Marketing Has Gotten Exponentially Harder | How Partner Marketing Solves That Challenge

Building a competitive advantage, creating a sustainable ROI, all of these things lead towards finding people who have the audience that you want, entering into a partnership with them, and using the scalability of technology to manage that partnership. And it's kind of like what a next generation kind of global, if you are global, you know, partnership program could look like.

All right, everyone. Today we're bringing my friend Bob Glaser back, also known as Robert Glazer, uh, founder and board chairman of Acceleration Partners, global partnership marketing agency. He's got a new book that just released called Moving to Outcomes. I think we're gonna have a really interesting conversation, uh, today because Neil and I have been talking about on this podcast how digital marketing is getting harder. I actually just last week had a conversation with my buddy, and we come from an SEO and paid media background. We're just like, man, that stuff ain't working that well anymore. And like, it's, it's— we're talking about the new stuff that's working, right? So Um, I mean, Bob has seen it from, from everywhere and he's worked with cool companies like StubHub, LinkedIn, Postmates, much more. And more importantly, in my opinion, as a, as a founder, he's got all the culture and the best place to work awards. Those are the only awards that matter in my opinion. Um, and bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker. Bob, welcome back.

Thanks, Eric. Uh, good to be here.

Yeah. Good to have you back. So why don't you, um, for those that haven't heard of you yet or didn't listen to the last episode, a little background on you, what your story is, and then we'll get rolling.

I started a company called Acceleration Partners. I actually moved out of CEO role last year into the founder and chairman role, and I'm working more on our global strategy and M&A. But we are the largest affiliate and partner marketing agency, independent partner marketing agency. We've been helping companies, pretty blue-chip brands for years, build and expand partner and affiliate programs. And I'm sure we'll get into this, but that definition has become a lot more expansive. I wrote this book 5 years ago called Performance Partnerships, kind of talking about how the affiliate industry was misunderstood and how it was changing. I think a lot of that has come true. You know, that book was really geared towards people sort of in the industry. I think what you were just alluding to in the new book, you know, Moving to Outcomes, is focused on— I think any CEO or exec team is starting to see the same problem. And that's like, you know, their blue-chip stocks are not returning, you know, 12 to 18% anymore. They're returning 1% or 2%, or maybe -2%. And I think they're really starting to— I mean, no one's going to give these channels up, but I think the reliance on them and the fact that they are, even Google, Amazon, and Facebook is like the world's biggest auction. And auctions usually benefit sellers, not buyers.

Yeah. So I think you wrote somewhere where you talked about how Facebook's— there's a decline. So maybe we can start there first. Where do you think Meta or Facebook's going? Where do you think— I guess for all these auction-based systems, where do you see them going? And we'll just start there.

Yeah. I mean, just look, I think it's a reality. I'm sure you've heard it with your clients. I think Facebook average, if you've seen average ad price in the last year, data's from up 50% to 100%, 50% to 70% or 100% or somewhere in that range. I don't think their advertisers' profits are up that much. I think some of that is because they have less inventory because some of the privacy controls and restrictions. And it's a little bit like education or housing or otherwise, where people say, oh, it's always a good investment, but at some point there's a price where the ROI just isn't there. And I think for a lot of brands, particularly brands who've built their business on paid social and stuff over the last couple years, I've heard the CEOs be like, look, it just wouldn't even work today. They're just having a hard time getting the ROI they need. So I mean, I don't know what their strategy is. I do think that You know, I always love the John Wanamaker quote from 100 and something years ago, you know, 50% of my marketing works and 50% doesn't, I just don't know which it is. My contention is with all of the digital and performance and data and everything that we have today, and all the direct-to-consumer brands who are trying to get people to buy their stuff from them directly, why are we still paying so much for clicks and impressions when we could be paying for sales and leads and metrics that are actually more more relevant to a customer that's, that's looking to sell directly.

Got it. So yeah, I want to talk about that, but I mean, I think affiliate marketing is still poorly understood even in 20— or let's just say today. And so how, how would you define affiliate marketing or performance marketing?

