← Always Be Testing
Always Be Testing
#59 The Art and Science of Performance Marketing, Richie Carreon, VP of Marketing, Levanta
00:39:04
Loading summary
Transcript66 lines
- [00:00]
Ty Degrange
Foreign. Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your host, Ty degrange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance marketing, customer acquisition, paid media and affiliate marketing. We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings and growth markets, marketing and life. Time to nerd out. Check your biases at the door and have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
- [00:36]
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange and I'm really excited to talk to Richie. Carry on today. Richie, how are you doing?
- [00:48]
Richie Carryon
Great. How about yourself, Ty?
- [00:49]
Ty Degrange
I'm doing well, man. It's been a long time coming. I, you know, I think I had a case of the black lung. Had to take a bit of a brief hiatus on the pod, which pains me to say, but we are, we are back and it feels, you know, we're bringing it, bringing the affiliate and performance marketing information to everybody out there. So that's what's, that's, it's a good time.
- [01:09]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, absolutely is. I mean it's, it's and it's. And it's actually prime big deal days today. So it's even. It's happening right now as we speak.
- [01:18]
Ty Degrange
For all of you in E. Comm. Performance marketing, anything Amazon related, affiliate related, this is gonna be a banger episode. Richie's the VP of marketing at Levanta. They are on fire and growing and we got a lot of good stuff coming your way today. Yeah, man. Maybe kick it off like Richie. What? Give us give the audience background on Lavanta.
- [01:39]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, absolutely. So Lavanta is an affiliate marketing platform for brands that sell on Amazon. And so through affiliate marketing, brands can essentially unlock an entirely new revenue stream, which was actually really hard to do before Levanta for many reasons, which I don't need to get into, but it's a really brand new channel for Amazon sellers and it's actually becoming even a global channel for Amazon sellers that sell across the globe, which I'll talk more about later. But there's really three benefits specific to Amazon sellers when they use affiliate marketing. And so one is they're able to partner directly with 6,000 plus creators, which it's a growing marketplace and they're highly vetted on Levanta. And creator can mean various types of creators like publishers, influencers, traditional affiliates that might have a blog or a newsletter, media buyers, and even what we call deal sites. But in our case it's anybody that's promoting only deals. The second benefit is really brands get full control over their commissions. So that means that they can set a cost per cell or CPS model or a cost per click a CPC model by product or creator. So that's really enabling to have full control over those commissions. And lastly, which is really interesting, is really improving your organic search rank and your bsr. And because Amazon sees us as external traffic, they'll reward you with those improvements on your organic ranks. And also what's even cooler is brands can get a general about 10% kickback from Amazon through Amazon's brand refer bonus when sales are driven through off Amazon traffic. And in this case that's all the affiliate traffic.
- [03:19]
Ty Degrange
The Always Be Testing podcast is sponsored by Round Barn Labs. RBL is the growth agency. They are a leader in efficient customer acquisition and pound for pound, the most experienced team in affiliate marketing. For the last nine years they've worked with brands like Oculus, Amazon Grammarly, Ebay, Atlassian, Scotch, Quarter, Live Nation, Hatch, Puma, Hoppin, StubHub, Recess, PacSun, SunBasket and more. They've generated over 100 million in media, spend over 250 million in traffic generated, 500 million in revenue generated. They go beyond the data to give you the why and the revenue generation, generating recommendations to grow and create a paid marketing flywheel for your brand. So if you're a consumer e comm brand looking to go from 8 to 9 figure revenue per year, or an enterprise brand looking for a higher quality of data, rigor and growth, check them out@roundbarn labs.com.
- [04:24]
Yeah, it's, it's, it's this amazing kind of confluence of events that seems to be happening, right? You've got this, you know, legacy Amazon associates that hasn't been necessarily ideal for the partners. You guys provided technology that allow brands to run traffic directly, affiliate Traffic, directly to ASINs, directly to seller URLs and there's just multiple payoffs that are higher and more improved compared to associates, right?
