Background

My story with marketing started in college. I was a student at the Faculty of Marketing within ASE (Bucharest University of Economic Studies), and from my college years I was already involved in various marketing projects and internships.

Like any student back then, I really wanted to work in PR or at a creative agency, but one of my first (paid) jobs happened to be in performance marketing, and I realized my personality was much better suited to an analytical job than a creative one.

I discovered affiliate marketing in my early years of work. First I worked on the advertiser side in the Telecom industry, where I handled the relationship with affiliates. My next job was at a company doing programmatic media buying for these telecom services, and that's where I discovered how much I love doing data analysis and optimizing campaigns based on the insights I found. 12 years later, I'm still doing that.

For 7 years I've been running Bigger Picture Solutions, which has grown from a small startup where we did media buying as affiliates for telecom services into a company with 17 employees in Romania and a few remote collaborators, with thousands of live campaigns for e-commerce and telehealth.

BusinessLeague in one sentence

Gamifying affiliate marketing :)

I say that because it feels like healthy competition. Media buying itself feels like a strategy game, and the ranking among affiliates makes us try even harder and motivates us.

What's your favorite Challenge on the platform?

I'd say SpeedRun, because it fits our paid media style best.

RevenueRally is more suited to those promoting products with high AOV or revenue, while Target Strike seems more suited for content sites or intent-driven sites.

Which stores do you work best with on the platform, and what are the ingredients of that success?

We work very well with fashion and beauty brands: Otter, Kitunghii, Pensule Machiaj. We've also had very good results with Intimax, Cupio, and other fashion brands that have since left the affiliate program.

I think brands' openness to trying new things and good communication matter a lot.

If you could change one thing about BusinessLeague, what would it be?

I'd want more tools for affiliates. I think you do an excellent job for affiliates with content sites and for those who want to run Google Ads/CSS campaigns, but for Meta or other social media platforms where paid ads can be run, other types of tools would help.

Also, professional affiliates who do media buying usually use a tracker, and integrations are done via postback, in order to bring conversions into a platform where you can monitor all campaigns and get relevant statistics.

I think the biggest obstacle we ran into in scaling on BusinessLeague on the Facebook Ads side was the technical integration. We eventually managed to do it through a workaround, and since then we've started getting better results.

As a media buyer, you need to track campaign data in a tracker and also send conversions to Meta. Otherwise you're buying traffic blindly and hoping it converts, and you also can't get valuable insights to optimize campaigns (demographic insights, ad insights, etc.).

Meta has a very good algorithm for bringing relevant users to your ads, if you give it the right signals.

Why is there still reluctance toward affiliate marketing?

I think most brands in Romania have preconceived notions about affiliate marketing and affiliates. Most want to work with CSS or with influencers or content sites, and overlook the fact that there are people specialized in other channels who can bring traffic and sales.

Many chase vanity metrics or try affiliate marketing because it's a trend, without deeply understanding the differences between the promotion channels used, or without getting involved in helping affiliates.

Here I'll give our own example - Meta Ads or programmatic media buying.

Many brands refuse to try, saying they already do this with an agency or in-house. But campaign performance depends more on the analysis the campaign manager does.

Most agencies for Google or Meta don't have a performance mindset. Being paid commission from media spend, or paid per campaigns launched, their KPI is to spend the budgets. Affiliates, being paid on commission from sales, are much more careful about where every leu of the budget goes, because they're paying for traffic out of their own pocket and can lose money. So every campaign is analyzed in detail.

To come back to the question, after laying out our context - many online stores believe affiliates might compete with their own direct campaigns, which would raise their CPC. And while that may be true for Google Ads (for search campaigns), I don't think it's the case for banner or video ads, because there you're competing with all the advertisers who have the same target audience. So, with the help of affiliates, a brand is simply maximizing its visibility and accessing a larger share of the traffic pool.

Each channel has its role in the funnel, and affiliates can add incredible value:

• Google Ads is much more intent-driven and captures the user when they have a need and are researching
• Content sites have the role of educating users
• Facebook/Instagram Ads are suited for impulse buying (which is why it works much better for fashion & beauty)
• Coupon sites reach a budget-conscious audience that might go to a competitor without a discount
• Influencers reach a niche audience that wants a certain lifestyle
• More technical partners can help optimize conversion rate and reduce cart abandonment rate, etc.

Also, I think stores should know that without getting involved in recruiting affiliates and offering them support, things don't happen on their own. Affiliates have different needs: some need creatives, others need higher commissions to be able to test more traffic sources, others need better payment terms; and don't even get me started on communication - I've often noticed, as an affiliate, that I gave many more chances to online stores where the account manager on their side was friendly and available when I needed help.