Yeah, so, so, you know, affiliate tried to rebrand into performance years ago, and then everything is performance. I think you're seeing a concerted effort to come under now the umbrella of partnership marketing, which, which to me makes more sense, but really simple. It's less of a channel and then a methodology. It's working with a partner, coming up with a performance-based payment system, tracking that, and paying on an outcome basis, right? So you could do that with a whole variety of partners. You could do that with coupon loyalty sites. You could do that with business development partners, app, mass media, otherwise. So I, I, it is almost more of a model, and as a channel, it is made up of all sorts of different tactics and different size partners. But it, the, you know, you would basically, you know, each one of those does not have the volume that, you know, a paid search or paid social otherwise have. But if you can use software and put 1,000 different partnerships on a platform and track and measure those as a channel, it starts to, it starts to have the scale that, that you want. So when people talked about affiliate marketing in the past, I think they're talking about a very specific type of partner, right? Like a coupon site, a loyalty site, even though anyone could have been an affiliate. Today, that spectrum of who can be a partner is probably as wide as it's ever been.

Got it. And so like, let's talk about it from an agency perspective, because there's a handful of agencies that I know, and you probably know these people too, where primary services right now, even today, paid media and SEO and maybe some conversion rate optimization. How are you guys different from that? Like, how are you guys offering like a greater breadth of services? Like, how are you guys attacking that differently?

Yeah. So look, we're a specialist in what we do. We work with 175 companies, some of the biggest in the world at this. Like I always say, and I'm sure you'll agree with that, I talked to Neil, like if you have more services on your website than you have people, then you've got an issue, right? A competency is when you have multiple people that do the same thing. And for a lot of agencies, it's been like, oh yeah, we do affiliate and there's one person. That's not a practice. So, you know, what we have seen is that people, there's almost now a suite of partner marketing services from recruiting and management and influencer and B2B, that the people really looking to build a program who aren't falling for the old sort of AOR trap, you know, are looking for specialists. So they'll say, look, this, this, this is a paid media specialist firm, this is a conversion specialist firm. And, you know, Acceleration Partners is really a partner management recruiting specialist firm, and they are not shy about working with, you know, the right partner, particularly, you know, we do these programs on a global basis. And there are very few, if any, offerings where people are legitimately global and can do the same thing for them.

Got it. So what does that look like specifically?

In terms of like the services themselves?

Yeah, because right now it sounds very high level, right? I'm just trying to think about for the listener too, like what does that mean exactly?

So there's like 3 parts to any program. There's recruiting partners, which is like sales, right? Finding people to join the program. There's getting them joined. Then there's the ongoing sort of campaign management optimization. You have 1,000 partners who are asking for things. You have a sale and you want to tell about it. They have a promotion coming up and they want to talk to you and maybe can they get something worked out for it. So there's a ton of sort of ongoing engagement optimization, sort of partnerships supported by tech. You're using one of these platforms to manage it all. And on top of that, you have some of the things you have in the other channel. You have data fraud analysis, trend analysis, you know, looking at reports, partners that are falling off the radar, partners that are flying up maybe too quickly, you know, or not, not quickly enough. Building kind of, you know, welcome campaigns for them. Like, what does a 90-day sequence look like for bringing a new partner in and the things that you want to offer them and train them or otherwise? So it is managing hundreds or thousands of these relationships. There's a big— it is a very high-tech, high-touch industry as opposed to paid search or otherwise, where it's really tech. Like, this is 50% tech and 50% working with people and getting on the phone.

Got it. So if I were to try to visualize this a little bit for people to clarify, so basically this partner marketing could be influencer marketing at scale, right? You're reaching out to a bunch of people and you're adding—

It's all converging very quickly. It's just, that's just a method, right? They have social media. It depends on how you're paying them. If you're paying them on an impression basis, then sometimes that goes in your media budget. But yes, influencers coming in quickly, quick. And this whole B2B segment where now that people have these affiliate networks or increasingly these SaaS platforms that do all the contracting and commissioning, They're saying, look, let's not go through the whole BD team. Like, we've got a whole workflow and stream here. Like, if you have a confirm page and you want to add— you're a travel company and you want to add our ticketing offer after that, we'll sign you up in our partner management system, push you an offer and a rate, and like, you can go. Like, we don't need to go through business development for 5 or 6 months.

Got it. Love it. So I do want to talk about the book. So Moving to Outcomes, what is that all about? What's the— what's kind of the gist?

