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#74 Navigating the Future: AI, Blockchain, and Affiliate Marketing | Matt & Philip
00:36:21
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Transcript53 lines
- [00:00]
Philip Q
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Ty DeGrange
Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty DeGrange. I'm really excited to have Matt Hunter with impact.com and Philip Q at Henry Social. What's up guys?
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Matt Hunter
How you doing?
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Philip Q
Great.
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Ty DeGrange
Nice to have you today and really looking forward to this episode. I just wanted to share that this is my first time with not a one on one but more of a group conversation. And so I think it's going to be a fun, amazing flow and it's going to be a great way to dive in and learn a lot today. So Matt, maybe kick us off, tell us a little bit about just you and who you're with and what we're going to dive into. A little bit.
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Matt Hunter
Yeah. So I'm with impact.com I've been with the company pretty much from the onset in 2010. Been in the industry for good, 25 years, dating back to starting at CJ back in 99. So yeah, I mean I've just been a great adventure and appreciate the opportunity to share kind of some history along with kind of where we're at today.
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Ty DeGrange
Yeah, I just want to share. Matt's been a great collaborator with me over the years in his years at Impact. Following his career, many of us got our start at CJ in the affiliate industry and then obviously gone on to do some great things with Impact and we've worked together great over the years. So really excited. This has been a long time coming to have you on the podcast and get your perspective, which is super valuable.
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Matt Hunter
Appreciate it.
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Ty DeGrange
Philip, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background for those that don't know you.
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Philip Q
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Phil. I'm the CEO and co founder of Henry Social. And you know, before then I actually brand new to the affiliate industry. You know, I used to be an investor at a B2B SaaS VC fund, mostly focused on early stage investments. And you know, kind of how I got down this rabbit hole was we actually did a lot of research into affiliate marketing. You know, as we were doing our research, we basically realized that a lot of the technological improvements that could be made all happened to be at the intersection of blockchain and AI. And unfortunately those weren't really deals that we could underwrite at the time, just given it wasn't part of our investment mandate. And so, you know, that's when I decided to leave and build our own thing along the tracks of blockchain and AI within the affiliate space. So it's kind of how I got here. Today.
- [02:24]
Ty DeGrange
Amazing. That's fantastic. And it's great to see. I think it's maybe part of that trend towards validation and positivity and growth in our industry that continues to improve and get a lot of recognition. And I think this is such a great example of the potential of AI, the potential of blockchain, the evolution of what's kind of happened in Web three, what it's kind of called, this kind of new wave of the web era. And I'll let you guys talk through that. We can talk through some defining of terms, but obviously there's a lot of interest and hype and growth and excitement around these emerging things that are new coming out of the Internet and part of it. I know we've talked about it a lot. Matt, you have a strong interest, some strong background, obviously Phil does in particular with the business. But I think it's a very interesting opportunity to look at the partner marketing space and see for Henry, Social in the publisher role, impact in the network role, kind of discussing how that works and how that's successful, obviously utilizing impact, but kind of understanding more about what that looks like. So excited to kind of dive in. I think it kind of presents a nice opportunity for people to see in partner marketing, the publisher or the partner is really driving so much of the asset and value. And so I think it's an important learning and I actually hope to have a lot more publishers on the pod, just as an FYI to people out there. But Matt, maybe starting off with you diving in a little bit around some of the successes you've had with Impact. Obviously the pod's focused on learnings and experiments and such. So what are some of those favorite learnings that you've had in your great ride with Impact?
- [04:06]
Matt Hunter
Well, it's been a while. Again, been with the company now for 15 years, but I'd say my favorite learnings have been that it's an incredibly rewarding experience making new acquaintances and really seeing how new technologies can be developed in the expanding capabilities of supporting online marketing and advertising. Again, I think something that I look back on is like the introduction of the cell phone and each new model make that comes out. I've always been one that was fascinated by new innovations, which really is, you know, what has always gravitated me to pursue a career in software development, online marketing. And again, it gets more and more exciting each and every year.
- [04:47]
Ty DeGrange
That's amazing. Yeah, I'd have to say that when I describe to people what I do or what we do that are not involved in tech or not involved in performance marketing. For me, it's like constantly changing and constantly evolving and it's like, I feel like it's getting faster and faster by the day and week as you follow what's happening. Right. So for me that's, that's invigorating. It can be challenging at times, but I've always been kind of fun to seek out that new intel and new information and innovation. Love it. And you know Phil, looking at Henry Social, all that you've built, the co founder, maybe give us a little bit about your involvement, interaction with Impact. What has been in your observation in terms of collaborating with Impact to build and grow and to kind of monetize the platform as a publisher at Henry Social?
