Establishing trust in the era of AI-powered partnerships

[00:00:10] Todd Crawford

Welcome back to The Partnership Economy Podcast. I’m your host, Todd Crawford. It’s been a great season already. And for my last interview this season, I’m welcoming Brian Klais, CEO and founder of URLgenius. Brian’s been in the digital space for over 20 years and fell into the affiliate marketing space because of the growing demand for mobile from consumers, especially in this mobile first generation. He founded URLgenius, the leading app linking platform that enables seamless app-to-app routing, helping marketers and creators grow. The platform earned best influencer marketing technology at the Global Influencer Marketing Awards, and was recognized as a top 30 influencer technology. In this conversation, we’ll dig into the opportunities AI is unlocking for creators and brands alike, from automation and product insights to tracking. We’ll explore how to keep authenticity intact while embracing the changes in technology. And you’ll even hear how small teams and businesses can use AI to their advantage. I hope you enjoy. Hey Brian, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you on. I’m excited for our conversation today. 

[00:01:16] Brian Klais

Hey, Todd, so excited to be here with you. Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:19] Todd Crawford

I’m excited to dig into some AI today. But before we go down that path, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, URLgenius, and also I’m always curious how people got into the industry. 

[00:01:31] Brian Klais

I have been in the digital space for over 20 years, but most of that time’s actually been outside of the affiliate space. Most of that’s been on the search side of things, SEO, technical search engine optimization, mobile search engine and optimization. And so I think like a lot of folks, I kind of fell into the affiliate side of thing, just, because of the focus that I felt mobile demanded from a consumer experience perspective. And that’s really, really important now when it comes to creators who are mobile first and consumers who are at mobile first. So that’s a little bit about my background, but yeah, I can give you a little bit of an overview too of just URLgenius. We specialize in and pioneered what we call codeless app deep linking. What that means is that if you are a creator, or a brand, or a marketer, you can easily create links that have the ability to streamline that mobile app-to-app link or that experience. And the benefit that you get from that is that you can boost app commerce, app engagement, app attribution, and app commissions. And that’s really important for creators who are app-centric. And we have found that that’s really the key to unlocking the creator economy. Just a little bit of a background on URLgenius. Thousands of commerce creators use URLgenius in 2024. They drove over five billion in social commerce through the platform. We were also honored to win the Hello Partner Best Influencer Marketing Technology Award last year, and I’m honored to say we were invited to the Inc 5,000 fastest growing private companies in the US. That’s a little bit of background. About six months ago, we partnered with your team, Impact, to conduct what we felt was groundbreaking. A study looking at how the affiliate economy and the creator economy are starting to converge. And so we thought this was a great opportunity just to talk a little bit about some of those findings, but also, as you say, every day that goes by we are hearing more and more about AI and how it’s affecting our personal lives as consumers and business go-to-market strategies. We’re very excited about what AI can do from a creator standpoint too. So excited to just dive into, dive into that. 

[00:04:14] Todd Crawford

Me too, I think AI is always exciting. And it reminds me a lot of the promise of mobile commerce back in the mid or beginning of the 2000s, like the WAP. And I mean, it felt like mobile was coming forever. And of course, it’s here now, and here to stay. I think the interesting thing about AI is it came on strong and get out of the way. There’s no, we’re, you know, people are talking about it, and we’re waiting still. It feels like people started talking about it, and it started actually getting used, and working. So it’s definitely hitting the ground running. And back to that case study that we did with you guys, is there anything that surprised you or at least stood out as a metric or fact that people maybe wanna hear about here so they can read about it later? 

[00:05:14] Brian Klais

Well, that’s a great question. There were a couple that I thought were worth noting. In fact, I think you’ve maybe touched on them in some of your other podcasts too. One of them was that two thirds of brands have their affiliate team tasked with managing the creator go-to-market. And that’s really interesting. That was surprising. I didn’t expect that to be as high. And I think that’s exciting and interesting because it sort of underscores the role of essentially the performance-based model that has always driven an affiliate, and the role that that can play in helping creators get started and unlocking the opportunity for them as a commerce creator. So that was really an interesting thing, and I’d certainly love to hear your take on that as well. But the second was how that then lends itself towards new payment models. About half of the brands, and also half of creators who responded to the survey. Both said that their preference would be for a hybrid comp model where it’s a pay-per-post-plus commission. Well, the machinery of affiliate marketing can shine in that case to enable that. So those are both really interesting findings from our perspective. 