Yeah. So, so in some ways it's a little bit the sequel to Performance Partnerships around sort of what has changed, right, in terms of in the marketplace. That is, you know, the, the paid media stuff, really the prices, you know, everything in an auction getting to the point of ROI, far more D2C companies, far more privacy restrictions, which in some cases is just wiping out entire business models that are based on, you know, third-party cookies and PII. And so it's just reorienting everyone around. And we saw this during COVID how You know, from building a competitive advantage, creating a sustainable ROI, all of these things lead towards finding people who have the audience that you want, entering into a partnership with them, and using the scalability of technology to manage that partnership. And it's kind of like what a next-generation kind of global— if you are global, you know, partnership program could look like, and the types of people you can bring into that, and why that is sustainable. You can't Similar to SEO, where if I just came in with $2 million and you've been working with an SEO client for 2 years and I said, Eric, replicate, get me to where they are, you'd be like, I can't do that overnight. I mean, in paid search, I could just pour the $2 million in and bid on everything that they're looking for and just overwhelm them. Partners, the same thing. If you develop these relationships, you develop these working styles, you figure out the right rates, you can't just come in and dump a lot of money on that. So it gets you outside of the whole auction apparatus, which I think today it's really hard. I mean, you can just download everything every everyone else is doing in the auction world and just bid a penny more. So it's not— for some companies, it's really hard to maintain a cohort or an audience or something before it gets burned through in days or weeks.

Got it. So I'm looking at the book on Amazon right now. So what are you trying to solve here, I guess, for the reader? Is it how they can build a partnerships program from scratch?

Yeah, it's sort of a 2-part. It's having a look at their marketing portfolio and really think about like, How long do they want to stay in the game of putting all their apples in the basket of increasingly diminished returns? And that, and that there are some real fundamental shifts in the marketing that are causing that trend and probably aren't changing anytime soon. So how can they diversify that? And what are the different types of options— partners, training, building a team? Like, what does it look like to build a partnership? digital partnership capacity within their organization.

Got it. And so this book's already top, um, number 1 on sales and marketing very quick, so congrats on that. Um, you've done books for— for— I mean, you've done a handful of books already, right?

Yeah.

Um, it's, it's a labor of love, obviously. Um, so, uh, I mean, beyond that, I mean, why do you continue to do it? Book writing is a pain in the ass, in my opinion.

So book writing is easier than book marketing, uh, in, in some cases. But yeah, look, my sort of archetype is to find a better way and share it. So if I figure out something that I think can help people or companies, I naturally want to share that and get that out. So it was sort of bookend for me, right? I had my first and fifth books were about marketing. And then a lot of the other books were about culture and stuff that we learned along the way of building a business and growing a remote organization. But Performance Partnerships was a big risk. Like we were kind of going out there and trying to say, move market towards us. People just really misunderstand what affiliate marketing is. We'll tell you all the bad stories just so you hear them, but like, we really think that this partner marketing is, is, is, is a really huge opportunity and people are missing it. It's like trying to make the market come to you. But we saw a lot of titles popping up of performance partnerships, directors of performance partnerships. Like, I, I think we were able to sort of open people's awareness Look, what's really interesting is like during COVID like this channel exploded. Like as soon as everyone's budgets are cut, the first thing they do is they stop everything that's disconnected the most from results. And they would say, look, I'm not going to cut this off. Like if you can continue to get a dollar in sale, I'll pay you 10% if it's good revenue. I just think it's interesting that people come back to it when times are tough. And then when times are good, they get caught up in all the like what's new and they tend to, tend to forget about it. But we were I mean, in April, May last year, we were on CEOs' radars for the first time in our companies. It was the only channel open, and they were like, interesting, we can liquidate with this. Like, there's some really interesting stuff that we can do with this.

Got it. I mean, I'm looking at Facebook stock right now, about a 16 PE ratio, so still fairly low for a tech company. Maybe we'll come back to that. But I guess for going back to your book for a second, so, you know, how can a company easily get started with performance partnerships? Obviously, if they've got some money, maybe they can go to your company, but What's it like a practical way for people to get started?