- [05:38]
Philip Q
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think just to start off on some background with our team, you know, nobody on our team has an affiliate marketing background. You know, there we have a couple of VD guys mostly on the Web three side of things and the rest of the development team, it's all traditional tech backgrounds, Web3AI. And so we're new to this industry and you know, Matt and the rest of the Impact team has really kind of helped us get a foothold in this industry, make a lot of crucial introductions, whereas without them, you know, we wouldn't have been able to really even, you know, get our feet off the ground with introductions to brands and even developing our platform whatsoever. So, you know, they've been super instrumental in helping us out and yeah, excited to see what's to come over the next, you know, couple of months. I think we're going to make a lot of big moves with some major brand partnerships coming up and yeah, super excited for that.
- [06:23]
Ty DeGrange
That's awesome. And Phil, I'd love to double click a little bit on Henry Social for people that don't understand it and maybe do some just quick defining of terms maybe after that with your help. I think that'll help set the stage for people to understand, you know, more, more vividly what you guys are working on. So maybe for those out there, what is Henry Social? What are you guys working on?
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Philip Q
Yeah, absolutely. So Henry Social is building consumer AI agents for any consumer based task. So whether it's buying groceries or it's shopping for clothes, buying plane tickets, our agent can do it all for you, end to end. It can help you with product discovery and then also at the end also checkout for you. So it's a complete paradigm shift in terms of how top of funnel traditionally works within the affiliate space, right? Traditionally what you see is most People either look on Google, they either read a blog and find a product they like. But the future is really agentic. It's really about AI. Agents are going to be performing 99% of tasks for people. People aren't going to be looking up for stuff anymore. They're not going to be reading to find products. They're all going to be asking an AI agent to do it all for them. And that's the future that we're really building. And yeah, creating this paradigm shift within the industry in terms of how people really discover products.
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Ty DeGrange
I love it. I've been sharing a lot about the shift I'm witnessing as a user and talking a lot about this with my team. We're implementing quite a bit of AI testing and processes into our business and the agent piece is a powerful shift. To your point. I literally was thinking today. It popped into my head, my Perplexity. App usage has gone up so much that I found myself walking around yesterday, having a full conversation with it, curious about some key things, and just literally having a conversation while walking to lunch from my office. And then the next progression of that is obviously agents of hey, can you get this for me? Hey, can you research that for me? Can you do a deep analysis on xyz? It's kind of mind blowing. Is that kind of how you're seeing things and is that what you're observing, Phil?
- [08:30]
Philip Q
Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, Perplexity, like you mentioned, they have their own shopping feature. We're actually using their foundational model to actually build out our model. What I'll say about Perplexity specifically is that I think what Perplexity is really good at is being a search engine. They're really good at being a search engine, really good at gathering metadata and giving you accurate information. But the problem with Perplexity is that they're not really optimized for a shopping experience. For example, when you try to search for an item that you might want to buy or try to put some queries in there, essentially it'll give you a bunch of text first. It'll give you a bunch of text, a bunch of descriptions, and then it gives you the images. And that text is like three or four paragraphs long. Like, nobody shops like that, right? Nobody shops by reading paragraphs or descriptions of products. So what we've really focused on is using various different, what's called stable diffusion models, which is basically image generation, to really create a compelling aesthetic for users to check out. And on top of that, something else we're really focusing on is kind of removing decision paralysis from the entire process. It's a huge problem in shopping. If you go on Amazon, if you go into any in person brick and mortar store, I mean there's just such an abundance of options for you there and you know, you don't even know where to start. And a lot of times that leads to a lot of user churn throughout the shopping journey. So that's something else we're really focused on which is, you know, hyper tailored recommendations ensuring that the agent asks you a bunch of specific questions before it actually gives you a product recommendation so that you actually are incentivized to check out.