[00:06:35] Todd Crawford

Yeah, I thought the two thirds number was very interesting because I’ve been having a lot of conversations about this kind of phenomenon, and it really happened rather quickly. I don’t think it’s taking a lot of the PR and macro partnerships into affiliate. In some cases it is. It’s more like, hey, we’ve got a team managing three to 10 very expensive macro type creators, and now we’re like, well, what do we should do with the rest of the creator economy? It’s out there. We should, we should formulate some kind of strategy there. And obviously when you talk about a lot of moving parts relationship based business partnerships, right? You can’t really do much with affiliates or creators without having some kind of conversation about what, what, what’s expected and negotiating comp models and things like that. So I think it’s a natural fit for the affiliate team. I think there’s some learning curves there and some bumps in the roads, but it’s, it’s it’s. It is happening. It’s it was, and it’s not forced, which is something I really liked. So yeah, it was exciting. 

[00:07:54] Brian Klais

From our standpoint, the role that we’ve been able to play in all of that is because that performance-based model is so attractive, both on the brand side, the retailer side, and the creator side. It’s important to make sure that that operates in a mobile first manner as well. You know, what’s so important to acknowledge is that creators are app-centric, they are in social apps, that’s where they’re spending all their time. That is how they reach their audience. And so there’s this technical hurdle that exists that is important to solve for in order to unlock that commission, those commissionable links. And that is social apps by nature would prefer to keep the followers within the social app, but there’s that embedded browser function or facet that complicates the click through, and it makes it difficult for people to purchase. They might not remember their password for Amazon or Walmart or Target or whomever when they’re in that buying mode. And so that creates a challenge, and that’s we hear from creators all the time that say we tried to do affiliate marketing in the past, and we couldn’t get it to work, and and that was the reason because of those embedded browsers within social apps. So, new technology was needed to help get their followers out of the social app embedded browsers and into the destination commerce app where the consumer could make the purchase. The creator could get the credit. The retailer could measure and do attributions. They all get, you know, that that sale came from Instagram or TikTok, what have you. And the brand can then feel good about investing more in influencer marketing. So that really was sort of the missing piece to unlock the whole creator economy, at least with respect to the commissionable links, you know an affiliate technology perspective. 

[00:09:48] Todd Crawford

And I was surprised half only half want a hybrid payment model, because I think if you’re a creator and you’re looking to only get pay per post, you’re leaving money on the table, even if you take less upfront that that revenue stream, and it depends where you’re promoting, right? If you have a piece of content that’s going to be there for 24 hours, maybe the links aren’t going to, aren’t gonna generate as much revenue. You know, some of the other platforms like YouTube and Instagram and places where those posts persist, you can generate a lot of revenue through those, or if you have your own blogs and things like that. 

[00:10:30] Brian Klais

Absolutely. 

[00:10:31] Todd Crawford

I think they’re, they need to, you know, I think it’s a big shift. You know, it’s, a shift, everything’s shifting. It’s it’s settling. It’s figuring it out. Who manages it? How do we track and how do we make sure everything works? Like all the pieces, like as you’re pointing out, you know, if we’ve got a gap, we’ve gotta close it so that the consumer gets a good user experience, and the creator gets compensated, and the brand sees the results, right, so they can measure how successful their creators are. So yeah. 

[00:11:00] Brian Klais

That’s what has been holding it all back in years past is that the influencer, the creator, might actually inspire you to make a purchase. It’s just you have to go, as the consumer, you have go open that app now and search for that product. And maybe you do make the purchase, but guess what, everybody is sort of in the dark in terms of what drove that purchase, where what was the attribution source, who drove it, who should get credit, who should give the commission. So that’s really an important piece is not just making the streamlining the user experience for the purchase, but also being able to flow all the tracking parameters and stuff through so that the brand, the retailer can attribute back to the source and continue investing in the creator economy. So big opportunity, the way that the two are combining and converging. 