Yeah, look, I think if you really want to do this, you need to find someone who knows what they're doing. One of the things we talk about in the book is that there's not an obvious place for talent in this industry. Like you could say, oh, Google certified or Facebook certified. So you have a little more demand than talent. And oftentimes we are finding that someone is coming in and running the channel for the first time with no experience. I've never found that to be like a great thing of success. Like if you had a client, Eric, and they were like, Hey, I want you to meet Sally. Sally's running our $10 million paid search and she's never done paid search before. You'd be like, what the hell? But this goes on literally every day in affiliate because there's just not— people don't know where to find people. It's not as clean. There's not a certification. So I think it's figuring out someone who knows what they're doing, whether that's an agency, hiring someone with experience, finding someone who actually— think about the platforms you might want to work with and what experience do they have. And then just building a quality program to start. And we talked a little bit about how you could build the team and where could these people come from different parts of the organizations. But it'd be more important to have a program that's pretty closed and maybe get 10 good partners, figure out what works for them, and keep it small if you don't have a lot of resources, than to do what I see a lot of people do is set up this thing, auto-approve it. They call us a year later, they got 2,000 partners, they're all doing fraudulent things, like they haven't paid any attention to it. Like, that's a whole mess to clean up. So I would focus on doing things that— I like the advice that initially you should always do things that don't scale until you get to quality and then think about how they should scale.

Got it. And so it sounds like, I mean, you guys are really handling a lot of the, you know, getting the partnerships going, a lot of the back office stuff. I mean, you guys know what you're doing clearly. And so if someone wanted to work with you, like how would that be structured typically? Because I remember last time we spoke on it, it's not like you're taking a I think it's like a standard type of retainer, right? Yeah.

Most people in our industry, because it's all measurable, have some sort of fixed plus performance component. And the performance component could be stretch goals, certain goals. It could be an efficiency goal. I think what's different than the old school sort of just flat performance fee model is that there's some flexibility to decide what that looks like. But given that it's all measurable and the goal is to grow the channel, I find most people in our space do a hybrid Model of charging.

Got it. Yeah. So it's like a retainer and then like, you know, maybe it's like a percentage of each sale or something like that.

Percentage of the revenue of the channel or leads or otherwise. Yeah. Like we look, it's tempting to say, well, why don't we do the whole thing on performance? Right. It's all upside. And we've had this discussion times and times over the years. First of all, there's not a lot of skin in the game and you need the client to be pretty engaged. And then you'll say, okay, but to do that, right, if I'm gonna work for 6 months and go build a bunch of relationships, think about like sales. And I'm only gonna— I'm paid. Well, then I need to be paid on like the 18-month productivity of that. And so we're gonna have to go to your legal team and talk about a tail and all this. And that's where it gets like, it gets messy, right? Because now we gotta enter into a 2 to 3 year agreement if you want me to, you know, not me literally, but if you want us to do that all on performance. So generally I think people have coalesced around the hybrid model as a good way to make sure the company has some skin in the game. But, but as we always say, like, That pays the bills. It's not what gets us excited to get out of bed. Like, the upside is, is, is what makes everyone excited.

Yeah, that's the way— I mean, you and I know like these other agencies where they go purely on performance, like, um, and it's crazy.

But if they go purely on performance, I just would worry. Like, I've never seen a top-tier agency do pure performance without a long-term deal. Or, I mean, we see people, you know, 0 months for free, and it's like, they're gonna get paid somehow. Like, so you're just— there's a hidden cost in there that you're not finding something. I mean, we have competitors that offer people free. Like, no reputable agency should be offering things for free. Like I said, my dad or someone once said, you know, anytime something's free, it's just a matter of who's paying.

Yeah, no, there's always someone paying for sure. I agree with you. Um, and so, you know, we've talked about this last time, but I just want to emphasize it again because I think what's really impressive with Acceleration Partners is just the sheer amount of company awards that you guys have won from a cultural standpoint. And those are like you actually need people from your team to actually like, no bullshit, like, this is what I really think, right? So, um, can you talk about why that's been such an emphasis and what that's really done for you guys as an organization?