- [04:49]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, there are benefits to Lavanta and there are benefits to associates. And really we always encourage brands, you know, take use what's best for you and you know, we have a lot of benefits to that. So an example would be that we offer a 14 day attribution window and if you go on Associates, a 24 hour attribution window. So really look at your attribution and what you're willing to do. But we love associates, we love Amazon, they're friends of ours, they're our biggest partner. And so we always like to say, you know, utilize Levanta with associates where you think it's appropriate.
- [05:19]
Ty Degrange
So yeah, that's great. And our partners kind of saying like hey, this is clearly a better solution. Is that what's driving a lot of the growth versus kind of the standard associates offering or other affiliate offerings?
- [05:31]
Richie Carryon
I think there's a lot of folks that they brands just really want more control over their partnerships and having that control over those partnerships and be able to really create a long term relationship with various types of creators out there. I think is very valuable to brands because the way the creator comedy is moving, it's no longer this one post dry performance and then we kind of close doors but it's really like how can we collaborate long term? Do our values match up and how do we make this sustainable? Right. It's like the, it's the, the traditional old school 101 marketing where you have to have multiple touch points over a period of time for a consumer to one recognize but then also drive interest, consideration and of course ultimately a purchase and hopefully a repeat purchase as well.
- [06:18]
Ty Degrange
I love it. What inspired you to join Vanta?
- [06:21]
Richie Carryon
Oh, that's a great question. So what's interesting about Lavanta is that a lot of us from the affiliate marketing world by original trade, not in the Amazon space, but in the D2C space. One thing is that the affiliate marketing space is very small and I had the privilege to be head of marketing at Refersion, which is it was or is a DTC affiliate marketing platform. And I had the privilege to work with Ian Brody and Rob Schab while they were the owners of Grovia Partners, which was an affiliate marketing agency slash technology that was acquired by Acceleration Partners. Fast forward three, four years later I start seeing these posts and they're starting up this affiliate platform. I'm like oh Levanta, okay, that's cool. And I get a call from them and they're from the team and they're like hey, like we realize we need marketing, we'd love to chat, see if it's a good fit it. And there's some important things for me when it comes to finding the next organization I want to work work with and that's really around core values culture. Are we actually solving a real problem for the seller? And in this case we're doing something almost entirely new for the Amazon ecosystem. And that's what really excites me is that we're enabling a very cost effective channel that is literally on the wave of the edge, like the cool stuff of what marketers are doing today and that's through creator partnerships. And that got me really Excited. And I've always had this ethos of make yourself uncomfortable at all times when it comes to professional growth, otherwise you're not growing. But also I've had a knack for really marketing various types of marketing channels like programmatic direct mail, which most people are like, what, what, what is that? To video, programmatic video to influencers, et cetera. So this is just a great addition to my Rolodex of channels that I've marketed my career.
- [08:11]
Ty Degrange
There's something magic about kind of that being willing to be on that uncomfortable level of learning curve and having that beginner mindset. I can definitely appreciate and love that. And I would also add that a huge emphasis for our business and for our team is a big bet on the creator economy. You have so many prominent intelligent macro thinkers and business people and people that are not really even in marketing or performance marketing, really recognize this movement that is taking place where brands are really requiring, needing to leverage third party creators to tell their story in a more authentic way. So while our community hears that a lot, while the audience of this pod often gets that message because obviously I share it with guests, it's cool to hear you're clearly seeing that trend and riding that wave with Levanta.
- [09:01]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, we've been doing this for probably since the beginning of mankind, right? This idea of referring somebody to a trusted source and that's really, that's essentially where this is all originated. And we've just essentially as a society has formalized that into something that can be monetized even more. And that's, that's, you know, everyone loves a good referral, right?
- [09:24]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, you know, it's exactly right. It's, it's kind of baked into our, our psychology and our culture and our lives. What are you most excited about right now, Richie?