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Ty DeGrange
That's amazing. Yeah. And I, as much as I enjoy perplexity and I was blown away by their speed of rollout of their shopping features, it was really interesting. I in the delivery and actual execution, I wasn't really pleased and I wasn't necessarily expecting it to work particularly well and it didn't. So I like that you guys are more shopping focused. I think there's a lot of potential there that's super helpful. We can get into diving into more terms as well. But I liked kind of you talking about like some of the collaboration you're doing with Matt and Impact and maybe a good segue into just what, what kind of things we're talking about here. You know, you guys, Matthew, you've got tons of background, you've helped so many partners and different varying players in the ecosystem. You know, when you think about supporting a great publisher, you know, like Henry Social, as you look at different service offerings and such, like what does it look like and maybe share a little bit more about what you guys are collaborating on. What can we, what can we learn more about this, the service you're offering?
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Matt Hunter
Sure thing. So yeah, I mean after transferring back to the US in I think it was right a little after Covid started, so it's like May 2021, I was in Australia helping open our Asia Pacific region, opening the office there in Sydney and then again spending time there and then transferring back to where I had to readjust to the market, to the, you know, the entire industry and how kind of it's kind of five years in advance in a way. So I had a really big leap to catch up. But then I steadily started to get more inbound responses from publishers, also attending conferences and whatnot. That basically there was a high demand for having an interest in a point of contact at Impact. Historically, Impact has always been such a strong technology foundation, an ability for brands, publishers to be really self serve on the software, but we didn't really have any provided account services per se for publishers. And more recently, however, the sheer scale and diversity of partners on the platform has meant some publishers, especially with those with unique business models such as Philip and Henry Social, are really looking for assistance in showcasing their audiences and the performance to Impact brands.
- [12:08]
Ty DeGrange
That's awesome. Yeah. And maybe Phil can share a bit as well around where are some of those areas that you feel, you know, you're kind of getting in terms of where Henry Social is at now? What are some of those things that you feel is kind of hitting well with regard to the Impact partnership? Is it more on the growth side, Is it more on the monetization side? Just excited to hear your perspective to kind of drill down a little bit into the great publisher managed service that Impact's providing.
- [12:39]
Philip Q
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, like I said earlier, like, the Impact team has been incredibly helpful with getting introductions, facilitating payments, everything along that front. But I think what I'm really most excited to work with the Impact team on is an issue that I think a lot of AI agents face today, which is the attribution portion of how do we basically prove to brands that agent performed a certain action or that they helped the user buy something? Because currently the way attribution is done is it's all dependent on redirects. For example, it could be URL redirects, it could be a redirect to a different app within your phone. But the problem is, you know, all AI agents are going to operate within one interface. Like, you're not going to be leaving the AI agent to, you know, check out, because the AI agent is going to be doing it for you. So that begs the question, which is like, how do you attribute a purchase to an AI agent? And how do you verifiably prove that AI agent acted on someone else's behalf? Right. And that's, that's really where the blockchain aspect comes in, because you can essentially create identifiers for each individual stakeholder within the entire kind of shopping flow. And that's what we're really excited to work with Matt on. You know, I know the Impact team is looking heavily into blockchain as a solution for some of these attribution issues we see with AI agents. And yeah, Matt and I have been going back and forth about how we could potentially solve that. And what I'll say is no other affiliate network has been as responsive as Matt has and also kind of as tech forward thinking as the overall Impact team has. So Kind of just a great example of how great they are when it comes to publisher service.
- [14:03]
Ty DeGrange
I love it. No, it makes a ton of sense and that's fantastic. And maybe wouldn't mind. I think it's important for folks out there that are maybe not as de into blockchain, that is deep into AI to kind of level set for them. Phil, where. Where are we at? Just maybe summarize the last three years in AI. Just kidding. Can you give us a little bit of a primer for those that are not as up to speed on AI LLMs? Maybe a little bit of just the high level where we're at. And I'd love to just transition that into the pieces of Henry Social that you're building, because I think it's. But if folks can understand and appreciate that, I think they'll better understand like how much of a technical lift you've created, how much of a community you guys are building, which is pretty powerful.