Another important point from our perspective is that newly launched brands are very hard to promote as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing as a promotion channel should come in once the brand is better known and has a good reputation.

Affiliates are reluctant to promote new brands they don't know much about; the same goes for users, who prefer to buy from an online store where they know for sure they can return items or that they'll receive their order. Affiliate marketing should be a channel that supports a company's other marketing activities.

Facebook Ads as our main sales weapon

As a disclaimer, globally, our core activity at Bigger Picture Solutions is programmatic media buying. But in the Romanian market, things are different - here Facebook Ads is our main channel as affiliates - honestly because almost no one wanted to try programmatic.

Coming back to Facebook Ads - yes, it's our main channel for the Romanian market. Our focus is fashion & beauty - and that came from years of experience trying many verticals. As an affiliate without pixel access on the site to do retargeting, Facebook Ads gets the best results for impulse buying. I want to buy a product that looks good or that gives me certain benefits or status.

As for our strategy, we use the BusinessLeague reports a lot to see what users are buying. This is very valuable information that, honestly, out of the dozens of international affiliate networks we work with, no one else offers. So one of the things we do weekly is look at the best-selling products and try various angles for our creatives.

As I mentioned earlier, through a technical workaround we managed to bring our conversions from 2Performant into our tracker (Voluum) and from there into Meta, so now we can use their algorithm (run campaigns with a conversion goal) and also see in detail in the reports which targeting brings more conversions, in order to optimize our campaigns or launch new campaigns with new targeting combinations.

We also use lookalike audiences quite a bit to discover users who are similar to those who are already buying.

That said, one of the difficulties we run into is finding online stores in the fashion and beauty niche that accept Facebook Ads. We always run into that "we do it in-house."

How do you see affiliate marketing in the medium and long term?

We're very active in the US market - a much more mature market and quite different from ours. I think many trends from there will show up here too.

Affiliate marketing is constantly changing and adapting to technology. For example, AI has had a major impact on the industry. On one hand, content sites have been hit hard by AI and zero-click search (and rightly so - people don't want to land on content sites that rank first on Google just because they're SEO-optimized, only to find an article full of ads with no actual answer to their question).

On the other hand, many affiliates have found AI to be a great resource for quickly producing ad copy or banners, or even entire vibe-coded projects monetized through affiliate marketing.

Another trend I've seen at affiliate conferences is brand-to-brand partnerships. Specifically, brands promoting each other through affiliate links. Technical solutions implemented after a user buys a product are becoming more and more popular - a pop-up appears with a promotion for complementary brands.

Also in the medium term, I expect affiliate agencies to start appearing here too. Similar to what you've done on the platform, encouraging affiliates to become affiliate managers. In the US there are many well-known advertising agencies that have opened standalone departments to manage major brands' affiliate programs, or simply agencies that employ only affiliate managers. These agencies have thousands of publishers in their portfolio and the know-how to grow affiliate programs or expand into other markets.

I'd add here that we have a few Romanians doing an incredible job as affiliate managers for international brands.

In the long term, I think there will be even more emphasis on incrementality, meaning bringing in new users as an affiliate - people who wouldn't have bought that product without hearing about it from you.

Affiliate marketing largely works on a last-click attribution basis, which means a large share of commissions go to very intent-driven affiliates (coupons, cashback, etc.). A user might see multiple ads from multiple affiliates before buying, but the ecosystem rewards the last click before the purchase.

I've seen many brands starting to transition toward multi-touch attribution, precisely out of a desire to properly reward all the affiliates who contribute to a sale. It's quite complicated to implement and track, but that's where I see the industry tending to move in the long run.

Fashion Report. Which numbers do you find most interesting/useful from there?

The insight about iPhone users spending more money on fashion - we see that too, and it's interesting. Of course, we see that when we analyze total data by OS, because we have dozens of campaigns running with various targeting, and the trend doesn't always hold at the individual campaign level. Also, the vast majority of traffic in our Romania campaigns comes from Android users, and they also generate the vast majority of sales.

I'd add an insight I've seen consistently in recent years - users with their browser set to English have a much lower conversion rate. In other words, I think users with an English-language browser are less receptive to ads on Meta and more digitally native.

As a media buyer, I think it's crucial to understand campaign statistics and make data-driven decisions. Data tells a story, if you know how to ask the right questions, and your insights are very useful because they highlight the need for analysis.
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(this interview was translated from Romanian using AI. Pentru versiunea originală în limba română, click aici)