- [09:34]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, there's actually two things that I'm most excited about. So the first is, as I mentioned earlier, like as we speak, prime Big Deal days is happening. And that, and for those who are not familiar, that's Amazon's second prime day of the year, which happens in October, since it's October 8th today. And it's interesting because this last July, which was the first prime day of 2024, we saw record numbers on Levanta, which I'll again, I'll dive more into the specifics around that. And so that was just summertime prime day. I can only imagine what today and tomorrow's prime big deal days is going to look like in terms of conversion rate, lift, overall sales, sales lift sellers, and just overall engagement. For creators, I think that's one thing I'm super excited about. The other thing is a little bit more on the Levanta side. We, we just announced yesterday that we now support both French and German Amazon stores. So what that means is we now support a total of five GEOs across the globe. So US, UK, Canada, France and Germany. So anybody that has a store in any of those domains, you can use Levanta. And we have five more slated to roll out this year and that's gonna be Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and Mexico. So that's really exciting. And when we really look at the numbers too, like Germany for example, in last year alone they produced about $37.6 billion in annual net sales. And what that essentially means is that they are the leading and largest Amazon, like leading and largest group that purchases from Amazon and Amazon actually represents 86% of their E Com activity in that country alone. So there's, I think there's a huge opportunity one for sellers to capitalize on that and also be able to activate that channel. And for the French market they are number three in the eu, but they are, there's still a huge opportunity there as well. And mean their Amazon E Comm is representing about 20% of their total country's online retail market today. So that's again super exciting for us.
- [11:49]
Ty Degrange
That's awesome. There's just, there's so much kind of growth and learnings and new things happening that are exciting. I know you got some kind of specific juicy data to share and some learnings around specifically around Prime Day. Can you kind of give us a little peek into what you found?
- [12:05]
Richie Carryon
Yeah. So what's interesting data that we have is that we're probably one of the few like resources out there that has access to this data because generally that data is going to be kept in Amazon's world. But what's great is that Levanta is powered by the Amazon Attribution API. So that means all the data we're getting back is real first party data from Amazon and is approved. And so we looked at Prime Day numbers in terms of affiliate marketing as a channel. We saw some key things. So for our sellers in July's Prime Day, not for October, we're going to get those numbers tomorrow actually in two days from now. We saw that sellers saw an average about a 10x sales increase, which is awesome. I mean you can expect that generally around Prime Day, but I think that's still nice to see that quantified especially for affiliate marketing. So these are all sales that are happening through affiliates, they also saw a 4x conversion rate. So that means that our creators are highly engaged. They're creating content that is engaging and driving interest from consumers, wherever that might be. And also across our entire Amazon product catalog, we saw an average conversion rate of about 11.29%. You look at any other paid channels, that's pretty darn good for a conversion rate if you ask me. And then lastly with our top brands that are on Theonta, they saw a conversion rate of about 20%, which again is nearly almost double what the average conversion rate is. So I think that lends to say that says a lot about the power of affiliate marketing, especially as it pertains to Amazon. And what's interesting is in terms of the conversion rate lift by product category, it really ranged. We saw some categories starting at 5% conversion rate lift, which is still, it's a lift compared to your average week, upwards of 200%, which is insane. And even just looking at the clothing, shoes and jewelry category alone, they saw about a 180% conversion rate lift, which was an average of a 36.81% conversion rate. So you just look at these numbers, you're just like, whoa, that is insane. And it's clearly working for the sellers.
- [14:12]
Ty Degrange
Yeah. And just kind of like putting the skeptic hat on for a bit and kind of exploring this with you. Obviously you're seeing great growth. Obviously, you know, you're, you're a little closer to the funnel than I think some of the other performance marketing channels out there. Being able to kind of connect into that Amazon ecosystem, which is huge. I don't doubt that's real. Have you seen any successes? I know it's a little early in terms of brands who are kind of more on the skeptical end of the spectrum. Kind of be able to run some levels of experimentation, run some testing to kind of like stress test some of these things for those that are kind of the really rigorous or maybe those that are spending over a certain amount to kind of prove out those finance teams and those teams that are kind of fighting over like, hey, is this really what we're needing to invest further in? Obviously for a lot of us it's a, it's kind of a no brainer. But I'm curious to know kind of what you're seeing there in the early days.