- [14:47]
Philip Q
Yeah, absolutely. I'll kind of start off on where I really see AI today. Firstly, the cost of compute is going down significantly, which is obviously good for us because it means higher margins for any AI agents that are built on top of the foundational models. What I will say is that there are still a couple of core issues. I think even though the costs are going down, the query costs are still too high. So on an affiliate model alone, that basically means that most AI agents cannot be profitable these days because the cost of queries will almost always outpace the amount of affiliate revenue you can kind of generate. So that's a huge issue that we kind of face, something we have been playing around with. Obviously this is also something that we do want to work with impact on and a lot of the other affiliate networks, which is, you know, essentially this dynamic kind of pricing model for brands in terms of how they pay affiliate commissions, you know. So, for example, everything's like static right now, right? You, you make conversion, you're paid a flat rate, whether that's like 4 or 5%. And it generally works because the traditional forms of kind of product discovery is all pretty static, right? For blogs, you know, you read a couple of paragraphs, you click on a link on a product you might like, right? Same user journey every time. But a more dynamic pricing model would look like, okay, how many queries did it take for a user to get to the point of checkout? You know, and you really can measure how much effort an AI agent actually had to put in and how much it cost them to really get a user to Check out. And that's like an example of something we're playing around with. But the point being is that AI agents, they're ready for kind of this agentic future, this autonomous agentic future. I think the biggest challenge right now is costs. And also from the affiliate side of things, how do we really structure the attribution technology correctly to actually facilitate these payments in a more three dimensional manner versus traditionally it's very 2D. So that's something that we're actively thinking about.
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Ty DeGrange
Nailed it. That's so, that's fascinating. And it just reminds me that the thing, one of the things I love about partner marketing, the world that we live in, is you're bringing, you're, you're fostering these entrepreneurs like you feel, to build something out of nothing that wasn't there before. You're not just pumping money into Google and Meta, not just commenting, anything that they're doing or not doing. We're literally, you know, this is literally a way to like build new businesses out of nothing, which you're doing, which is amazing. And that's, I think that's the American dream. That's a global dream. It's a, it's a, it's a fascinating part of our ecosystem. I think that's something that makes it so endearing and exciting. That's awesome. I am very curious on the agent piece. So for those that are again, not familiar with agents, you give a quick primer on just what exactly is an agent?
- [17:18]
Philip Q
I forgot to answer that part of the question initially. That's my bad. But you know, a lot of people have a lot of different definitions for what an agent is and most definitions are valid because no one really actually can properly define it. The way I see an agent is that is, you know, an AI model that can legitimately perform a task for you in an autonomous manner. So in the case of shopping, it's really the kind of last, last portion of the user journey, which is the shopping or the checking out aspect. And on top of that giving product recommendations and so forth. Just an agent that can think on its own and really learn from the data that it's given and that's being inputted, which is another area where we're working with impact a lot, which is we're training our model with a lot of their product data which helps give better recommendations to our users. So that's how I define an agent. Some people might say it'd be more advanced that some people might say an agent would be less advanced in my definition. But I think My definition is kind of in the middle.
- [18:12]
Ty DeGrange
That's super helpful and I think it's good for people and is the use case primarily, hey, I'm looking for a really amazing dry fit outdoor running gear that's tailored for this thing. And then the agent's able to kind of come back with some really well done curated suggestions. Is that the direction you guys are trying to go in?
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Philip Q
Yeah, exactly. The end goal for us is for the agent to be able to complete any task across any different vertical. So it could be something like, you know, you could, you know, for example, if tomorrow morning you need a plane ticket out of JFK to like Denver, for example, it'll just be able to buy it for you with like one query. It'll be able to do that, it'll be able to buy groceries for you. You know, you can basically upload, you know, a picture of your grocery list and then it'll just buy it all for you using like Instacart or some of the other grocery providers with APIs and like even like something as niche as like, for example, if you're signing onto like a B2B SaaS platform and there's a lot of integration kind of work to be done there, an AI agent's gonna be able to handle that in the future too. And our attitude is, why not us? The vision is to create the AI agent to be able to complete any consumer based task and really kind of create a paradigm shift in terms of how people kind of interact with the different platforms they traditionally would consume on.
- [19:24]
Matt Hunter
Yeah, and I'll add to that, I think that in the next, whatever I'm seeing it now, but I think in the next three to six months we'll see more where you're gonna be able to use like that AI agent kind of on like browser assistant or you know, on your computer or cell phone to, for you to speak to and then make those plans or ask for product recommendations and then the ones that it gets back to you are going to be relevant to the conversation. And then hopefully with a lot of these partnerships, they'll then start to infuse, you know, impact brands as those product offerings. And then I think in the next, what, two, three years we'll have robots that you can simply have those conversations with them and then they'll be able to do it. One more thing too, is that the beauty, also speaking about crypto, is that it'll be much easier to use a stablecoin or cryptocurrency digital asset versus fiat because of credit Card and all those kind of issues that you can encounter using crypto is going to be a lot more frictionless.
