After months of behind the scenes planning and tinkering, finally we can announce that our brand new publication Hello Partner is live!

Hello Partner is your helping hand for building profitable partnerships. As the industry continues to grow and evolve, we aim to provide you with the essential hub for navigating the interconnecting worlds of performance marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing and the creator economy.

These four categories will form the basis for all of our content, which will consist of even more juicy deep dives, insightful interviews with industry leaders, and breaking news. You can also look forward to new features, such as our ‘Movers and Shakers’ revamp ‘The Top Line’, which will focus more on new and exciting job positions, as well as key partnerships.

Our live events are all about connecting the industry and strengthening the sense of community across channels, and Hello Partner will function as a digital extension of this space. There will be more opportunity to voice your thoughts, opinions, and questions about the industry via features like ‘Overheard in the Partnerships Lounge’, where members of our Guild group can make submissions.

You can also look forward to more webinars, reports, podcasts, and round tables.

Explore our membership tiers to get the best experience possible out of Hello Partner. Paid members will receive access to not only the best content but also upcoming business intelligence reports, recorded sessions from PI LIVE and the Influencer Marketing Show, our exclusive networking event, and much more. Members also receive access to recorded speaker sessions from PI LIVE and the Influencer Marketing Show.

Sign up to our new newsletter for all the best content of the week, as well as the new section ‘Partnership of the Week’, keeping you up to date with trailblazing partnerships. Paid members will also receive three exclusive features in their newsletter: ‘Top Tip for Next Week’, ‘Top Three LinkedIn Posts of the Week’, and an agony aunt-style section titled ‘What’s Your Problem?’

To be clear, this isn’t the complete end of PerformanceIN. The site will remain active, and will evolve in the coming months. Keep watching this space, as there are exciting plans in the pipeline. But to keep up to date with the latest news and features, head over to Hello Partner.

So, come join us on this exciting new publication, and sign up to Hello Partner now!

The post Goodbye PerformanceIN, Hello Partner appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The acquisition comes on the heels of Incubeta’s recent big win at the Global Performance Marketing Awards, where the team took home the trophy for Best Performance Marketing Agency. Judges’ comments commended the “powerhouse” agency of over 800 employees for “supporting employees across all factors, driving business growth and maintaining client relationships.”   

The Carlyle Europe Technology Partners (“CETP”) platform will support Incubeta in accelerating its international growth plan through the development of its existing suite of services and acquisitions, as well as investing in the company’s commercial operations and proprietary technology. CETP has extensive experience in scaling technology and marketing services businesses through its partnerships with leaders in their respective markets, including companies such as DEPT, Work & Co, The Mill, and HSO.

Lars Lehne, CEO of Incubeta, said:

“We are very proud of the significant growth that Incubeta has achieved, having completed five acquisitions over the past two years and becoming a key partner in the Google ecosystem. We strongly believe Carlyle is the perfect partner as we take the next step in our growth journey, given its global presence, deep understanding of our sector, and extensive experience in scaling technology and marketing services businesses.”

Andrew Tan, Director in the CETP investment advisory team, said:

“Incubeta has all the hallmarks we look for in our investments – exposure to a market benefiting from strong tailwinds, partnership with an experienced and driven management team, and multiple levers for growth, including international expansion and service line extension. We look forward to partnering with Incubeta’s management team under the leadership of CEO Lars Lehne to help accelerate the next phase of the company’s growth as it seeks to become the leading global partner of choice in the fast-growing GMP ecosystem.”

The post Global Investment Firm Carlyle to Acquire International Marketing Agency Incubeta appeared first on PerformanceIN.

With a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, VIVnetworks helps e-commerce brands scale their performance marketing efforts and unlock growth in the regional market, as well as globally. The agency currently possesses a client portfolio of 900 merchants across 27 countries.

The integration of VIVnetworks with CJ will open up new opportunities for global brands and publishers to activate and grow within Central and Eastern European markets whilst also supporting those within the region to expand internationally.

