging links and stories then maybe you could try and approach it this way. This creator saw you know, a million GMV in the last three months by creating sense of urgency, reverse shopping behavior like hey, I'm not going to buy this because it doesn't do this. We're kind of coaxing them into thinking we're going to return it after we've then explain all the benefits of it. That does work for TikTok shop. Could that translate to something like Instagram or um, YouTube? And I think the answer is yes, but we got to test it. So ELT is very involved in continuing to unblur those lines and I think um, we're trying to create growth engines that exist where that TikTok creator can, we can pull the usage rights and Boost them on social in a normal capacity and perhaps like just their name and their recognition in TikTok does enough for us to drive actual, uh, sizable, measurable growth, more than just an ekg, um, you know, in the POS data. So I see it as the person that has to manage the relationships with traditional affiliates, uh, or creators that aren't being spent, maybe aren't being paid $10,000 post to be like, hey, you're in some ways more valuable, right, because you're driving measurable impact to the bottom line. So that plus the ongoing conversation of what, you know, is EMV something you hang your hat on, or is it purely just a metric that people want to infer to help provide like a little bit more roas on some of the stuff that they're working on? Like we're trying to get away from EMV and purely focus on true GMV plus reach. Um, and then again, how can we layer those on into more of like a, uh, focused campaign, um, and leadership has bought in on that.

Speaker C: I mean, what are the mechanisms that you're trying to leverage or are you

Speaker B: to track some of these pay per post partnerships?

Speaker C: Are they unique promo codes? Are there actual links?

Speaker A: If you remove the TikTok shop element of it and you want to leverage creators on TikTok to drive back to dot com or retail or whatever the case may be, we are utilizing primarily promo codes. You know, there's auto attribution behind it that can help. Obviously. I think it, you know, bear in mind it getting leaked and then someone else reaping the credit for that for you. But, uh, codes are definitely a big one. Links for sure. I think people still do link in bio and that link tree is still very much so an active thing. Our, uh, VP of analytics is a former Googler himself and so he's very much so focused on building out something with a tech partner called Houzz. We're working on getting them off the ground as we speak to definitely measure things like spillover, you know, retailer Halo, et cetera. And then, I mean, honestly I'm leaning more into some of our partners, um, Impact being one of them. But also some of these sub networks like Shop, My and ltk, because in some recent testing we've realized the more we force creators to try and go into retailer specific programs, the less confident they are in their ability to convert and report back. So if we say, hey, let's just go engage the platforms that they're already using, Shop My, ltk, whatever, uh, let's have them, you know, be an advocate on our behalf to say, hey, we'd like to just get insights into this campaign that we're funding. They're leveraging through you. It's a, it's a win, win scenario. We just want the visibility and the insights into that that we can then track back to our side and our POS data. So um, it's kind of threefold, honestly, but it's been really easy. As much as not a lot of things are easy nowadays to get buy in from our vendors because I think they understand their value as well.

Speaker C: Are uh, the Shop Mys and everything else. Is that going through your channel? So you're getting the metrics out of the affiliate and helping the other teams understand it or how does all this data even come together? Because it seems like it's just thrown on the table and it's like, how do I organize it?

Speaker A: It's a little twofold. So if it's organic or supporting.com, i'll get it from an organic perspective. Uh, but through brand partnerships or I guess our paid platform usage on something like Shopmy, we are able to see that in those insights and get them to share through that data. So it's more so just teeing it up like, hey, we've got this campaign coming up to support Walmart or whatever. It's going to run from this time to this time. We're having everyone run through Shop My, we would love to get that data back. And then we have a full blown social analytics team that's taking all this in and running it through Snowflake and Power BI to say, hey, your campaign@.com did this with this creator. You know, it didn't index correctly to where it would have seen it for Walmart. Like why? And then we really engage the creator and the partner to figure out was there a tracking issue? Was the price different at a different retailer that led someone to purchase somewhere else? But it's, it's definitely a challenge because it's being pulled, ported in from a bunch of different places. There's not one clear place that we can, you know, aggregate, um, all this data and then optimize around.

Speaker C: So are there specific partners like groups or that you track and manage yourself? That kind of, I guess you would consider creators or the other teams. Everybody says these are creators too, or is it just, oh, it's still just affiliate.