- [20:24]
Philip Q
Yeah, for sure. And just going off of what Matt said, you know, AI agents can come in any different form factor. Right. So the most common one we see today is chatbots. But in the future you're going to see AR VR experiences, Metaverse, you're going to see voice becoming more popular, like for example Amazon, Alexa is going to become more commercialized among many, many different providers. And just Amazon, you're going to see a lot of different form factors that can facilitate these kind of top of funnel distribution methods. And you know, our end goal is really to have any of these agents of any different form factor who wants to build their own agent for their own use case. Build on top of our attribution infrastructure, which will be its own blockchain is essentially the idea there. And they're going to build on top of our blockchain and essentially be able to prove to the brands that they are responsible for a certain action, which is something that you currently don't have today.
- [21:13]
Ty DeGrange
Amazing. Yeah. There's so many things happening there, there's so much to kind of unpack. Those are super helpful insights. We've obviously talked about blockchain and crypto space and there's a lot to talk about there. Can you bear with me with another question around just helping people understand it? How can we think about blockchain as it is and kind of why, why is that kind of the. An improvement into the, into the product of Henry Social for folks that are not as aware?
- [21:43]
Philip Q
Yeah. So you can think about blockchain as almost like a paradigm shift in terms of how the Internet operates. So it's essentially decentralized infrastructure that can enable any peer to peer interaction without an intermediary and without the biases of any party involved. And what really blockchain fundamentally does within the context of affiliate marketing is it essentially removes all the different forms of fraud that you see. So like for example, you have obviously cloaking from the publisher side of things, you have sometimes non payments from the brands. I think it's called scrubbing. You see a lot of these different forms of fraud that no one can really prove that there's a bad actor or there's a bad action going on, but you're going to be able to prove that with blockchain technology because it'll all be visible on a ledger. And I think that fundamentally creates a paradigm shift not only for humans, but especially for AI agents, because any form of fraud. You see, with humans, AI agents are only going to be 10 times better at. They're only going to be 10 times better At. They can perform at 10x speed that humans can. And, and you're going to start to see the impacts of fraud and all these kind of abuses that you see when AI agents start to come along. And it's funny because when we were at asw, I kept hearing a lot of people say like, oh, there's fraud, but it's not enough to warrant really a huge concern about it because it's kind of relatively low. And all I told them was just wait until AI agents come along and see what happens. You know what I mean? We need to stay proactive about this and really solve the problem beforehand. So that's really where blockchain solutions can really help affiliate marketing.
- [23:12]
Ty DeGrange
Yeah. And I think just building on what you shared around blockchain and I think there's a kind of a trust and safety and authenticity piece where my understanding you're able to digitally kind of reconcile two parties quicker, more bonafide, less intermediate, less room for fraud and spoofing and issues. Is that accurate?
- [23:36]
Philip Q
Yeah, that's very accurate. And also another thing I'll throw on top of that regarding the intersection between AI and blockchain is that a lot of this might sound really silly, but AI agents can't hold bank accounts, but they can hold crypto wallets. Right. So all the payments and the affiliate fees that are paid to AI agents is going to have to happen in crypto in the future. And so this is something that I personally think the brand should stay ahead of the curve on. Obviously we've seen a lot of regulation changes around crypto. I think brands are starting to warm up around a lot of these different crypto use cases, particularly around payments. And you already start to see a lot of big players like, you know, Stripe Klarna, a lot of these big players in the payment space are already, you know, offering crypto solutions and you know, it's only a matter of time before the brands start to adopt that.
- [24:18]
Ty DeGrange
Amazing. Matt, what are you excited about here? I know we talked a lot about some of the future and features and definitions around Henry Social, which are very much top of your mind and very much important for for impact. But maybe share kind of what you're most excited about in the future.
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Matt Hunter
Yeah, well, I mean, definitely our partner growth services impact. But yeah, I mean, staying in the same conversation here, I'm just super excited and have been for over a decade now with regards to, you know, learning more about crypto and blockchain and how it can help to overall, you know, improve online marketing in general by again making it more efficient, scalable and transparent. Just what Phil's saying. And as of recently, again, my mind on a weekly, daily basis these days continues to be blown on a daily basis learning about how AI advancements really can be created and deployed across the Internet and our industry. So again, it's being spoken about just at asw. I know Phil and I sat in on the AI talk track there. So it is moving and again, it's something that's definitely going to become more pervasive in the industry and I think just overall, again improving fraud and I think, you know, really scaling the amount of transactions that we'll have across brands and publishers and AI agents. So yeah, exciting times.
