Matt Conlin is Founder and President of Fluent. I’ve known Matt for more than a decade and wanted to have a conversation with him what his company is doing and about the latest trends in performance marketing. As Matt explains, Fluent is “a specialist in customer acquisition whose platforms allows brands to bid on outcomes” in a variety of verticals. The Fluent platform is underpinned by a group of web and mobile web properties.
Given Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter, I wanted to get Matt’s take on the changes that Musk is making to the platform and whether these changes will help or hurt Twitter’s future as an ad-supported service. As Matt observes, it’s important for Musk to embrace his best talent, his most significant community contributors, and also Twitter’s advertisers: “this business will fail unless it can drive not only results but continue to bring in ad dollars because advertisers believe it is a brand-safe environment, and they’re getting results as a byproduct from their advertising on that platform. It seems like none of those things are working too well right now.”
Our conversation then turned to a discussion of push notifications, messaging strategy, and the fact that email still constitutes a key tool in the marketer’s toolkit. As Matt notes, email today represents the key to identifying one’s audience on various addressable platforms, and that SMS is often a preferred communications channel for many brand interactions. We discuss the growing importance of excellent creative in messaging, especially in terms of the fact that having great creative can allow the marketer to afford media that would be otherwise unaffordable, and whether it makes sense for a marketer to provide different creative for different audience segments. We also address issues that are coming up — for marketers and audience members alike — as a result of privacy-protection measures impacting tracking.
I also wanted to get Matt’s take on what might be ahead for the marketing industry in 2023 and beyond.