Speaker A: Yeah. So we lean in with the YouTube shopping program for sure. Uh, we use them all a little bit differently. If I've had a chance to interact with Them again I think some of the obvious ones make sense. LTK shop, my YouTube shopping is a big one. I mean I don't know if we planned on talking about it but obviously we've got the meta um shopping that's just released this beta that's going to be I think in my opinion massive. Uh, especially because it just rival TikTok shop. But um, we lean in very heavily on a lot of those but for different reasons. Right? I mean between the AI within uh, Google and the SERP results changing, I think we're leaning heavily into YouTube to help inform form um, you know consideration phase search tactics be more mid upper funnel but still you know get exactly what the, the user's looking for when they hit search. And so YouTube definitely helps fuel that whereas you know an LTK in the Shamai and Mavely may not but they are definitely more full funnel creator ecosystems where people can look at them as we need reach, we need impressions, we need awareness, but we also need to drive conversion. And so it's just about framing it up internally. I'd say this the, the last six, eight months affiliate has been a buzzword internally and I think it's been thrown around and used incorrectly at times.

Speaker C: How so?

Speaker A: I'm educating my influencer team who's booking pay for post on why they need to start reducing rates because of commission upside that creators should be bought in on better content, better performance, better second and third repeat uh campaigns and like that's been a bit of an adjustment. So I think it's been like affiliate has been used as a buzzword. That means if this then this when in reality it's not guaranteed and they're just lumping it into everything. So creators as an ecosystem internally still need to be defined a bit better. Um, but we use a lot of them in different ways.

Speaker C: So from a budget standpoint, right, you've got paper posts, you've got rev share through affiliate, you've got some hybrid probably on both sides. How is this being managed? If I'm a creator and I'm doing something, I don't know on a social platform, but I'm also posting on YouTube or I have a blog, I mean and you know me by name, I mean how does this all get sorted out?

Speaker A: I absolutely do because commission rates change by platform quite frequently and there's a lack of education to the creator or to our uh, influencer partners on where they should be driving their traffic to, you know, based on their ability to earn more. Shark Ninja is unique in the fact that our budgets aren't just, I mean affiliates. Traditional affiliate is like by line of business and even then like that's hard to force to happen. It's not how we operate obviously. But um, when it comes to how we want to support products and campaigns internally, we don't just have shark budget and we don't just have ninja budget. It boils down to NINJA category sku.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: And so however we get from A to Z to get that creator casted wherever they drive to, we may or may not have control on where the commission comes from. With impact. Obviously I do with TikTok shop, I do with Walmart, I don't. With Amazon, I don't. If they don't take the time to do the due diligence on their end to ensure they're going to get commission on their traffic like they come back to us, they have more questions around why did I agree to this if I'm not getting paid out correctly? So it is, it is a little bit um, all over the place on where to centralize the funding, um, to be more brand focused versus product focus and then honestly boiled down to be more retailer specific. There's more value in certain retailers and certain products because of the demand or the category control that exists. There's example being air purifiers. Bulk of air purifiers get sold. I think 70% gets sold on Amazon. So it's tough for us to say let's only put 30% of our budget towards Amazon because we want to try and steal share a voice at Best Buy or Costco. Like those programs are very different. Like you should play where the demand is and therefore the funding would come from that retailer versus that brand team's budget. Uh, our traditional influencer team pay social. They have their own budget. They have a campaign or a category or retailer to support it's pay for posts. That's it. A little bit of boosting budget done. We've now built out and hired two new folks, they started a couple weeks ago that are in the our first and our social commerce role. There's a bridge between retail affiliate and paid social but that's operating substantially more in a hybrid capacity. We're leveraging gifting more to help offset rates. We're looking at higher CPMs at the expense of revenue. Um, and it's been scary for that team to change their way of thinking about how they go cast somebody but take a couple swings. And some of these folks have absolutely worked out better than expected. And some of the ones we thought were great in a traditional paid influencer capacity have kind of flopped on their ability to actually drive purchase intent. So it's given us a lot of really good insights on ultimately how we build our internal ecosystem of creators that we can rely on to drive revenue. Depending on that, that campaign and that retailer.

Speaker C: When that team builds out a campaign, let's say it's a new product launch, um, is there any coordination or effort on the affiliate side to kind of be part of that campaign as well?

Speaker A: Our paid influencer team will get budget to go work with a select number of creators because they have an impression and a reach goal. Uh, our social commercial team will give budget to kind of meet in the middle. Uh, and so there's an affiliates emphasis there where we're again helping them vet based off of uh, their ability to sell. And so we'll look at things like shop mine, ltk, we'll do like partner, we'll do creator research to understand their last 30 days GMV to validate whether or not we think this will work. Plus obviously looking at the content to make sure it's a good fit and then affiliate helps kind of fuel that from the bottom up. So we'll do some product seating um, to creators through YouTube, shopping through an LTK gifting. And that also gives us an opportunity to understand these creators work within these platforms that we ultimately want to track through. And if they're raising their hand to take a product for free just for the opportunity to post and get you know, new product access like that tells me they're probably someone we should funnel more a funnel to the social commercial team to you know, consider for the next campaign. And then similarly like if the paid social team uh, works with a macro or a mid level creator and they actually do drive sales which I'll be honest, most of the time they don't. But again to be fair, their content isn't made to drive sales. It's been, it's made to educate on product brand. If someone converts goal there, we'll drive them a little bit further down funnel as well and we'll try and work our way towards that social commercial model where everyone wins realistically.