- [25:41]
Ty DeGrange
Yeah, absolutely. I'm absolutely excited to get more involved with Phil with what you're building with Henry Social. Obviously we're very focused on innovation, technology brands. We've got a great track record in terms of just E Com and various types of businesses from health and wellness to, to B2B to technology and innovation. So it's kind of top of mind for us. I see. Matt, you make a great point that there's a lot of like, I think hope that comes with the potential to increase speed, trust, validation of some of these things. And I think digital obviously has had issues not, not just, you know, with affiliate. It's been every part of digital and E commerce and programmatic and you know, affiliate is certainly improved significantly. But if we can get to a place where, you know, AI is kind of giving us more volume or agents are giving people more ease of use and more options and making that curation better or complementing it, I think with that increased opportunity you may bring in blockchain, it sounds like as a way to kind of check and balance it and validate it as this trust mechanism. It's really fascinating and exciting to me and it's like I'm not quite as depth in my years of blockchain interest and learning as Matt, but certainly was followed behind him and found it to be really fascinating and believe in those a lot of the core principles of what it means and stands for and love to hear that you guys are very much at the forefront of that. That's awesome. Thanks guys for letting me go in my soapbox for a little bit there. And we talk a little bit about some of the AI elements we've touched on the use cases. Are you seeing Phil, are there Any interesting use cases from the customer's perspective that they're coming in and saying, wow, we really want to see this, or we really want to see that. You kind of talked about being able to serve a lot of different segments. So I was just wondering, is there a use case that you're seeing that's most prevalent? Is there one that you think is going to be kind of coming in the future more so you touched on? A little bit. But I'm just wondering, from the customer's perspective, what are you observing?
- [28:05]
Philip Q
Yeah, I think so. Just for frame of reference, we are still in development right now. As you know, an AI agent is actually quite tough to develop at this point, even though there are a lot of foundational models out there. So we will be launching that within the next month or two, hopefully one month instead of two. But generally where I think there's going to be the biggest improvement with AI agents is in the fashion world, because I think that's where there's the most decision paralysis involved. If you look at some of the other categories that I mentioned, like groceries or you have plane tickets, generally that's like, pretty set because you understand exactly what you're going onto a site to do and you just got to kind of book it or you just got to buy it. But with fashion, a lot of times user behavior is, I know I want to buy something, but I don't know what I want. And that's where an agent can really make a difference. And on top of that, it can, you know, gather product data from thousands of different stores through impact and really help you make an informed decision and not have you regret it later, which I think is the biggest thing. You know, there's a lot of talk between, like, you know, satisfying and maximizing. I think this is really a tool for all the maximizers out there who might think they could have gotten a better deal, might think they could have bought a better item that was better suited for them. There won't be that fear anymore. So I think that's where the biggest difference can make.
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Ty DeGrange
That's awesome. And Matt, you kind of touched on it previously, like, where is this, this whole wild world of affiliate marketing headed? I think we're, we're touching on a lot of the themes, but would love to hear your perspective to kind of take us, take us down the home stretch.
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Matt Hunter
Yeah, sure. I mean, just like Phil said, we're still in the infancy stages, believe it or not, after really crypto started with Bitcoin in 2009. And it has been evolving since then. But again we definitely are still in the infancy stages. So we haven't seen it really been deployed across the Web2 space per se. But Web3 definitely have been building for let's say five to six to seven years. But yeah, however with clear or more clear regulatory framework that actually is being written finally as we speak here in the US for both crypto and AI, I expect us to see the floodgates really of adoption open up within three to six months. And I say that firmly because now again I'm starting to hear that from our new cryptos are and AIs are and this is again my opinion, but I think that we share a lot of this together these days that these technologies could eventually really reshape affiliate marketing and partnership marketing as we know it today, really by enabling faster, cheaper payments via crypto, reducing fraud like Philip said, through blockchain transparency. And then smart contracts like Ethereum and blockchains in general could really automate commission payments, ensuring accuracy, eliminating intermediaries. While AI powered analytics could really optimize targeting, personalization and content creation which overall would improve conversion rates. And with AI agents again we'll focus on that such as Chatbots or again Henry Social's virtual assistant will really enhance that customer engagement and guide users to affiliate offers in real time combined I really believe that these innovations are going to be promising more efficient, secure and transparent. Again like I mentioned. So going back to the example with fashion, I think that with AI, with AI agents bringing again those products and services and offerings, everything in real time is really what will again enhance consumer behavior in purchasing, making it more opportunistic, which I think there's just been a lag and delay in technology bringing more again which I strongly believe AI and and blockchain will do.