- [15:05]
Richie Carryon
Yes. I mean even for me as a marketer, I do the same. I have the same skeptic skepticism with any channel that exists. And like with anything with performance, it could be anything that causes a Metric to be really great or could need a lot of improvement. Email marketing is your subject line, could be the start of it. So from that perspective there's a lot to unpack there. But to your, to your original question, it's pretty simple, right? It's, we see a lot of sophisticated brands that like to do a land and expand approach. So one starting with a CPS model or a cost per sale. And from the economics perspective they're only paying when their sale is generated. So it's really low risk, high return for those brands. And so entering maybe starting with a couple of ASINs, testing it out, see how it scales and then growing it to another ASIN and adding on more and more and more. And then over time we've seen some brands where they see the power of it, they really, really tweak it to perfection and they're like okay, how do we scale this even more beyond what's possible today? And then that's where you start to see folks that want to start testing out things like our cost per click offering where they can work with the creator on driving traffic to their asin. And so that's where we've seen where the, it's really simple to really help people see the light because who doesn't want to only pay for a sale versus a click? So I think a lot of benefit there for those brands in that capacity.
- [16:35]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, no, I like that. We're obviously a huge proponent of the platform. You know, referred stuff to you guys. I think it's a, it's really a no brainer for so many reasons. Obviously all businesses have their challenges. What, what are some of those challenges that you are looking to overcome as an organization?
- [16:50]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, I think a lot of it's down to education. So in the world of D2C affiliate's kind of a known channel, it's been utilized, it's proven and it, and for any, any agency that is managing a D2C brands, performance marketing to an in house team, they understand the ins and outs from A to B. For Amazon sellers it's a little bit different for a couple of reasons because there's really three types of Amazon sellers that we've identified. There are the singlepreneurs, you know, solopreneurs as I guess they're properly called and they sell maybe office supplies, right. They sell pens, really, really niche products but they're not quite privy to all the other types of marketing and they have a really big tall order. Right. They're managing, sourcing the branding, the building of the Page to the marketing. And then of course, returns and ops and logistics. Logistics, that's a lot to manage. And then there's this second group, which are direct consumer brands that start out digitally. They understand digital performance. They understand that really deeply. But they may not quite understand Amazon to its entirety. And then there's your traditional, what used to be called incumbent brands. I would just call your native household brands. So think like Abyssal vacuum cleaning cleaner, for example. And they started maybe in store and eventually went online, D2C, sold through other RMNs or retail media networks like Walmart or other third parties and now are entering the Amazon space because they really want to meet the buyer where the buyer is and chooses to buy. So with that said, there's varying levels of education. And so what we learn is that we really need to help folks understand the breadth and depth of affiliate. Because affiliate for some folks might mean, oh, I'm a tiktoker, I'm going to jump on my phone, I'm going to do this cool video and use my promo code and that's that. That, that is true, but that is one type of affiliate. And so I think really educating folks on that breadth and depth. Like I mentioned earlier, publishers, some people don't realize that publishers are affiliates. And those can be very, very powerful affiliate channels for them. And so an example for folks that might be new, new to this, you might go on to Wirecutter or buzzfeed and they're like, hey, this summer, these are the top 10 picks of sunglasses that you need to wear to the Hamptons for the next party. And what you might not know is a lot of those links will go to Amazon and those are affiliate links. And they're making those, they're making commission. That's how they keep the lights on. And those can be very, very powerful. I mean, Ty, I'm sure we have some clients there that publications are powerful. I mean, what have you seen from your end when it comes to public publishers as affiliates versus your traditional influencers?
- [19:34]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, publishers as affiliates. Tell me, tell me more. Just kind of in your definition to make sure I'm capturing that correctly. So I think that can be, that can be interpreted a number of ways. I want to make sure I get that right.
- [19:46]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, I mean like buyer's guides, for example, those are huge, huge resources. Like holiday, holiday guides are another big one. Then there's Listicles, which we consider different than your traditional publisher. I would consider those like ranking sites or just guides. And then you would have your traditional affiliates that might own a newsletter or a blog that just wants.