VIVnetworks will be integrated into CJ’s continental European offering and operate under the leadership of Tobias Allgeyer, Senior Vice President EMEA, based in Munich. VIVnetworks’ founders, Vladan Hejnic, CEO, and Robert Studený, COO will join CJ’s executive management for Central and Eastern Europe.

Mayuresh Kshetramade, CEO at CJ, says of the acquisition:

“A decade ago, CJ started partnering with VIVnetworks to harness the agency’s vast expertise in affiliate marketing within Central and Eastern Europe. I’m pleased to say that continues to be a huge success. VIVnetworks have not only operated and developed expertise in the region, they’ve matured the affiliate industry. Now, under CJ’s unified umbrella, VIVnetworks and CJ will fully combine to help our clients—advertisers, publishers, and agencies—win in commerce with unparalleled regional and global performance marketing expertise supported by our internationally renowned capabilities in data, technology, and partnerships.”

Vladan Hejnic, Founder and CEO at VIVnetworks, comments:

“The integration of VIVnetworks within CJ marks a merging of expertise. CJ is a global performance network and technology platform with local expertise worldwide. By joining CJ, the VIVnetworks team will enhance that expertise, becoming a core strength in Central and Eastern Europe to benefit VIV, CJ, and Publicis Groupe’s global clients. In addition to CJ’s ability to offer our advertising brands action-based insight on trends, best practices, and local-level knowledge around the world, our brands will gain greater access to Publicis Groupe’s commerce transformation through CJ’s expert teams—data science, product, engineering, publisher development, and fraud prevention to name a few.”

We look forward to seeing how this acquisition will benefit clients of both companies.

The post Publicis Groupe Announces Acquisition of VIVnetworks – To Be Integrated with Performance Platform CJ appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Facebook founder, Zuckerberg, informed executives in a meeting yesterday (Tuesday 8th November) that since Meta has lost two-thirds of its share value, it is unfortunately necessary to make this intense cut. 

Meta isn’t the only tech platform that has cut its number of employees heavily over the recent months, as just this week, we saw the news break that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, will be cutting the platform’s 7,500-strong workforce due to a warning of a massive drop in revenue. 

In September, subscription platform Patreon laid off 17% of its staff ahead of the anticipated recession, and online homeware retailer, MADE has also been top of conversation as it enters administration, putting at least 500 jobs at risk. 

This response, which is extremely unfortunate and disappointing for those directly affected, is a direct response to a decline in growth for these platforms, contrary to the growth and attraction they gained during the pandemic. 

The partnership marketing space hasn’t fallen under the radar during this influx of employment cuts. This summer, we covered the news that major partnership marketing agency and tech platform, impact.com, would be laying off 10% of its workforce. 

David A. Yovanno, CEO, and Per Pettersen, Co-Founder of impact.com were very honest about the fact that earlier this year the impact.com leadership team set aggressive hiring and growth targets, to achieve exponential scaling of the company.

In hindsight, it seems the decision made to significantly increase investment in hiring was ‘the wrong choice’, as, in David’s words, they “could not have predicted the full effect of the macroeconomic conditions we are all experiencing right now.”

With even the world’s largest tech companies being affected by the current state of the economy, it seems as though job security is far from guaranteed.

The post Meta Follows Suit as the Latest Tech Platform to Slash its Workforce appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Matthew Wood, Founder of the awards, gives advice: “The vibrancy and atmosphere at this year’s awards were one of the best I’ve seen – the incredible teamwork mostly during the pandemic was rightfully celebrated and rewarded. For next year, we have refined many of the categories and added new ones to the mix. The entry deadline is fast approaching so now is the time to get heads together, speak to your team and clients and put your best foot forward!”

Celebrate at Grosvenor House

We’ll be gathering once again at the glorious Grosvenor House venue for an elating evening of networking, dinner, and awards. You can look forward to being back surrounded by your peers, celebrating all the hard work and efforts that have gone into making this channel so effective and durable.