Speaker C: So do you have any examples of things that worked out really well and some of the moving pieces or specific partners that uh, give us a better understanding of some of this at a more granular level.

Speaker A: The benefit of the affiliate partnership with social is that when creators see the power of performance content and it converts and they see commission, they're inclined. The unlock is they can do it whenever they want. They have access to our product feed. They can post whenever they want. We see it frequent, we see, we see it frequently with partners like, I mean, yeah, Bethany Frankel, good or bad example, she loves shark beauty. She posts frequently. When she does, we see those spikes. There's other folks like Alex Earl who just posted today about one of our products because she's going to Coachella. She doesn't link like we would want her to, but we see search intent and we see Halo to typically an Amazon or a D2C. But for the most part, like when we work with partners that are opted in, we absolutely love continuing to engage them. Like Bill Gates's daughter, Phoebe Gates, an active affiliate partner of ours because she has her own platform and she believes in the power of providing a good story, a good product at a good price and she'll take the commission all day. And I want to be able to continue to say come back for more. I can almost guarantee at least a better return than we would have if we just let her organically post in.

Speaker C: Right? Yeah. And I guess that organic posts get on your radar and even if they aren't a partner, then that gives you the opportunity to reach out to them and maybe fine tune things as you kind of described.

Speaker A: It just opens the door. Right. If they tag us and they haven't and we haven't paid for it or it's just an organic partnership like actually Alex Earl was an organic partnership that came to fruition from uh, uh, our cryoglow face mask that launched the March of last year. I think she got it herself, posted about it and then she's now uh, a brand ambassador.

Speaker D: I'll call her.

Speaker A: You know, we're on an annual deal but it doesn't take much to get our attention especially if like you talk about the product in the right way and you have like a good resonating following. And uh, our open cell partnership, I

Speaker C: mean like you said, that's the one thing I really love about performance creators or whatever they're going to be called is that they can find a product they like and post about it through the affiliate program and have a ready made commission set with it. And that creates a kind of a momentum like an always on versus campaigns which are more a spike, a spike. And I imagine that even the management sees that as a really powerful thing that you kind of got this constant current and then you can create these waves through the social team with the campaigns.

Speaker A: I'll say this, there's as you've gotten to the point where like we are trying to go maybe even a level deeper. Um, and I think unlock an advocacy style program, right? Like consumers also want to talk about our product and they just may not be on our radar from a um, social, commercial or paid social influencer perspective. But they're valuable more often than not. Like to unlock those folks, you just need to show them you're paying attention, create a little bit of an entice and intrigue outside of a small commission to get them to continue to speak on your behalf. So we're double clicking even a layer down to, to find more untraditional affiliates that are just super fans of our products and want to be able to talk about it.

Speaker C: That's really been our focus is those three buckets, right? You've got affiliate, you've got creators and you've got advocates or customers, right? And to me those are the three buckets where you can get third party trusted validation or influence of your, of your products. That is what the consumer values most, right? I see something I like or I see something somebody I know has and I think it's interesting and they tell me about it and I'm more likely to buy it than seeing an ad, right? So you know, how does the company, I mean obviously the company gets it because you're getting the user generated content and putting it in your own social media. Um, and that, that right there to me is 100% validation but it seems like doubling down or going deeper into more of an advocate program. Um, does the company see that as kind of aligning the way I just kind of described it or has it not really been discussed yet? You're going to wow them with that or what's going on?

Speaker A: I mean, peek behind the curtains. I'm trying to wow them with it. So the downside of affiliate in this capacity is that there's lack of control of content. And so a big conversation with ELT has been brand accretive. Um, affiliates that are talking positively, they know how the product works, they know

Speaker D: how to say it correctly.

