AwinTalks recently sat down with Victor Dahlborg: Co-founder of refunder to discuss consumer focused marketing. Victor is uniquely qualified to talk about this topic, as his background and current practices will illustrate. Affilate marketing is, in many ways leading the way in development of tools and methodologies to help serve the complex needs of online shoppers.

Often times it takes a shock for us to realize business principles that should have long been right in front of our noses.  The reciprocal value of consumer focused marketing and a consumer value driven approach seems to be the great takeaway from years of Amazon devouring the ecommerce world.

In many ways, the affiliate industry has long been a viable channel for the acquisition of satisfied traffic. Of traffic, that represents a consumer already receiving value from the publisher funnel.   

Victor Dahlborg is the Co-founder of Refunder. Today Refunder is Swedens largest cashback site – or – as they describe themselves, a Social shopping site.

Victor Dahlborg

"I would characterize myself as an entrepreneur, but I have a previous background as Global Brand/Marketing Director for companies like PriceRunner and MTG and Telefonica. Some people might also know that I was the founder of the certification Trygg E-handel, that guides consumers in Sweden and Norway to retailers who actually fulfill higher demands than what the law requires. I also co-founded the car buying guide FACIT.com that helps people who really doesn’t care about the logo on the hood, but wants to find a car that matches their needs and price. And that is a really interesting industry.

I would say that the car industry is probably the last disruptive industry after the travel and music industry. It really needs to go through a big change in order to meet the new buying behavior we see in so many other industries.  Something that not so many people know is that I was working with a team to build the first – and actually a better version - of todays AirBnB. The problem was that it was launched only 2 weeks before the dot.com crash (in April 2000) J. And the conclusion of that…… its all about Timing."

In this episode, we will chat about the positives and negatives of such an event. We will also give a bit of background about the event goals and if we believe we were able to meet them.

In this final episode of our preview series, we introduce Sri Sharma. Sri will be the Keynote speaker at the Awin Fashion and Retail day.

Sri self identifies as a digital entrepreneur and investor. His successes in both areas are substantial and demarcated by business growth and a raft of industry awards.

Sri has won awards for entrepreneurship, fast business growth and technology innovation such as Highly Commended Entrepreneur of the Year from the National Business Awards, The Sunday Times Tech Track and Deloitte Tech Fast 50 and 500 across EMEA.

Sri will be giving a forward looking presentation entitled The Future of Retail.

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This episode is an introduction to one of our featured speakers for the Awin Fashion and Retail day; Rob Davinson. Rob is our global content manager and is also the host of the AwinTalks global podcast.

Rob has also been responsible for a substantial number of industry white papers and responsible for the annual Awin Report, an overarching global industry insight document.

Rob will be giving an in depth presentation of how affiliate can save the internet.

In this episode you will be introduced to one of our featured event speakers Henric Smolak.

Henric Smolak has been passionate about changing the media landscape since his first startup Qulart who wanted to create a new way to discover content in a personalized media platform which recommended you the best available content on the web. His next journey has been with the content recommendation platform Strossle which has become one of the biggest in Europe. Strossle has 10 offices in Europe and serves over 3 billion content recommendations every month. Strossle aims to become the the publisher’s best friend and a top of the line distribution platform for both publishers and brands. Henric is an evangelist in Content Marketing and Native Advertising and is fighting for a brighter future for the industry. He believes in a digital climate which is qualitative both for the users, publishers and brand and believes that the Internet today has become a giant Times Square where everyone tries to steal your attention. Henric also hosts Sweden’s biggest tech podcast, is a course leader in Digital Media and Content Marketing and is a frequently hired Keynote speaker internationally. Henric is a member of the board in IAB’s Native Task Force in the Nordics.

Be sure to check out Henric´s podcast Under Femton  

At Awin, building lasting connections that power growth means that we have to hold ourselves accountable to bring together the industry on the bases of knowledge sharing.

The 2018 Awin fashion and retail day in an opportunity for all members of the digital marketing world within the Nordic markets to interface. In this episode you will hear from the Awin Nordics managing director Tim Lomborg about the upcoming event!

In this episode of AwinTalks, I had the opportunity to chat with one of the Nordic affiliate industry´s most long standing experts. Mats, a former network Head of tech created Kickback in 2009. KickBack is now one of the largest affiliate publishers in the entire Nordics, is a part of Schibsted Media Group and now operates within the verticals of CashBack, Voucher and editorial content.

Some of the questions asked in this interview at times push the comfort zones of both myself and my guest as we explored the value of big media house investments in the affiliate industry and the relevance of influencer agencies.

As always I want to carve out some space for my own opinion. I believe in accountable traffic. As is it the case that Affiliate traffic is generally the most accountable of all digitally driven, at times I find it difficult not to deride any affiliate players making claims of value that are not verifiably trackable. This is basically where I land with regard to some agencies. Advertisers and influencers should tread carefully when it comes to evaluating returns from such partners. Unclear value return creates a surefire scaling gamble. This is not a blanket statement about influencer agencies. This is a statements about those who operate as outlined only. Affiliate marketing by design shields advertisers from making such gambles through its performance based commission model. It may be simple and it may not be laced with buzz words but, it’s accurate and scalable.

Mats also focuses heavily on the need for greater education in the digital marketing field. He advocates for education through relationship building and a focus on transparent business practices.

In this episode we chat with Henric Smolak about the digital marketing world as it stands today.

In this wide ranging discussion, Henric, CRO at Strossle and Host of industry Pod Under 15 gives his educated views on the topic of digitalization, GDPR, mega platforms and much more.

Each marketing channel has a set of definable KPIs. This is a factor that is indicative of overall channel value.

Channel KPIs for Affiliate marketing are amongst the most complex and misunderstood of any digital channel.

As this is partially a result of poor messaging from within the channel, it is critical that as a baseline all Account Managers understand all potential KPIs.