Study the entry kit for steps-to-enter, judge’s advice, mistakes-to-avoid and more.

Save the Dates!

• Earlybird Entry Deadline – 25/01/2023
• Regular Entry Deadline – 01/02/2023
• Last Chance Entry Deadline – 15/02/2023
• Shortlist Announced – 06/04/2023
• The Awards – 11/05/2023

For full details of the entry criteria, categories and deadlines download the entry kit.

The post Performance Marketing Awards 2023: Entry Kit Ready For The Performance Industry’s Oscars appeared first on PerformanceIN.

We adhere to the mantra of helping you ‘Build Profitable Partnerships’, which is why for the first time, PI LIVE Miami will kick off on Sunday with some fun networking activities to set you up for the conference. Influencer marketers, you don’t have to miss out either, as the event will close with an Influencer Marketing Show takeover, giving you a taste of what’s to come at IMS NYC later in 2023… 

To ensure that no one has to miss out on the chance to connect with changemakers, e-commerce-led brands, creators, and publishers at PI LIVE Miami, tickets are now available at a super early bird price, in limited quantities, to allow you to save your dollars ahead of the fast-approaching holiday season! 

Tickets will then be rolled out as follows… 

If you’re with a retailer, you may qualify for a complimentary ticket to PI LIVE Miami. Be sure to check our eligibility criteria.

Will you be joining us in The Magic City? If so, we look forward to seeing you at the Hyatt Regency from April 2-4 2023.

The post Join Us in The Magic City – Secure Your #PILIVEMIAMI23 Tickets appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Resilience will obviously remain vital amid the latest swell of challenges. The ‘are we or aren’t we?’ questions around economic recession continue, alongside downsized spend estimates that could see teams struggling to drive greater results with even fewer resources. More than just continued hardiness, however, what marketers need are smarter ways of managing change and, ideally, getting ahead of it. 

To be specific, they must work on building better systems for identifying early warning signs of sliding effectiveness, in addition to emerging opportunities, instead of simply scrambling to respond after the fact. And an essential element of doing so is embracing valuable yet often overlooked elements of proactive analytics, especially anomaly detection.

Ghosts in the machine

Even in the current age of technology-powered marketing, anomaly detection might sound more like a sci-fi invention than an everyday tool. Not as complex as it seems, the process is about uncovering patterns in data outside the norm, using artificial intelligence (AI). 

The basics tend to involve setting machine learning algorithms to assess given datasets and 

spotlight outliers that don’t tally with what they expect to find. Trained on huge stores of data about past performance and consumer behaviour, algorithms run comparisons by harnessing knowledge of what counts as typical for particular types of audience segment, campaign, seasonal offers and more. With semi, fully or unsupervised options for analysis, marketers can leave labour-intensive evaluation to machines if they choose, or apply closer levels of control.

Great, so what does that mean?

For marketers, the ultimate outcome of smart analytics is simple. When any unusual patterns are detected, they receive instant warning signals or alerts. As assessment is often focused on monitoring pre-defined metrics, this means they get immediate insight into specific areas of inconsistent performance. For example, analysis may show a product explainer video that has enjoyed high viewing completion for months is now losing audiences mid-way, or highlight sudden spikes in click through rates (CTRs) for recently released display ads.

How does it benefit marketers?

In the days marketers only had a handful of campaigns to juggle, manually monitoring for abnormal data points was feasible, although not always precise. Vast expansion in the scope of modern communications has produced data that’s increasingly difficult to organise, let alone scrutinise for discrepancies. In fact, our research reveals most CMOs (99%) are using at least 10 data sources, compared to six or fewer just three years ago, while six in ten (67%) unsurprisingly admit to feeling overwhelmed by growing volumes of available data.

Where mistakes caused by human error were already a risk, it’s becoming much more likely that marketers drowning in data will miss crucial insights: stopping them from swiftly moving with developing changes and potentially leading to unchecked performance issues.