Yeah, what's interesting is we are a lot of people that enjoy working with high-growth companies, right? But a lot of high-growth companies are pretty messy, often toxic cultures and otherwise. And I, I think we wanted to be, you know, a company that worked with those sort of businesses, but, but, you know, ran our business a different way. And so we've You know, invested a lot in developing people, and they don't— might not stay here forever, but they go in-house, they do a great job, they become part of our, you know, alumni. And we just felt like we wanted this to be— we wanted to grow by growing our people, not by burning through people in the typical kind of agency structure. And, you know, 80, 80, I think 90% of our senior managers have grown up through the business and stayed with us. I think like everyone, you know, the last couple years have been a challenge with, you know, elevated rates, but we're seeing the flip side of that too. We're just— we've hired over 100 people in the last 12 months, you know, and they are coming from cultures that are bad and bosses that are toxic and love that they come in and there's 3 weeks of training. And they all comment like, we've never had training like this before. I'm like, well, you know, seems like we should train you on something if we're going to throw you into blue-chip clients and have you work on it. So, you know, it's, it's, it, the bar is, is, is low in the agency world. We've never, I mean, we are a de facto agency, but we've never sort of wanted to put ourselves in that bucket. We've been fully remote for over 10 years. Um, so, you know, a lot of things, we're just, you know, we try to build an environment that is about accountability and flexibility. If you are accountable, if you get results, then there's a high degree of flexibility.

I want to talk about that for a second. You talked about being remote for, for 10 years. And so like, Um, what do you guys do? Because I mean, GitLab, I think they have really good documentation. Um, Levels does a really good job as well, and Stripe too, their, their culture. How have you— because a lot of people that they're talking about, oh, like, you know, there's— we missed the in-office piece. Like, how do you guys kind of, um, create these, the connections without the office? Let's just put it that way. I'm just curious to know what your process is.

Yeah, I actually think we have an advantage in that everyone is on the same system. We are built around hub cities. We have events, we have a cadence, everything's on Zoom. There is no like, you're in the office with 6 people and I'm on the call up here. So because of that, we've designed a lot of systems and cadences around that, and everyone feels like they're on the same page. And the vast majority of employees say they feel more connected to AP than they have at other companies that they worked in, in person. So I, I don't think we've sorted out yet good remote and bad remote. I think Right now, recruiters are telling people anything they want to hear to take a job, and it's working to get people to leave. But we've had a lot of people calling us after 3 or 6 months, you know, who left on good terms and like, look, I was sold a bag of goods. Like, it's not, it's not the, it's not the same. So I think we're going to see that. You know, we also do value getting together. Our whole Europe team just got together this week. We are all in May going to our AP Summit at a camp this year, the entire company for 4 or 5 days. So, you know, we've just We've thought about what is it, what are the touchpoints and the human connection that you need kind of regularly to, to, to feel connected. But when you're doing a lot of client work in small teams, you don't need to be in an office every day and be in that 2-hour commute. Or if you live in LA like you did, you know, that's a one-way in some cases. Yeah.

So how often are you guys meeting up?

Um, it's a little tricky now. Our client teams used to meet up a lot more because they were traveling to meet with clients. Those clients are now a little virtual, so there's no place to go. But we try to, you know, have something at least every month or every other month, whether it's an in-person hub event, as we call, whether it's our AP Summit, you know, and this has all been constant on and off with COVID But we've been using the last 3 months to get our teams back together physically, you know, and one of the strategies of having people in these geographical hubs is that our leadership team will fly to a hub and we're able to get a huge concentration of people together and They can ask questions and we can do a social event or we can do some sort of workshop, you know, and then— but conferences and teams, I think, you know, pre-COVID, a team that worked together, it's kind of like the military, like their little pod of 8, they'd be together a lot. They'd be out at conferences, they'd be meeting clients. Some of that is just starting to, to come back for the first time.

Got it. I think that the hack here is really having the hub cities because they can meet more frequently, and then you do the AP Summit, which is where you get everyone into like this giant conference, right?

And by the way, that's where it literally works like the airline strategy, like the hubs move with each other. Like we'd realized years ago, if we were to hire 200 people in 200 different places in the US, that would mean very different things for the type of culture we wanted to build in terms of the ability to move people around, human interact. Like you can't even try to plan an event with people coming into one place from 200 places versus the Philly team is all, you know, coming to Boston. on a bus or otherwise. There are a lot of logistical things. And my last book was about remote work. Frankly, there's also a legality thing around a lot of companies telling people they can work anywhere and all this stuff. They are making a legal and administrative mess that they might have to deal with later. Tell me about it. Yeah. And by the way, you know when it comes up? Due diligence. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. When you're going to take an investment or sell your company, It comes up because there's not a real police on this unless you get caught doing something egregious. But when you find out that you haven't paid taxes in the right 6 states or had the right register, then people go to you, you got to go fix all of this or pay for all of this if you want to do this deal or indemnify us. None of those are attractive options.