- [31:48]
Ty DeGrange
Amazing. I love it. There's so many. I think there's a lot of opportunity coming to your point and I think excited to continue to monitor and be a part of it with you, with you both. It's been super interesting stuff and I think, I think we're getting a lot of people up to speed and those that are aware are aligned on it. Yeah. Coming down the home stretch here for the always be testing pod, we've got to ask the spirit of it. Those tests and experiments that were most learning and interesting for you and just kind of bringing it home. Phil, why don't we kick it up to you just because Matt just went and then we'll finish with Matt. What are some of those things that come top of mind for You Phil, in terms of campaign or real time or building learnings that you've experienced recently?
- [32:34]
Philip Q
Yeah, absolutely. So you know, I've always abided by that same model always be testing here at Henry just for some frame of reference. We've probably gone through like at least six or seven different product iteration ideas within the past six months. For reference. We actually started off as a crypto cash back platform. You know, the idea was basically you could earn digital asset yield on your cash back. So over the course of 10, 15 years it'll feel like never spend a single dollar in your life. It's actually how we started and you know, various different problems we experienced there, which is obviously competing with the honeys and rakutens of the world, people forgetting to use our app instead going straight to Amazon. Things along that front really led us to start building the AI agent which would improve kind of our own top of funnel. And you know, through the iteration we start to realize some of the problems that the space had. Obviously talking to people like Matt and other people as well realized some of the attribution issues and you know, the iteration and the kind of roadmap has changed so much over the past three or four months that you know, it's like, it's like you said, we're always testing and you know, we understand that we're going to fail at some things, some things are going to succeed, but it's just a matter of really doubling down on what, what does succeed and kind of getting rid of the failures quickly.
- [33:41]
Ty DeGrange
That's amazing. That's a great philosophy and it's awesome to hear. You're, you and your team are certainly owning and living that which is awesome. Nat, what about you? Any, any learnings or experiments that are become top of mind that you want to share?
- [33:54]
Matt Hunter
Absolutely, yeah. Again, since entering the industry after college back way, way back in 1999, around that time you kind of again you enter an industry for the first time and that industry is really starting or starting to take off and then you learn kind of along the process of new nuances or new opportunities to again specifically with say online marketing, that you're going to be testing campaigns, testing creative testing payouts. And it's pretty much held true up until today. And now we have new technologies. Again, we've spoken at length of what we have coming right around the corner. But again if you're a platform, a publisher, a brand, an agency, you always want to be testing new technologies, new tools, new features. Again, what will best serve you and your objectives.
- [34:43]
Ty DeGrange
Love that Love that. You know, I think, I think those are great ideas and great learnings and yeah, it's awesome to see your kind of collaboration and professional marriage of sorts with a stellar publisher that's innovating and doing something, you know, truly cutting edge. You're trying to differentiate and be something that no other publisher has been and I commend you for doing that. And then obviously Madden Impact being such an amazing network and technology and platform to really, you know, facilitate and support and provide real, real partner services is huge. So it's awesome to, to learn more and get to know you guys deeper and just we're going in a really good direction if we can pull off some of these things.
- [35:25]
Matt Hunter
Absolutely.
- [35:25]
Ty DeGrange
Heck yeah. For folks that want to get in touch and follow up with you guys and learn more, where can they best track you down? What's the best way to reach you?
- [35:34]
Matt Hunter
You could get a hold of me@mattpact.com M A T tact.com and for me.
- [35:40]
Philip Q
You can just shoot me an email. It's a PhilipEnry Social. It's Philip with one L. Beautiful.
- [35:46]
Ty DeGrange
Phil. Matt, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'm glad we finally did this. We kicked off the first group conversation on the always be testing. So thanks for bearing with me as I'm getting out of my one on one comfort zone. Even got my lighting working better. Hopefully it appears that way. And you guys are awesome. I really enjoyed it and a lot more to come.
- [36:07]
Matt Hunter
Great, thanks for having us.
- [36:08]
Philip Q
Appreciate you having us on.
- [36:09]
Ty DeGrange
Thank you.