Outlier detection tools can go some way to help reduce overlooked discrepancies and speed up insight activation. With the ability to rapidly assess large-scale marketing data — including information about cross-channel spend, delivery, and interaction — analytical engines stand a better chance of accurately capturing all possible anomalies, enabling marketers to take swift, informed action. For instance, on top of directing budget away from ineffective efforts to limit wastage, they can identify which activities are over-performing and decide where adjustments should be made to improve both in-flight ROI and future outcomes.

It’s also worth noting that unusual events can indicate the beginning of bigger shifts. Keeping an eye on anomalies once detected will allow marketers to see whether certain patterns grow into fully-fledged trends; meaning they can observe, and respond to, the unfolding effects of external factors such as consumer living costs and market flections, as they happen.

What does adoption involve?

As with any form of analytics, there are crucial ingredients for effective use beyond the evaluation tech itself. Before adopting solutions with real-time detection abilities, users first need to ensure there is a solid foundation of unified, precise, and usable data to work from. 

Almost every marketer will be familiar with the data processing mantra of “garbage in, equals garbage out”, especially in terms of AI solutions. Whatever their assessment sophistication, intelligent analytics are only as reliable as the data feeding them. If data is flawed and fragmented, it’s highly probable that choices guided by the insights they produce will fail to hit the intended mark, or worse, result in negative impacts for brands. 

While the work needed to fine-tune data fundamentals will clearly depend on individual needs and circumstances, marketers can make a start by checking whether systems meet a basic list of criteria. Data stores need to be comprehensive collections of all relevant sources, accurate, and up to date. Analysis will also be a lot smoother, and reliable, when inflowing information is automatically integrated, cleansed, synced, and merged, ready for evaluation. 

Not only can anomaly detection assist with identifying any patterns but it can also provide critical intelligence to maximise performance, which can be replicated in future campaigns. Anomaly detection also tends to work better when companies already have a higher level of data maturity, including use of machine learning (ML) that helps them pinpoint where to focus detection analysis. For example, data mature companies know what KPIs are relevant for their business, how to track them and what KPIs are relevant for which dimension. The AI and ML algorithms can then help classify and analyse these two parameters, indicating how significant an outlier would be for this combination. For instance, a small outlier for an important KPI in the most important market should ring the alarm bells more than a huge outlier on a vanity metric.

Despite acute awareness that their remit has become more complicated, many marketers are hastily reacting to each new curve ball, instead of rolling with and turning fresh developments to their advantage. By providing immediate indicators of deviations from the norm, anomaly detection can enable marketers to see change coming and make proactive decisions about where, how, and when their approach should be adapted for better results. All of which means anomaly detection is a key agility asset for the modern analytical toolkit.

The post WTF is Anomaly Detection? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The post Movers and Shakers: October 2022 appeared first on PerformanceIN.

And technology is evolving to address the needs of publishers so they can take advantage of every revenue opportunity. Here are four areas where it can make a difference:

1. Growing your partnerships and opportunities quicker. The faster an advertiser partner can be onboarded, the faster both parties benefit. But onboarding has traditionally been a one-way process with brands determining who to work with and then instigating publisher partnerships. At impact.com we’ve flipped this. Publishers can now connect with brands they want to work with without them having to be part of an affiliate network or on our platform. Publishers can offer their own white-label programmes, providing advertisers with a link to quickly set up an account at no cost to the advertiser. This reduces the timeframes to get partners up and running. It allows publishers to engage directly with the brands they can support and easily onboard them without relying on third-party networks – meaning both can begin to make money quicker.  

2. Automating your payment and performance reporting. Even if a publisher has in-house technology to support elements of its partnership programme, when it comes to proving performance and managing partner payments, most rely on manual approaches. But invoicing, extracting data from multiple networks and Google Analytics and developing reports remain resource-heavy and time-consuming. Meanwhile, it’s challenging to track content performance and provide the regular reports that brands need to monitor the success of their activity and prove the value of working with a partner. This is a huge issue for many publishers, so take advantage of automated technology that solves it.     