- [20:08]
Ty Degrange
I think they're so it's such a large piece of why brands want to tap into affiliate. It's such a big emphasis for a lot of brands that want to have that precious real estate where users are considering various product or service offerings, everything from B2B to consumer tech to E comm. And I think as a result in the last few years you've seen this flood into it that has increased price point, that has made it more competitive, that has brought FTC eyeballs and regulation and standards both good and bad as the channel evolves. And I think it presents a challenge to really balance the the effort, cost, timing and really be smart matchmakers for your clients to ensure that expectations are correct in terms of budgeting, in terms of gifting, in terms of commission increases, all of that. And thinking about it from a longer term lens than say search or social can be challenging. And so like Meta, where you see these trends of costs going up and results going down, not to say you're going to leave Meta, it's one of the most powerful performance marketing platforms around. You're never, you know, you may not stop your Amazon investment, but it's interesting because you kind of have to think of it like it's like the index fund stock performance portfolio approach. Like there's you might dial up your content percentage in different moments throughout the year you might find opportunities. I think getting that down to a proper science and thinking about okay, what are those CPAs that are reasonable on this partner versus others and really, really looking at the data without too much bias. Easier said than done. And I think it's such a valued partner type. But brands need to go in with, you know, somewhat eyes wide open around like cost and time and requirements around it because it's gotten so in demand.
- [22:04]
Richie Carryon
I agree. And that's why we're really big. We really believe that a lot of brands really succeed when they have partners like y'all to manage those programs. Cause you're working with a broad set of product category niches, services, offerings, et cetera. And you can really take a lot of those learnings and apply them to various clients and really boost performance faster than if you were to do it alone. And I mean, for example, just like a real life example on our end as a B2B marketing team, we're like, let's test out Reddit. I think it came from the Martech Record event that you and I were sitting at next to each other and I was like, you know why, why why won't we test Reddit? You know, let's give it a try. It failed miserably and that's okay because we just did not have the resources and time to execute on it where it's been a benefit to us. But we're going to go and retest it again. But we're going to go with the again to your point, with wide eyes, wide open and open mindset and just try to think and just look at the data as it is and just and just be real with it. So to your point, having partners like you all I think is very helpful to any brand's affiliate marketing programs in that capacity.
- [23:18]
Ty Degrange
Thanks for asking. And turning around. This makes it's an awesome kind of back and forth.
- [23:22]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, I like a good back and forth. I was trying to find that groove versus me just telling. But you know one interesting thing Ty that I think was good to just set. You mentioned setting the right expectations earlier with the client and some folks will assume, assume that affiliate marketing is a turnkey. Set it and forget it channel. Another thing that I think is important for brands to be aware of and just have the right expectations is that it's not an overnight channel. There are have been known where there are some products that you listed on a marketplace and then there's tons of creators that want to start promoting it. They agree to your commission. It's just like all the stars align perfectly and then you're making money overnight and that's not the case for every product out there. And I think that's important for people to realize. And the other component is your mix of creators. So you talked about looking at various types of creators, what you're willing to spend across various types. And I think also having a diverse set of creators that you work with I think is going to be really important to not only test but also broaden your reach then through exclusively through an influencer or. One of our most successful types of creators are Facebook mommy groups, which are phenomenal for family focused products.
- [24:45]
Ty Degrange
Yes.
- [24:46]
Richie Carryon
So actually, so when I was at a conference here in New York, I was meeting with someone and they're like hey, we're using Lavanta, but we're not seeing quite what what we were expecting. And I was like, well what kind of creators are you promoting or using? And they're like oh, we're using this type of creator specifically. I was like well did you know that there's also these four other types? And they're like no. And they were like oh my gosh. Okay, thanks for telling me this because I didn't know that and I'm going to go tell the team like let's, let's activate across these other types of creators and lo and behold they saw an improvement on their performance because they diversified their creator types.