Yeah. So where are your hubs? I mean, you got Boston, I heard Philly as well.

We have Boston, Philly, Denver, Chicago, London, and then we have an an LA-ish one. I think now we have like an Austin one too.

Got it.

Usually that's when we get above 10 people.

Got it. Yeah. By the way, Bob's book on Elevate, so I actually made a handful of people from my team read that book. It's Elevate: How to Thrive in a Virtual Workplace. So that's, that's great. I mean, he's got the Friday Forward newsletter that we talked about in the last episode. Moving out comes a new one, Performance Partnerships. Bob, just a couple more questions from my side. I mean, now you're, you're a chairman, you're focused on, on M&A. So, um, what's the move for you long term, next 5 years? It's scoop up a bunch of companies and then sell it to a larger one, or just keep it going, um, and then just holdco model? You go buy other stuff, invest in other stuff? Like, what's the play here?

Uh, yeah, we partnered with Mountain Gate Capital, which has a phenomenal track record. They work with, uh, Bounteous and Tenuity and a lot of other sort of marketing agencies. And so it's really a customer-driven approach. Like we took a look, we did some market research. What are our customers going to want? What are the products and services they want to have? What should we be building? What should we be buying? And we're executing on that strategy. And, you know, it's typically a 5-year period. You know, we might have a new investment partner. That's what Tenuity did, or otherwise there's sort of the next stage. But, you know, we'll all have to look at that and decide what the right options are. But we've, we've got our heads down right now, you know, trying to, you know, what is, what is our product and service and scope set look like in 2024, '25, but it's very client-driven, right? We're not looking for scale for scale. We're looking for what are people going to want and where do they want it and where can we help them?

You don't have any partners originally. You didn't have any partners, right, with AP?

Uh, no, uh, I bootstrapped it.

Yeah. So how does it feel now? Okay, so that thought had to have crossed your mind. You're like, well, you know, I was— I've been running the show the whole time, taking on investors. Like, how does it feel now? Like, I just want to see if there's Did the stigma live up to it? Like, do you feel like you're reporting to bosses now, or do you still feel a lot of freedom?

I feel like we won the jackpot with our partners. But by the way, I— and I'll say, I am surprised, continuing when people hire in our industry and otherwise, how no one does due diligence. Like, I did a ton of due diligence on investors. I probably talked to 20 referrals, people that worked with them, you know. And I— it's like a marriage. You want to understand who you're, who you're marrying. So I feel like we got exactly as advertised. Our partners are not operators. They've been able to help us in a lot of areas around finance and technology and processes and scaling that frankly most of us haven't done before at this size. So they've been really helpful, sort of as advertised. Again, I don't think you can make a holistic statement around that. I see some people, they go for the highest bidder. We specifically went out and said, here's what we want to do, here's our culture, who wants to work with us because of this, not who's going to change it or otherwise. So You know, I've heard great stories, I have heard bad stories, but I've also— you know, there's a quote, you can't do a bad deal with a good partner, or the right deal with the wrong partner, or the wrong deal with the right partner. So I think if you're going to go that route, it— I— you need to choose the partner very carefully.

Got it. I want to squeeze this question in as well. Uh, wage inflation, what are your thoughts? Because you just heard like recruiters have been poaching people like crazy.