3. Maximising the value of your current – and past – content. Defunct links and out-of-stock items rapidly deplete the value of e-commerce content. And for consumers, these are major frustrations when looking to buy the products they’re reading about. But beyond this annoyance, finding an out-of-stock item leads them to go elsewhere to buy it, depriving the brand of sales and the publisher of commission. Publishers must invest in technology that automatically checks links and stock levels so broken ones can be updated and out-of-stock items redirected to a different brand or similar item. This ability to react automatically, without needing to go into the website, is critical for publishers to maintain sales and not lose opportunities.

It also extends the value of content. Some publishers’ highest-earning affiliate articles can be several years old. But while consumers might still be discovering or referring back to these, how often do publishers undertake the time-consuming process of checking and updating the article links? Now it’s easy to do this. In automatically applying link updates, they can take advantage of mid- and long-tail opportunities by ensuring the content remains relevant, up to date and profitable.

4. Improving your commission revenues. As writers create branded content for your advertiser partners, your technology should allow them to optimise the content creation process by automatically providing them with these links to support the articles. Also, they should be able to identify the links that generate the highest commission, based on the article’s theme, so you can maximise the revenue potential.  

Growing the partnership channel for everyone 

While impact.com may be recognised as delivering a platform to support brands, as a tech business, we’re developing tools that grow the whole partnership channel. And in doing so, we need to support both sides of the market. If not, we’re stifling the channel’s development. 

So we’re focusing on providing the best tools for the differing needs of advertisers and publishers, in order that both sides prosper. And for publishers, this means moving towards offering what they need – a fully integrated suite of partnership marketing tools controlled from one interface.

The post Perfecting Publisher Partnerships: Developing More Profitable Affiliate Programmes appeared first on PerformanceIN.

As we face a cost-of-living crisis, and general economic fragility, consumers are having to constantly evaluate the value of products and services they use. There has been a genuine fall in income for everyone, and this is having a knock-on effect for brands – some of which are benefitting, while many others are losing their customers.

What value means to brands

We’re seeing German discount grocery chains, Aldi and Lidl, growing their market share, while services like Netflix are losing subscribers. Brands are having to prove their products or services to provide consumers with the much sought-after value they seek, and marketers are having to re-evaluate what value now represents for them.

The current economic climate is proving to be a far bigger challenge for brands than what they faced during the pandemic. As a result, value has become one of – if not the – most important aspect of their campaigns. With marketers increasingly unsure of who their target customer is, many are struggling to find the value they are desperately looking for.

Nonetheless, it’s not the time for marketers to reduce their budgets – it’s time to continue investing and show them why your brand provides value to their lives. To do this, marketers must see value as being closely tied to brand and performance, with all three working together to get the most out of their campaigns.

The changing face of value

Marketers must look beyond the transactional media investment and consider the role that improving their brand and driving performance have to play in providing value.

When looking to protect or grow market share, insight and creativity must be at the heart of the campaign. Insights help understand audience behaviour to form the strong foundations for the campaign, while creativity ensures that audiences are engaged and interested in the advertising being served to them.

Performance should be driven by utilising KPIs that matter, with a particular focus on attention metrics and how these can help brands to produce the most effective and efficient advertising. Ultimately, every campaign is different and brands must focus on the performance indicators that are more relevant to their needs. Value can’t be found in viewability continuing to be the standard metric for measuring the quality of impressions.

Getting brand and performance right will automatically create value for brands, because they’ll be able confidently identify who their target customer is, and ensure these are the people that are being reached at the right time. This will help to encourage current customers to continue buying from the brand, while proving to new customers that the brand can add value to their lives.

Understanding the link between value, brand, and performance isn’t just about generating value for the brand, but also delivering value for the consumer, both in and out of difficult economic climates. Tying brand and performance to value will ensure that both consumers and advertisers benefit, even as the definition of value evolves. 

The post WTF is Value and Why Should Marketers Care? appeared first on PerformanceIN.