- [25:23]
Ty Degrange
It's amazing. The education is so important and there's so many smart people involved in the business world and performance marketing world. Yet it's been said often in different ways. Like affiliate has in some ways a very elegant simplicity but it also has complexity because you've kind of got every type of promotional method and channel under the sun available to you and they're interacting and there's multiple ways to access them and then you kind of have them entering that, you know, multi touch stage of the buyer journey and then you have to kind of think about how are we crediting appropriately. So it's not that it's the most doesn't require a PhD to manage per se nor, nor does many performance marketing channels obviously. But they're right. It's like a, it's a very interesting balance between like there's a lot of education required and it goes back to I think that matchmaking magic that can be, that can get pretty sophisticated and like, even with our like database and thinking about how we think about partners like trust is such a huge piece of how we think about the equation. It's like this third party had great things to say about you in a UGC ad that direct them directly to an Amazon listing. That's magic for a brand and that's trust. And so you know, getting that is great. But also knowing what other partner types you can acquire, what are other ways to get that kind of trust score up into the right that matchmaking is so important because some, some partners are going to just thrive with brands you wouldn't expect. Some partners that maybe have done really good for your competitors may not do very well for you. So it's a little bit of that art and science balance and I think the matchmaking piece sometimes gets lost because it is, it is a challenging art and science.
- [27:03]
Richie Carryon
I mean you mentioned art and science and that goes back to like what a mentor used to tell me is like marketing is an art and science and, and we tend to forget that. I think there's just what I've noticed in the industry collectively, whether it's B2B, B2C there are folks that are like this is pure science. It's all about getting the conversion. I get that. Yes. But there is an art to it that sometimes gets Lost from time to time. And some of the best marketers that I've worked with and had the pleasure to work with either side by side or they worked. They were a service provider to us have been those folks that know how to strike a balance between what's art and science and, and meld the two together, which is really hard to do, by the way. Very hard to do.
- [27:43]
Ty Degrange
Absolutely. In the spirit of the always be testing pod, what are some of your favorite experiments or learnings that you've had insight for you?
- [27:52]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, so one of our favorite experiments from the B2B side, and I like talking about this because I'm in the day to day with the team on this. We tested out direct mail recently and it wasn't your traditional like, hey, here's a postcard with like a deal on it and it looks like your local car dealer persons or DSWs trying to sell and send you more coupons for shoes at their local store. We, what we did is we took a, we reached out to our SDR team and was like, hey, like, we know you've reached out to a lot of folks. What's the conversion rate from outbound to meeting? Let's get a list of everyone who's opened those emails but hasn't responded or converted into a meeting, and let's send them a handwritten postcard. So we use tools like handwritten, which is essentially like a robot that writes it out for you, add a little QR code, very personable, and we didn't quite see the results that we wanted. And that's okay. It was a test. It was a small cohort test, but we want to continue testing that channel out. And you know, I hate talking about COVID because it's so behind us, but it's still kind of relevant in terms of like how we've evolved since then. But I'll be very frank. Like, I have on my phone, I get postal notifications of. It's called informed delivery. So I know every single mail piece that's coming to my house. And if I see something handwritten, I do get excited. It's just something. It's weird. It's. It's just. I think it's just this human element where if you see like a wedding invitation or a birthday card or anything of that sort, you get excited. Like you. And.
- [29:19]
Ty Degrange
And authenticity trust.
- [29:21]
Richie Carryon
Yeah. I mean, granted, a robot did write this, but we, we wrote the content. We wrote the content. But my point is testing out those perhaps analog channels, but tying it with digital, that's been A fun thing for us because we were able to track every QRX scan and that was all ported back into our CRM. So that was pretty cool.
- [29:42]
Ty Degrange
Yeah. This may be a silly question around Analog, but is in real life community, is conference a huge driver for you all or as a B2B SaaS product.
