Marthe Berlin, Regional Vice President of Publisher Development at impact.com, believes that partnerships have evolved beyond traditional affiliate marketing, creating new opportunities and fresh challenges for both brands and publishers.
NDA recently spoke with Berlin to find out more…
Why do you describe partnerships as the missing layer between adtech and martech?
If we look at what adtech and martech have traditionally done, they’re answering different questions. Adtech is focused on whether you acquired a customer, while martech is more concerned with what happened after that customer was acquired and how they behaved over time.
Partnerships sit in the middle. Historically, we haven’t always had the infrastructure or the data to connect those two areas, but partnership data provides that missing layer. It gives brands the information they need to understand not only whether they acquired a customer, but also how that customer behaved afterwards and the value they ultimately created.
How have partnerships evolved beyond traditional affiliate marketing?
One important distinction is that affiliate really describes the mechanics and measurement of the channel rather than the breadth of marketing activity it now covers.
Partnerships today span everything from email and loyalty to programmatic and content. What has changed most is how brands use the data available to them. Rather than simply asking whether a publisher generated a conversion, they’re asking whether that conversion produced a high-quality customer, which partners are delivering the greatest lifetime value and whether they’re rewarding those partners appropriately.
Increasingly, partnerships are being viewed through the same lens as martech, with much greater emphasis on retention, loyalty and customer lifetime value rather than acquisition alone.
How is partnership data helping connect media performance with customer value?
Traditionally, brands looked at where a customer came from. Today they want to understand what that customer did afterwards.
Connecting different data points gives brands a much fuller picture of customer behaviour. A partner that appears to drive 10% of new purchases may actually account for 30% of repeat purchases as well. Once you can see that, the value of that partnership changes dramatically because you’re no longer judging performance solely on the first transaction.
What are brands asking for today?
The level of sophistication varies considerably.
Some of the more mature brands are already using partnership data to integrate affiliate activity with the rest of their marketing and understand how partnerships contribute to broader business goals. They’re looking at how they reward partners delivering the highest-value customers and how partnership performance aligns with wider marketing objectives.
Other brands are earlier in that journey. Their questions are more fundamental: how do we measure what’s working, how do we understand the full customer journey, and how can we use data to optimise performance?
What challenges are publishers facing?
Publishers are increasingly focused on diversifying revenue without increasing workloads.
Many publisher teams are resource constrained, so they’re looking for automation and ways to make better use of the resources they already have. They’re also becoming much more strategic, using data to optimise partnerships over time rather than simply establishing relationships and leaving them to run.
The most successful partnerships are increasingly collaborative, with publishers responding directly to the commercial objectives and KPIs that brands are trying to achieve.
Are brands becoming better at using their own data?
We’re definitely seeing progress, although many organisations still operate in silos.
Affiliate teams, loyalty teams and customer optimisation teams often work independently and don’t always share data. But there’s a clear shift towards a more unified approach, particularly among more mature organisations that want a complete view of the customer journey.
We’re also having conversations with a much broader range of stakeholders than we would have previously, including loyalty teams on the brand side and editorial teams within publishing businesses.
What trends are emerging in consumer behaviour?
One of the biggest changes we’re seeing is that consumers don’t necessarily want to buy directly from the brand anymore.
Many prefer purchasing through retailers such as Amazon or John Lewis because they trust the customer service, know the returns process and are familiar with the overall shopping experience. That creates a challenge for publishers because consumers increasingly expect multiple purchasing options rather than a single direct-to-brand route.
Making those different buying paths available will become increasingly important if publishers want to maximise conversions.
What opportunities do you see for publishers?
Many editorial publishers have large volumes of content that currently aren’t generating meaningful revenue. Helping publishers monetise that content more effectively through contextual product recommendations creates an opportunity to increase the value of existing editorial assets without requiring significant additional resource.
At the same time, the emergence of large language models is creating new challenges for publishers as referral traffic comes under pressure. That makes it even more important to maximise the value of every visitor who does arrive by improving conversion rates and making commercial content more relevant.
What are your priorities over the coming year?
A recurring theme across everything we’re working on is helping brands and publishers diversify rather than relying on a single revenue stream or marketing channel.
Automation is a major priority, as is helping organisations connect partnership data with their wider business objectives. Ultimately, partnerships are becoming a much more strategic part of the marketing mix, and the opportunity is to use richer data and better technology to help brands and publishers build more valuable, longer-term relationships.