So yeah, it's real. I, I would say that In talking to other execs in agency digital marketing, and, you know, it's probably 15 to 20% in the last year that it's gone up. So, and look, these things tend to, you know, the cure for high prices is high prices, I think Warren Buffett once said. So I think everyone's dealing with this. They're dealing with their people getting called every day and someone offering them more money. And now that geography is off the table, you know, Silicon Valley, company cannot call someone in rural Virginia and, and, you know, offer them that. I, I think that, you know, when you get a lot of those calls, eventually, you know, it starts to affect your psyche and decision-making. But, but, but we're— and, and every business has their own economics. Like, we're, we're open book. We're pretty honest with our employees. Like, we couldn't— you know, 90% of our costs are, are people, right? So it would just, to just you know, we can't— we haven't raised prices 20% on our clients to just move 20% or whatever it is. Like, it just wouldn't work. So, um, I think, you know, like everyone, we're, we're focusing on our entire value proposition. You know, we're trying to, uh, you know, take care of people, move people to market. But yeah, it is— did the, the demand for digital marketing talent is through the roof. With that said, I will tell you that when someone takes that, we've seen too, they take that whatever more they're offered and they go to work and they are miserable, they will tell you that it's not worth it. So there is some balance to that, but it is for sure a super competitive market right now. And I think when a side has— when a company has too much power, it goes to their head. I think when employees can have too much power, it often goes to their head too. And there's some balance that I think would be good for everyone. The pendulum has swung really fast. And I think it's, I, like I said, it's an interesting thing. We are, we are. So certainly our turnover is higher, but we are having no problem getting people to come in. And they're coming in super excited. And again, in our industry, if a lot of times we are training people and then they are moving up and going in-house, it's kind of the McKinsey model. Like it's not a bad thing for us long-term to have a lot of, you know, AP alumni, you know, leading these, these efforts at different organizations.

Yeah, you just gave me an idea. I think there's, there's an argument for the head of people, um, to go back and repoach the regrettable loss, um, to see how they're feeling after 6 to 12 months.

You should check in with everyone. We've done it after 6 to 12 months, and we heard from some employees who weren't happy that other people were too shy or embarrassed to reach out. So yeah, our head of people did reach out to everyone, just said, I'm just checking in, like, you know, the door is open, let us know. I mean, I, I was surprised how many people felt like who hadn't burned a bridge, but they just had some guilt or some—

They all do.

About wanting to reach back out. Yeah.

Got it. Final 2 questions from my side. So being that this is a marketing podcast, everyone loves tools. So what's your favorite performance marketing tool? One or 2 of them.

Performance marketing tool. I get to— I'll tell you, I get a lot of data off LinkedIn. Just watching who's doing what campaigns, they're talking about new clients, competitive intelligence, like I think, I think it's one of the few things I use daily. And actually the insights tool in LinkedIn is pretty helpful too. If you don't, I mean, you can see whether companies are growing or shrinking or which roles they're hiring for. So, I mean, that's, I'm not in the marketing weeds anymore. So for me, that helps me understand dynamics that are going on at potential clients or competitors or partners or otherwise.

Cool. And Bob, what would be your favorite book? Not one of yours, favorite book in the last, let's call it last 24 months or so, most impactful one.

You know, it was a little before that, but I'm fascinated with cognitive dissonance. I think it's just like, I think it's an overpowering phenomenon that causes a lot of us to make really bad decisions. And there's a book called Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me. And it's sort of the definitive book on cognitive dissonance. I have gifted that a lot to people and I send it to them and I There's nothing that I see more regularly than that phenomenon sort of in personal and professional life.

Is that audiobookable or is that— should I just physical book it?

I think it is. It's by Carol. I'm forgetting her last name now, but it's just got some great examples about why we repeat our mistakes to sort of try to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Okay. All right. Should I get the audiobook version or the physical? What do you think?

I mean, I think audio is equivalent in anything, so. Really?

Sometimes I think it's— Naval Ravikant uses the analogy, it's like juicing, right? You remove the nutrients. Sometimes I agree with that.

The audiobook?

Yeah.

Sometimes the author reads it and they're not a very good reader, right? Yeah. So sometimes I like that it's their voice.

Interesting.

Michael Lewis had a woman narrate his last book. And I love Michael. I just love listening to him. And I was very surprised when I got the audiobook And it wasn't, it wasn't him the last time.

Fascinating. Well, Bob, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find out more about you and the book?

Yeah, sure. Um, the book is wherever books are sold, Moving to Outcomes. Uh, if you're interested, Acceleration Partners, uh, easier to Google it than to, to spell it. Um, we've got tons of free resources if you want to understand partner marketing, FAQs, all that stuff. Uh, if you're interested in Other books, Friday Forward, any of that stuff, it's all at robertglaser.com.

All right. Thanks, Bob.

Thanks, Eric.