- [29:52]
Richie Carryon
Or it's a huge component. And actually, you know, we are a global company now, so it, it actually has proven. Or hasn't. Not yet. Because we haven't quite done them on a global scale yet. But my hyp, my very, very well backed hypothesis is that it's going to serve us even more in international markets, specifically in China, where they value face to face conversations to build that trust. But what we've tested and done so far, the this year alone conferences have been one of our biggest ROI drivers. Keep in mind we're new to the, new to the market. We're about less than two years, so there's a lot of awareness building that has to happen. Y But what was most interesting is we were at a conference called Amazon Accelerate, which is one of Amazon's tent pole events that happened in Seattle just last month.
- [30:43]
Ty Degrange
Nice.
- [30:44]
Richie Carryon
And I spoke to a ton of Sellers, we sponsored some events, et cetera, et cetera. And during that time that I spoke to Sellers, I was like, have you heard of Levanta? They're like, oh yeah, I know Levanta. Like there were only maybe one or two people that were like, oh, what do you do? And I had to explain what Levanta did. And what's interesting is like as a marketer, it's kind of heartwarming when you see that people know who you are and you're kind of like, wow. But it's not just what marketing doing is also like the quality of the product is really good. We have amazing salespeople, we have great partner marketing and partner teams like all that collectively as a team, being able to communicate that and really put a great image out there of Levanta, not only as a brand, but the people in it. Yeah, it really helps with word of mouth. And so events have been a catalyst for that. And community and events are both really important pillars to our marketing strategy.
- [31:37]
Ty Degrange
I love it. I feel like we could nerd out on marketing because it's affiliate related, it's B2B related. There's so much we could get into, you and me on this. A lot of very good stuff to talk about now and in the future. Speaking of going deeper, you know, and doing cool things in your career, what was kind of the Sliding door moment in your career. Game changer or time when you had kind of two paths to choose.
- [32:00]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, this was like right after college, I would say like I worked my first gig. I did not like it. It was very soul sucking. And I was like, I need to find something that I love. It was in marketing, the soul sucking role. But it just, the industry wasn't quite.
- [32:17]
Ty Degrange
We've all been there.
- [32:18]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, it wasn't quite for me. The culture wasn't for me. And so what did I do? I good old Craigslist, looking for jobs on Craigslist. And of course you're going to hit those jobs that are like insert, you're a data input data. And I'm like, what is this? And there was one job that was kind of, that came across was for a creative manager role. Didn't say much about the company. It was very ambiguous. And I was kind of like, I saw a salary, I was like, I'll make that one day when I'm older. I put up, had a portfolio together, had a little website, did a little branded, you know, just really packaged it up, sent it out. And I was like, this is the one that will probably not contact me. And the next. That night I got a email back like, hey, I'd love to chat with you, let's jump on a call. And I was like, sure. Keep in mind, I was like, straight out of college, my student loans were kicking in, I could barely afford rent. Just like things were just not working in my favor. And they said, hey, if you can come to the Bay Area tomorrow, it was a Friday and do an interview with me, I would love to see if you're the right fit for the role. I spent the last 400. That's my name to get a dress up drive out there. And I was like, if I don't get this job, I probably got to move home and love that story. Did the interview. She was like, can you start Monday? And I was like, hell yeah I can. I was like, yep, let's make it happen. And that was a huge turning point. A huge turning point because I was now able to enter the technology space in a relevant way, which was actually ad tech. The company was called Yumi. It was a programmatic advertising company that was public on the New York Stock Exchange. I got to work on the corporate team as a brand designer. So I was making one sheets, really learning ad tech because I would get fed all this information. And I remember my first day of work. She's like, hey, so and so is going to Take care of you. Get your onboarding. I have to go out to France for the Cannes Festival. Creativity. I was like, what's that? I had no idea what that was. So that was when the glass door or the sliding door effect happened to me. And because of that job and the amount of effort I put into it and just the. The importance of relationships was a huge component of why I'm here today. And that catalyzed my growth to where I moved to New York because somebody there was like, hey, you know, I think I have a gig for you in New York. And just built, built, built, and here I am today talking to you.