[00:11:49] Todd Crawford

AI holds a lot of promises, not just for our space, but all over the world, all over every kind of industry, but we’re really going to focus today on really how this aligns with creators and affiliates and anything. But in particular now with AI is, you know, if you’re, whether you’re a creator or affiliate or you’re an agency or a brand, you kind of, just to kind of two sides of the coin here, you have your administrative tasks, things that you have to do, run reports, reach out to partners, you know, just things that are more mechanical or more manual. And then you have what I call the revenue generating task, which is, you now, because this is a relationship-based channel, you have to have those conversations that’s where you kind of create the most opportunity for both sides. And so you want to free up as much time for that and minimize the administrative. And so I think AI, you, know, is where a lot of people think, well, how can it, you know, make my life easier as a marketer to kind of compress and condense and eliminate a lot of the administrative work so that I can have more time to generate revenue in a relationship based sense. And two ways that’s working. One is, you, know, people talk about generative AI, creating content and developing content with it. Which may or may not be the best thing to do at this point with where AI is. You can lose some of the authenticity and maybe we’ll talk about that at the end of this if there’s time, but what I really want to talk about is we’re using AI to automate tasks and surface important information can really play a bigger role and create more revenue, right, for everyone. Where do you think the opportunity for AI is in the partnership space? 

[00:13:44] Brian Klais

The most exciting opportunities that we see are similar to what you’re describing. I mean, as a creator, you’re typically, you know, maybe a, maybe you’re a mom, you’re next door, you’ve got a small team, maybe your kids are helping help do some of the work in your, in your creator life, creator business. And so you’re a small business. You just, you don’t have a lot of resources. Technology that can help you scale and gain leverage is really important. So, I think that’s why AI has promise this potential, at least exploration of what it can do for you as a creator. We are actually in the midst of our next survey right now, our creator survey, and this is one of the questions that we’re asking, and so a little bit of fresh insights I can share here is that over half of the creators that we are surveying are already using AI, and some of the ways that they are doing that are through engagement automation, like chatbot kinds of technology, but also using AI tools to help with the product discovery function. And we think that’s particularly interesting, and it’s a big opportunity. And the reason is What we see is that commerce creators typically will have thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of product links that they use to drive their drive their commissionable links and their income as a creator. Well, that right there is a big data challenge. There’s no amount of virtual assistants that you can hire to successfully look at thousands or tens of thousands of links, and how they’re performing or how those products perform day to day or how are these links performing in Instagram or how these links are performing coming out of YouTube or out of TikTok. It’s overwhelming. And so, one area that we think is really exciting is the ability to use large language models to help synthesize and analyze that big data problem to help you understand what’s going on within your audience at scale. That is interesting, but is it actionable? Well, maybe, maybe not, and that’s where we think the big opportunity is. Creators spend an inordinate amount of time in the product discovery function where they’re looking for the next products that they’re going to be promoting tomorrow and next week, and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day they’re planning it all out. That takes a huge amount of time, a huge amount of resource. And we think that AI gives you the ability as a creator to sort of scale that function because you can now tap into the power of large language models to look at, okay, out of my hundred thousand products I promoted in the last year, which ones are most popular right now, or which ones were most popular for Mother’s day or and what other products are out there in the marketplace that can help me earn the kind of bonuses and commissions that I’m really looking for that are very interesting to me to promote and that I think will resonate with my audience based on past performance. AI is like a super virtual assistant that can sort of ingest all of that information, and come out with highly relevant recommendations for you. Where should you spend your time tomorrow? What products should you be promoting tomorrow and why. So that whole product discovery function, that’s really one of the biggest, most important functions for careers. And, and I think AI gives creators the opportunity to streamline that. To discover products that are relevant for their audience and pay well, and really just really help them help them grow with very little effort. So that’s one area that we think is super exciting and we’re really pleased to see many creators are already starting to use AI to power that. And it’s, I think that’s an advantage for them. They’ll have an advantage over competitors competitor creators who maybe aren’t using technology in that way. 

