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Linkshare has experienced many changes over the last year, but president Steve Denton says the evolution isn't over.
Earlier this year Steve Denton was named president of LinkShare, following the resignations of Chairman and CEO Stephen Messer and President and COO Heidi S. Messer, who led LinkShare's development from its founding in 1996 through its $425 million sale to Rakuten in late 2005. Denton heads up all day-to-day operations including management and continuous development of the talent and processes required to drive LinkShare's continued growth. Revenue Editor-in-Chief Lisa Picarille spoke with Denton about the cultural, organizational and other big changes that LinkShare is dealing with in order to achieve its goal of becoming a performance marketing powerhouse.
Lisa Picarille: What's changed since LinkShare became part of Rakuten last year? Steve Denton: Rakuten USA is the company set up in Boston, and the CEO of Rakuten USA is John Kim and he's the CEO of LinkShare. LinkShare was the first international acquisition for Rakuten. It's been great working with John and the entire team at Rakuten, including Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO. Rakuten is now the sixth-largest Web services companies in the world from a market cap standpoint. And having access to those resources from that organization has been very rewarding and very fulfilling. When there are new products we want to roll out, new markets we want to enter, new geographic footprints that we want to establish, I don't have to wait for two years to accumulate the capital to do that. I have an owner that has the resources and that's why we sold the company. We also sold the company because we don't just compete against affiliate companies. We are in a performance marketing industry – so we are competing against everyone out there that is going for inventory on these publishing or distribution sites.
As far as the way we operate the business, there has been no real change. The financial results roll up into Rakuten. That is obviously a structural change. There's a new board of directors. But as far as running the day-in-and-day-out business there's John Kim and myself. We have seven teams' employees working with counterparts in Japan on integration projects to see where we can find some synergies and some best practices from both organizations. That's taken a good amount of time and we just looked at the final presentations [in June] and there have been some subtle changes there that you wouldn't notice externally. We've been the beneficiaries of development resources from Japan, which again, Jonathan Levinson, our CTO, came from Rakuten. But as for the nuts and bolts, it's all about continuing to build on what we have.
LP: What impact has there been for LinkShare since the departure of Steve and Heidi [Messer]? SD: Clearly anytime the founders that established a business and an industry leave, they are missed. But as an organization we are moving forward. I run the day-to-day business or the customer-facing business. I deal with distribution services, merchant services affiliate support, marketing, product development, client development and search. All of those roll up to me. And beyond the customer-facing – tech, legal, GNA, finance – John Kim manages that.
We've been focused on three things since this past February: the leadership transition; strengthening our core offering; and the cultural transition from being a New York-based privately held business to a business unit in a division in a large international media company. That's been a big transition – culturally, and the leadership change, that's been a big focus.
The second big thing – strengthening the core offering – not that we had any issues with the core offering and some of the products we announced at the symposium – rolling out Link Locator Direct, which is our first Web services offering. It enables affiliates to have easy access to links, and have them defined in categories: coupons, hot products, logos, general promotion, free shipping and best converting.
We've made some changes to our merchandizing product. We have a client in beta now for whom we've recently categorized the data feeds; so, working with normalization and unification. Synergy Analytics has been in beta for some time. We held the affiliate and merchant advisory boards in San Francisco at the [LinkShare] Summit; we got some great feedback. And working with the development teams, and it's our intent to take both of those products out of beta by the end of the summer, then run dual reporting for six months as the performance testing and get the feedback from the users. It's been in beta a long time but that's because it's a product that's going to change and revolutionize the way we do things here at LinkShare and send information to our partners. That's been a big focus.
LP: What changes have you made at LinkShare since being appointed president? SD: Lead generation, ad networks, AdSense itself and shopping comparison, performance- based and what used to be known as affiliate marketing deals have all evolved. I think that we need to embrace that and find a way to be inclusionary with that, rather than just watching it grow up around you.
People ask me if the affiliate marketing industry is slow – no. I don't define affiliate marketing as just what I do; I look at performance marketing. Anytime you are paying a third-party website a commission for some sort of thing that is a measurable and definable event – applications, sales, subscription – that's inventory that a company like LinkShare should be going after. Because we've got great merchants, and we've got great distribution partners. That's inventory we should be going after.
LP: What are some of the initiatives LinkShare has planned over the next 12 months? SD: It's been a busy four months: leadership transition, cultural changes, integration with Rakuten. The Synergy Analytic product – getting it out of beta is just step one, but then refining that product and taking the feedback from users and enhancing that product over the next six months and beyond is key for us. The work we've been doing on the merchandising data feeds and expanding that out. Taking this new locator direct and expanding our Web services offering in new ways of distribution of links is critical. Then we'll be in the middle of backto- school, then right into fourth quarter, and that's not a time to roll out new products. So, our road map is fairly welldefined, with some of the exciting things we did last year and with Athena and enhancements we've been making to that – the affiliate analytics and the changes to that. Continued on Page 2...
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