Founder and CEO, Goat Media
Oakes became known through the world surrounding Diesel Power Gear and the Diesel Brothers, where commerce, entertainment, community and high-value product giveaways could be combined into one growth system. His career is a useful counterexample to the assumption that direct response must always mean discounting. He learned to make the promotion itself feel like part of the brand’s culture.
Oakes is an international performance-marketing expert who has built and exited multiple businesses. He is also one of the conference’s visible advocates, repeatedly emphasizing the quality of the Affiliate World audience and practitioner community.
Oakes’s profile is defined by range: affiliate marketing, lead generation, agency work, owned businesses, and exits. That breadth makes him a useful guide to the decisions that connect short-term campaign performance with long-term enterprise value.
Oakes’s reputation grew through his work with Diesel Power Gear and the Diesel Brothers ecosystem, where paid media, entertainment and high-value giveaways were woven into one customer-acquisition engine. He later carried those lessons into business exits, consulting and Goat Media, becoming a specialist in making promotion feel like participation in a brand community.
At Affiliate World Europe 2018, Oakes discussed the dos and don’ts of influencer marketing and shared a case study promoted as achieving 17-times return on ad spend. His giveaway framework later became a recurring Affiliate World subject. Instead of cutting price, a brand could offer entry into a desirable giveaway, lowering acquisition costs while collecting customer and audience data that increased lifetime value. The impact was the shift from transaction to event: customers were not only purchasing an item, but joining a story they wanted to follow and share.
Affiliate World readers can learn from the way Oakes frames the industry as a network of high-capability operators. Success is not only a matter of tactics; it is also access to partners, speed of learning, reputation, and the ability to recognize where a proven acquisition skill can support a larger company.
Oakes later built and exited businesses, helped scale Diesel Power Gear from a reported $4 million to $30 million in 2021 and founded Goat Media. His repeated Affiliate World appearances track the movement from in-house success story to an independent performance-marketing authority.
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