[00:17:44] Speaker 3

If you’re enjoying this podcast, we’d love to see you at Impact.com’s Partnership Experience in Austin, Texas from June 9th through 11th. Join us for three days of partnership innovation, including future-focused keynotes, panels, and workshops, tons of opportunities to network and book meetings with publishers, brands, and more, a welcome reception at Banger’s on Historic Rainy Street, and IPX Fest. A festival-style party filled with all things Texas hospitality. To secure your ticket and a $150 discount, check out the episode description or go to events.impact.com/event/ipxaustin, and enter code podcast. Finally, if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, please email events at impact.com. Now back to the show. 

[00:18:35] Todd Crawford

Because a lot of brands really love the micro-type creators, right? There’s more authenticity, more engagement with their followers versus the macro. There can be a little bit of a disconnect there. And when you said the teams are smaller, their ability to, you know, do a lot things in a UI to, like you said, get links, run reports, understand data, make decisions off that data can be a little overwhelming. Maybe outside their wheelhouse, I mean they’re really good at being a creator. And that’s kind of like, and the artists are the, I guess that’s the, what’s that, left brain or right brain, I forget which, which is not always great with numbers and things. And I think another thing that AI can do is help just bring data to the surface that normally, you know, someone that’s really in the data would have to spend a little bit of time to kind of dig in, find out, right? Like the proverbial needle in the haystack and that can be tough for, for a lot of creators to even just try to think about what data should I even be looking at, and am I looking at the right data? I mean, there’s so many reports available just in our platform. We’re really looking at how can we just make it more intuitive? Whether that is the platform just surfacing things that we think are important, or being able to just type in a question and having data, you know, a database question and the data kind of coming out of that question as opposed to having to go find the right report or build the right report, you know, do the filters, run it, and then try to figure out what that means. We’re really focused on, you people. Data can be a big hangup as I think a lot of people are overwhelmed and, or afraid of data. 

[00:20:44] Brian Klais

I think that’s true for creators and I think it’s true for brand marketers too, perhaps just as true for both parties. So yeah, I think the way the AI can help synthesize and simplify and help you understand what are you dealing with, what actions should I be taking and why. That’s a phenomenal power. That’s really a super power that I think is just so exciting for AI from a marketer’s standpoint. This is probably not surprising, but it’s worth noting is that the creators are very leery of the flip side of AI. How much do you sort of outsource to the technology? You know, there’s a great hesitation. Well, there are a couple of things. There’s one is the concern that, okay. If you’re using AI to generate your content and to be your voice, some creators who are just getting started might try that, and that creates competition for other commerce creators. It creates pressure to keep up and so forth. But that is really the big concern that we hear from creators. I cannot outsource my voice, my personality, who I am. I do not trust AI with that yet. Maybe someday, not now. And so I think that’s where we’re trying to sort of feel our way through this opportunity. How, where’s that line? What are the things that feel, to your point, almost administrative in nature that is okay to outsource because you get scale and leverage. But where do you cross the line? And now you’re in this area where, who are you anymore if AI is defining what you’re talking about and is your voice. And we’ve all had the experience of listening to an AI generated, whether it’s AI generated content that just feels a little off. Maybe it’s hallucinated a little bit, or it doesn’t sound like it’s reading things and pronouncing things correctly. And we just go, oh, hang on. That’s not real. You realize that you’re not dealing with a person here. So you tune out a little. But so I think that’s where creators are cautious. And I think rightfully so. Around how much of the personality and authenticity do you give up in that equation. I think they’re right to be very protective of their personality and their voice and who they are, to me, that cannot be outsourced to AI yet. 

