Transcript
Jason Fuentes (0:00)
Foreign.
Ty Degrange (0:07)
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange, and I'm really excited to talk to Jason Fuentes today. Jason, how you doing?
Jason Fuentes (0:17)
I'm doing great. Beautiful sunny day in Austin, Texas. Thank God the freeze has passed us, so I can't complain.
Ty Degrange (0:26)
We're back. I went and grabbed a quick bite and I was walking down Congress appreciating the sunshine, and people are kind of out. It almost feels spring even though we're still in winter.
Jason Fuentes (0:37)
Yeah, I think I'm almost ready to jump in the pool. I mean, I was out yesterday, sitting out in the back, 78 degrees. Started getting a little bit, feeling the heat.
Ty Degrange (0:47)
I love it. It's coming to be that time. So for those that don't know Jason, he is a illustrious member of our Austin affiliate marketing community. We get together periodically and a veteran of the affiliate space. I'll let him kind of give more of the background, but maybe for those that don't know you, maybe jump in with a little bit of a little wildfire action. Tell me about what they do for sure.
Jason Fuentes (1:13)
Veteran of the affiliate space. I mean, no joke. When I think back to first job, it was affiliate, right? Not knowing it, I was just happy to have a job. But it was. It was affiliate manually scrubbing lead lists. This was doing lead generation through these online. I forget what it was called, but these online schools back in the day, University of Phoenix, it was 2000, 2005. Ish. Right. University of Phoenix, if, if I still remember correctly, was the industry's largest advertiser at the time. And so we built these portals and. And we would distribute them and collect leads and manually scrub them, hand over a file through Excel and UOP would come back and say, yeah, these are good. We'll pay for these now for these, and go some back and forth and it's like, do it again, do it again.
Ty Degrange (2:05)
They were so huge. I mean, I feel like every role I had in the 2000s, University of Phoenix, was involved somehow because they were spending so much.
Jason Fuentes (2:14)
Totally. It was so much money. And it's like, it is what it is. But it's funny starting there, going through this progression of really ad tech for me back in the Bay Area and watching Ad Tech, 1.0, 2.0. I don't know what point zero we're at now. 4.0, maybe 5.0, but it's been a good progression. And so doing that and being involved in ad networks and programmatic and social and mobile and CPMs and CPVs and CPAs and CPLs and CP, CP. Who knows what else exists at this point. Spent some time digital media production, podcasts and producing social media channels and all sorts of really fun stuff. Fast forward to today. Here I am back in the middle of again, right back into affiliate, back to where it all started. Slightly different format though nowadays. And so Wildfire for the folks who are not familiar with what we do, ultimately we white label a loyalty and rewards platform for businesses, mainly financial institutions, for white label a loyalty reward solution for digital businesses to help them increase revenue, user engagement and loyalty. And a lot of that comes through in the form of creating more value for their users in the form of shopping companions. Shopping companion a lot of people may recognize as like a capital one. Shopping. Right, that's an idea or an example of a shopping companion. And so we build these shopping companions that offer cash back, rewards, coupons, discounts and more recently including capabilities to highlight product upsells, remind members of program benefits, all encapsulated and put together into this really user friendly.
