The Thin Layer of Trust
Michael McNerney, Publisher of Martech Record, is the rare person who had both a trade publishing background and a front-row seat to affiliate marketing’s evolution before starting an independent publication to cover it. His philosophy for building a trusted B2B media brand is the same as his advice for brand marketing: target audience, positioning statement, reach, frequency, rinse and repeat.
“I want to be the thin layer of trust that allows every transaction in the industry just to go a little bit easier. If you do that consistently, you find yourself in all the right places.”
Michael McNerney is the Publisher and Founder of Martech Record, a trade publication covering the intersection of commerce, media, and affiliate marketing. He founded it in 2019, applying his two decades of experience in trade publishing and B2B partnership marketing to a market he believed was about to grow significantly as the things people buy online got more expensive and more complex. The community now numbers 9,000 newsletter subscribers, a 4,000-person Slack group, and five live events a year.
Michael began his career in advertising at FCB Global and Ogilvy and Mather in New York before going to business school and spending a decade at McGraw-Hill, eventually as Senior Director of Digital Media for their trade publications. He was then part of the McGraw-Hill Management Development Program, a leadership programme placing MBA graduates in three rotations before a full-time leadership role. He moved to Yodle as Director of Business Development and Channel Sales before shifting to affiliate and partnership marketing at Partnerize.
Watching the affiliate industry from inside Partnerize, he noticed what he recognised from his trade publishing years: a market that needed a trusted independent publication. Nobody else was covering affiliate marketing in a serious, consistent, non-promotional way. He was also probably, he notes, the only person in the world who knew both how to run a trade publication and something about affiliate marketing. Martech Record was the result. His view is that quality, independent, targeted content is the only media strategy that compounds over time.
“Target audience, positioning statement, reach, frequency, rinse and repeat. I hate to say it to this audience, but it is not brain surgery.”
“CEOs say what they want to say. The perfect person is the person just promoted to Vice President.”
Michael’s founding editorial policy was to keep CEOs off his panels. Not as a provocation, but because the VP is the person who will tell you the truth. They have enough seniority to have an opinion worth hearing and enough proximity to the day-to-day to make it concrete. The insight compounds: if your brand marketing wants to get in front of the right people at a trade publisher’s event, stop sending the CEO. Send the person who actually runs the thing.
“Affiliate is the last relationship-based channel. You are handing your brand to another publisher.”
The mistake most brands make when approaching affiliate marketing is treating it like search or social: high frequency, low relationship, optimise toward last click. Affiliate is the opposite. Building a productive affiliate relationship takes months of education, incentive alignment, and trust. Michael’s advice for anyone new to the channel is to hire someone who knows what they are doing, commit six months to building and failing, and understand that the brands who have built this patiently are seeing compounding returns that paid search cannot replicate at current costs.
“For the first three months, don’t say anything interesting. Just be present.”
Michael’s advice to Connecto, a client he used as a case study, was to resist the instinct to explain everything at once. Presence before positioning. Consistency before conversion. The strategy was to show up in the newsletter weekly for three months, saying nothing complicated, just establishing that the brand existed and was part of the community. Then send the sales team to the relevant events. Then start talking about specific benefits. Then turn on lead capture. It sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it in that order.
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