[00:23:03] Todd Crawford

The ones that are concerned are being smart about it. I think there’s still people that are saying, you know, look, I’ll take any shortcut. I’ll create a bunch of content. Maybe it’s not authentic. Maybe some people won’t notice it or won’t care. And I can, you know in a sense spam, YouTube spam, Instagram, or whatever with a lot of content that people are looking for, but maybe I am not an expert on, but maybe, I’ll get the views, you know, and I’ll get the revenue, you know, there’s always people on the internet trying to make a buck for the least amount of effort. I think what I, one of the ways I think I would approach this is, and we do it here is at impact.com is you want to look at all the things that somebody has to do. So if you’re a creator, if you are a brand, if you are an agency, you know, let’s just talk about what do I do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, how do I manage relationships? What does it take to build and launch a campaign? What does that take to recruit and engage creators, right? There’s all these things that, these dots, right, and now which of them, is it appropriate to find, or can AI help, or some type of automation, compressing the administrative task to free up the creative time and the relationship time. And I think if you’re a creator out there, and you’re thinking about this, you know. The various platforms you’re on are trying to help you, but you can help yourself by, again, figuring out where is the most effort and pain or friction or challenges, and is it right to find a solution for this or is that just something I have to always do myself or I wanna always do myself and then figure out when you do find something. Is it more of an automation or is it more of an AI application or a combination? Is that something the platform I’m using or a platform I am using provides or is that something I need to research and use kind of on the side, right? You don’t want to wait for people to bring you AI. I mean, that’s certainly part of it, but it’s also about figuring out how to run your business more efficiently. 

[00:25:19] Brian Klais

I think you pointed out in a previous conversation that I had, it feels like authoring a document can be very helpful to use ChatGPT or other tools to help get your thoughts down, help organize your idea into bullets, and help to create a skeleton for your content. I think that’s where we’re all trying to figure out where’s the line. Yeah, because if if you are just letting the technology generate to your point about spam. I mean, if you’re just letting the technology generates, say you’re a blogger, and you just, Hey, ChatGPT, you know, write me 50 articles or 50 posts on this topic. And even yesterday, Google had their Google shared at a conference that they are now going to be inviting reviewers to say, does this piece of content that’s ranking highly in Google feel AI generated. Like Google’s inviting us as people into the quality review process, and essentially coming up with a determination, how does this feel? Does this feel like it was bot generated or not? And so while there might be, and this has been very true in the SEO industry, I’ve found over many years, there might be a short-term opportunity to spam the system. But those, it’s never sustainable. It always catches up to you in the end. And so taking those shortcuts doesn’t really pay off over the long haul. And I think that’s kind of what a lot of creators are sort of realizing and kind of look at it that way from a content creation standpoint. 

[00:27:02] Todd Crawford

Yeah, I think you have to, you can let AI help you, but don’t let AI run wild. Like you said, content creation, I mean, I played around with several of the AI agents, and I think more and more people are just using them as search engines. Google has incorporated it into their search results and, you know, it’s very helpful to find out a fact. But if you use it to generate content, is it still in your voice? Is it accurate? Are there even potentially just the way things are worded? It’s just not your voice, it’s not, or it doesn’t make sense. Like you have to review. And LinkedIn now has it. So when I’m typing in a post about something, I might type three or four sentences, and then there’s a little AI button and I can see what, you know, they kind of punch it up. You know, punch up my script, and I look at it and maybe I take some out or edit it a little and then post. And it, it does save time, and it’s still my voice, it’s still, you know, my post, but it’s, it is saving time and it is, and I’m surprised how good it is. I expected it. I actually didn’t touch it for a while. And then one day I was like, what’s this going to look like? I was like, Oh better.

[00:28:23] Brian Klais

Just hearkening back to my SEO days, I mean, one of the most tedious tasks in search engine optimization was always the development of the behind the scenes stuff, you know, your title tags and your meta tags and that kind of stuff that most humans don’t look at, most humans, don’t pay attention to, but the bots see and do pay attention too, but and that they can have some ranking impact from a Google standpoint. But that’s the type of task that we see creators who have a strong blog presence are very attracted to using AI tools to help maybe generate the meta-tanks, essentially doing large language text analysis and saying, OK, well, what are the themes you’re picking up here? What feel like the right meta-text to put in those fields or the page title tank? So to me, just in my experience, that feels like an okay, acceptable use of AI to be helpful in summarizing content at scale. And to have, hopefully you’re not spamming the search engines with lots of tags, but that feels like a helpful use of AI to your point. It’s helping amplify what you’ve already kind of created, as opposed to it’s generating all of it 100 percent, and you’re just sort of hands off, push, push publish. 