Speaker A: And we're not just simply hammering promo messaging or discount deal and devaluing the brand. And so the advocacy portion of things I think is where we unlock more of the brand accretive partners that want to talk about our brand the right way and want to tell their story. And I think at the end of the day for me I want to give them the power to do so. Um, and if all it takes is a like on their comment or the opportunity to like speak to a product team member give their feedback on a new product. Like, I'll absolutely do that. Because then they're not going to say, they're going to be educated and they're going to want to continue to unlock those opportunities. So they're going to say everything correctly about our product. That's why I'm trying to tee it up to leadership as something we absolutely should invest in. Um, because, you know, it builds our community, it builds our credibility, it also builds our, you know, bottom line.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I think one of the challenges a lot of business or one of the opportunities that a lot of companies aren't aware of is their customer base. Like a lot of their customer base are, some of them are affiliates, some of them are creators. And figuring that out is not easy. And I think when, um, when you can engage a real customer who is also a creator or an affiliate, it's such so much more powerful because you can have a conversation with them and things start happening quicker. And I know when we launched or were building out our advocate program, our product, one of the things we thought would be interesting and it's resonating is that we can take a customer list and then spit back to you. These are customers of yours that are creators and acting active creators, whether it's just makeup or something else. And these are ones that are acting as affiliates, which again, it's kind of like picking out all the needles in a haystack. Right. Uh, you don't need to go through the haystack anymore. Here's the pile of needles, which I think that's something that is an easy way to get started with your customers. Right. Because they're already doing this. Right. This low hanging fruit.

Speaker A: Our goal is to develop products that solve a problem.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: And so if we make assumptions based off of research, market data, you know, customer feedback, like, we still may get it wrong. And so an advocacy program or the ability to tap into affiliates that look at us as partners, which we are, and say, hey, is this something you think would work in real life? What would you change about this? Would you use this and give them the ability to just share that real feedback? Like all you're doing is just, you know, amplifying their desire to want to continue to work with you.

Speaker C: Historically, a lot of these advocate teams are managed by the CRM team and all they do is hammer them with emails. And it's, you know, not to say this is a, I'm not putting this in a bad thing, but I think affiliate managers are really good at herding cats. Right. There's a lot of moving parts, a lot of personalities, uh, a lot of things that you have to deal with at an individual level. Even when you're dealing with an affiliate that's a company. And I think an advocate program kind of aligns with the uh, way uh, an affiliate team is used to working with people. And I think we're seeing that more and more. I'm always surprised at how many companies don't have an advocacy program.

Speaker A: Uh, you get out of it what you put into it, right? So like a lot of them, a lot of them want it to be a self fulfilling prophecy on the back of a, of a loyalty program when it's not. It's very different from a loyalty program. It's a community. And I think to your point, like it's the affiliate mindset and Persona within a company is perfectly primed to run that. Uh, I'd say even more so with the social commercial team, I think we're probably going to push it more towards that team running it because they can see the best of both worlds.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: It's shocking the number of companies that just leave it to the wayside because it's not as fruitful as they wanted it to be, but they didn't give it the time of day.

Speaker C: You know, there's probably a lot more Runway, uh, here that we're going to be going down. And you know, so again, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all this and uh, I appreciate your enthusiasm. And uh, the one thing I wanted to mention just real quick is, you know, because you're able to talk to this stuff, it's because you're not just heads down in your own silo. And I think that's a really important uh, point here is like be curious, talk to other teams, you know what I mean? Help them know what you're doing, learn what they're doing. That's how companies evolve in a more coordinated, uh, way as opposed to more chaos and uh, conflict. You don't want to. That's mine. No, I know that guy. I talked to him m yesterday. You don't want that. You want everybody working together, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. One band, one sound. It's been really easy to poke my head into places where it probably doesn't belong. But I think, um, we are, we are, we're a big company, but we move very, very quickly because we're not afraid to, to take risks, take chances, make bets on what we see in the market. I think honestly tying this all back to being social first like a Lot of has to do with how we're developing products, going to market and the teams that we need to kind of be in lockstep to, to you know, be able to bring a product to life. So it's been, it's been a lot of fun to cross those swim lanes for sure. And you know, not to become a subject matter expert to an extent in places that I wouldn't have thought I'd been, you know, two, three, four years ago. So awesome.

Speaker C: Great job and again, thanks for coming on and sharing all this because again, I uh, think everybody's got their own challenges and there's something to take away from everybody's perspective here. So again, thanks again for sharing and uh, we'll talk to you again, maybe catch up and uh, hear how things have evolved and in a bit see you at ipx.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: After my conversation with Jordan, what stood out most to me was how he reframed the entire partner discovery process. Many of us have historically treated creator and affiliate partners or teams as uh, separate entities. But his idea of using the data driven mindset of an affiliate team to validate the potential of a new brand partner is the shift I find most compelling. It's no longer about choosing between brand or performance. It's about using performance to prove brand potential. I'll leave you with a small challenge this week. Listen. Listen to your customers and identify just one who is already organically sharing your brand. Maybe offer them a simple performance based incentive such as a commitment link or a unique code. It's a low risk, high reward method. To answer the question I posed at the start of this episode, you might just discover that uh, your next high impact partner is already in your customer base. A huge thank you to Jordan for being so open and sharing his team's journey with us. Thanks for listening and I look forward to next time.