- [34:42]
Ty Degrange
So cool. Richie. Yeah. The relationships are so powerful, and to get your foot in the door in those early, early days. And it's cool to hear that you took that chance. And those are. Those are just the stories of that it's all about. And it's super inspiring and exciting to hear about, I think, for a lot of the audience and people starting out or people pivoting or people changing or just people in general. So that's really cool. Thank you for sharing that.
- [35:07]
Richie Carryon
Absolutely.
- [35:07]
Ty Degrange
All right, let's. Let's go down the home stretch with some fun ones. Uh, what. What's something you bought recently that you just can't live without, that you rave about with for folks?
- [35:16]
Richie Carryon
God, where do I start? I'm just kidding. I have a.
- [35:23]
Ty Degrange
You have a retail therapy problem?
- [35:25]
Richie Carryon
No, no, no, no. It's a weird. It's a very strange one. So I've always been, like, a technology nerd as a kid. And I remember in the late 90s, early 2000s, like the turn of the millennium, there's, like, this robot dog and, like, by Sony. And now as an adult, I can afford one. I live in a New York apartment, so. And I'm very busy. Like, I'm out and about all the time, so I can't really. I don't have the time or I'd feel terrible to leave a real dog in the house. So recently I purchased this thing called a Sony aibo. It looks like a real dog. It's fully autonomous. It runs around the house. My friends are like, what the hell is that? And it is just super interesting. And when I show people, they're like, that is the cutest thing ever. So if you have a family or you just want something in the house that you don't have to feed, but you need a little bit of that dog fix to a certain extent, I highly recommend this thing. A little bit pricey, but it's I would never take it walking, by the way. That's a little, that's outside my comfort zone. It's an entertainment device. That's literally what it is.
- [36:28]
Ty Degrange
That's awesome. That's such a random, crazy and, and funny one. I have to, I mean, does it like, how intelligent is it?
- [36:36]
Richie Carryon
It can recognize your face, it knows who you are. It builds its own personality over time. So when you get it, it starts as a puppy and then you have to nourish it and like pet it, give it attention. It runs around the, like literally will walk around the house like it's charging right now. It knows when to go. Go to its charging bay. You can give it commands. It'll ignore you sometimes if it wants to be mischievous. It's a pretty high piece. It's like a pretty high tech piece of equipment. So yeah, the random fun fact about.
- [37:07]
Ty Degrange
Me now I'm compelled to ask what other maybe random fun facts that you want to share with the audience that maybe people don't know about? Richie?
- [37:16]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, so I do DJ outside of work for fun.
- [37:20]
Ty Degrange
Nice.
- [37:21]
Richie Carryon
I do a lot of like house music. Deep house. I've performed in some well known venues. I don't need to get into the specifics of here in New York.
- [37:29]
Ty Degrange
Awesome.
- [37:30]
Richie Carryon
Here's a little view of my little dj.
- [37:35]
Ty Degrange
This guy's a pro.
- [37:37]
Richie Carryon
Yeah. Yeah. I built something out of it and I love it. Music's always been dear to my heart and so yeah, it's a little quick fun fact about.
- [37:46]
Ty Degrange
You've got a ton of amazing experience and a breadth of interests and, and cool hobbies and some very cool stuff. Richie, it's been, it's been awesome to get to know you more and I genuinely enjoyed the like the learnings. Obviously there's a ton of exciting things happening with your role with Levanta, with marketing a growing software that's, that's doing well. It's doing great things for the affiliate space and for the Amazon space. And I think this was just a chock full of learnings episode, especially some of the data you shared around prime day and people are going to get a ton out of it. Thank you, man. Where can people find you? Where can they connect with Richie?
- [38:26]
Richie Carryon
Yeah, so the best way to connect with me is going to be on LinkedIn. It's LinkedIn.com forward/in I guess forward slash. My handles Marketing Guru 2018. I probably need to update that, but yeah, and I'm sure you have some show notes so I can send you that link.
- [38:44]
Ty Degrange
Beautiful. We will include it. Richie. Carry on. You're the man. It was a pleasure, and thanks for joining. It was a lot of fun.
- [38:51]
Richie Carryon
Absolutely. That was great chatting with you, as always.