[00:29:45] Todd Crawford

As the creator economy grows, there are literally hundreds of thousands, millions of creators out there, and there are tens of thousands hundreds of thousand, I imagine, of brands out there. One of the things you hear a lot, if, if someone’s going to work with creators is how do I find the right creators? I think there’s a lot of opportunity for AI to help, you know, surface, if you’re a creator campaigns and products that maybe you should be thinking about based on either your own content that you’ve posted or what’s sold well, what you’ve promoted and what’s sold well. And then also, you know, just conversely, brand saying, being informed about which creators are doing would do well for you based on how they’ve performed. You know, one of the things I really like about kind of this new thing, kind of I always call always on creators. So instead of running a campaign as a brand, I’ve got creators that are just in my program. They can pick up a link, they can ask for a product, and they can promote that product for the commission. That helps me understand what they’re selling well. So if I am gonna launch a campaign, and I know it’s in this vertical category or even these specific manufacturers or products, I can see who’s already doing well, driving sales for those. And then it kinda leads me to the right creators that have already proven themselves outside of maybe a campaign. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity there, whereas before, it’s kind of lookalikes or you had to decide yourself if this was a good fit. And it wasn’t as easy to scale. 

[00:31:42] Brian Klais

I agree. I think that those commissionable links is really sort of key to unlocking the whole engine because now the more that you can help, even if they’re a new creator was just getting started. But if they’ve got now the ability to prove themselves to drive sales for a particular product, and they’re getting the commission, brands are seeing, you know, who’s driving those sales, then to me, AI can do a couple of things. It’s almost bidirectional. On the one hand, it can help the creator find other products that are similar, and less time, and operate at scale in product discovery. And if they are successful, to your point, it can also then help the brand identify and discover the creators that are already proving themselves. And that might be worth reaching out to and creating a hybrid compensation deal of a fixed fee, pay proposed plus commission, like, that’s a very attractive proposition because creators are small business people to they’re trying to diversify their income, they worry greatly. What keeps them up at night is just algorithm shifts and things that are way outside their control and can disrupt their livelihood. That’s what keeps them up at nights. So, I think brands should think about that, and how can you approach creators with offers that are going to be attractive to them, not only on the commission side, but maybe the hybrid comp model. That really gets your attention because you just saw what was happening with some of the volatility around TikTok. Well, how is that affecting creators? Are they still interested? How interested are they? How interesting are they in investing time and selling through TikTok on TikTok shop? Like that’s something that they really wrestle with. There’s interest, there’s great potential, but it’s another example of where uncertainty that’s outside of their control affects how they invest their time. 

[00:33:40] Todd Crawford

You could even see AI starting to inform brands kind of like where they should start or expect kind of the terms to look like, whether they offer that or not is another thing, but at least they understand. Look, if you’re gonna wanna work with these types of partners or this specific partner, you’re going to wanna have to consider models like this. These models could be even smarter and understand ahead of time, look, I can look at this creator’s social media footprint. And I can tell you within some range of certainty how well they’ll perform. And then you can kind of set your commission rate almost dynamically, and see the return on ad spend or how that will work with a placement fee so that you can kinda say, okay, this is my best guess at hitting my target. And then, you have something to approach a creator with, and then from there, you know, test. And if it works, then you keep going forward. If not, you make adjustments. But I think that’s one of the biggest challenges too, is just, I don’t know what I should even pay these creators. I come from affiliate, which is a little bit like take it or leave it, in a sense. You know, like, hey, I’ve got a commission rate of seven percent. You can join my affiliate program. I might have certain tiers, incentives. I might reach out to certain partners based on historical data, and adjust their commissions up or down based on the value of those the traffic or the content they create when it comes to creators, you know, they expect they have different expectations. And I think brands are a little kind of unsure like what’s the best way to approach them and negotiate. And so I think AI could, like I said, maybe help inform them. Like, you’re going to be in this range, all in somehow, whether that’s all upfront or all on commissions or a hybrid, you know. What’s going to work best. 

[00:35:37] Brian Klais

I think it’s good for brands to just acknowledge that in much the same way that you would negotiate in the affiliate space, that’s what you’re doing with creators. Creators will negotiate. And especially if you come to them with a way of helping de-risk their livelihood. If you’re coming to them with even if it’s a, there’s room to experiment, I guess is what I’m saying. There’s room experiment. There’s to experiment and negotiate. Maybe it’s $1,000 a month for these types of posts, and maybe you hear back from them that, you know what, my time is due valuable. I need, you know, 5K a month or whatever, and you can just kind of go from there. So that’s, to me, that’s kind of where we’re at. There’s opportunity to figure that out, but yeah, what role could AI play in helping inform some of those initial negotiations is a great idea, but don’t be afraid just to experiment, and reach out to them. And remember their livelihood is they’re very concerned with all the volatility, and waking up tomorrow and hearing that, oh, you know, Instagram made some changes, Facebook made some changes or TikTok made some change. Now what? Sort of just constantly in that mode. So if you can approach them with, you know, with respect to that, and how can you make their life easier? How can you help assure them you’ve got a form of income for them? That might be a hybrid model. Typically, they’ll be interested in engaging and doing at least a round of negotiation. 

[00:36:57] Todd Crawford

Once you’ve found the right creators, I mean, you almost have to say it. I want a long-term relationship with you. If they’re not saying it to you, depending on which side of the table you’re at, whether you’re the creator or the publisher, I think that is something that creators have voiced over and over, they prefer a long term engagement or relationship with a brand as opposed to one and done or, you know, try it, see how you do kind of approach. And I think, figuring out the right partners and how they align with what you’re doing and how you align with what they’re doing is the key to a good initial relationship. But again, thinking about these as long-term partnerships and asking the right questions on both sides, like what do you need from me? What can I do for you to make our relationship better? Help you earn more money, help drive more sales for me or whichever, again, whichever side of the table you’re at. Because again, you know, this is a relationship based economy and, and if you’re not talking and treating it that way, you’re, you, you not going to get the most out of the, out of it. 

[00:38:10] Brian Klais

That’s why it makes so much sense for the affiliate teams within brands to, because they’ve got that skill set. They know how to operate within that realm and to build strong relationships. And I think that’s unique to affiliate versus other channel managers. And I that’s right, it feels right that they create those relationships, and know how reach out and negotiate with the creator. To me, that does reinforce that convergence of creator and affiliate and how we see that moving forward, which is very exciting. 

[00:38:42] Todd Crawford

Well, I think we touched on a lot. 

[00:38:44] Brian Klais

This this has been great. Thanks for thanks for the discussion time. I really appreciate it 

[00:38:48] Todd Crawford

Yeah, no, it was great having you on and continued success with what you guys are doing over there. And again, thanks for coming on our podcast, and contributing and yeah. 

[00:39:01] Brian Klais

Thank you so much. 

[00:39:02] Todd Crawford

Today’s episode gave us a glimpse into how AI is beginning to reshape the world of creator and affiliate partnerships, from easing administrative tasks and surfacing performance data to uncovering commission opportunities. We discussed how smaller creators can use AI to scale their efforts and stay focused on what matters most, building genuine connections with their audience. As influencer and affiliate worlds continue to converge, it’s important to look at where technology can enhance both sides of the partnership. Relationships will always be the heartbeat of partnerships, but technology like AI can help us protect and prioritize those relationships by giving us back time and clarity. When we use it to remove friction instead of replace creativity, we can create space for more meaningful work. And if you’re curious to learn more about how affiliates and influencers are converging, remember to check out the Study Brian mentioned linked in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to the next season of The Partnership Economy.