Another year has gone by and my, oh, my, what a blur it’s been.
Despite another year of pandemic life, we still found so much to celebrate—whether it was women in leadership, moms and dads, Juneteenth, Pride Month, AAPI Heritage Month, LatinX Heritage Month, or our Holiday shopping habits. As a company—and an industry—we banded together to make it through 2021 and not just survive, but thrive.
Thank you to our wonderful associates and clients across the globe—this year wouldn’t have been possible without you! As we near the end of 2021, we’d like to take a moment and reflect on everything we’ve achieved together.
Refreshed CJ Branding
In August we refreshed our visual brand identity to better reflect CJ’s culture, values, and innovation and we’re proud to say that it showcases our distinct voice and contemporary aesthetic without straying from our roots. We now have a fresh color palette, a new font family, and dynamic graphic elements.
Product Launches
From an innovation perspective, 2021 was a year when partnering with the best accelerated our development strategy and allowed us to bring exponentially more value to market. In February, we announced two game-changing strategic partnerships that furthered product delivery around core areas of our platform: mobility and recruitment.
- Through our collaboration with leading mobile app platform, Button, we’ve allowed more brands to integrate affiliate partnerships into their mobile app plans while improving the mobile shopping experience for customers. The ability to leverage partners across platforms to reach customers and provide a frictionless mobile experience demonstrates the versatility and relevance of the channel in ways that speak with measurable results. As we approach the one-year mark of our partnership, the results speak for themselves.
- Our strategic partnership with CreatorIQ, the industry’s undisputed leader in influencer marketing technology, amped up our partner recruitment capabilities. Not only are our VIP influencer campaigns newly infused with the power of CreatorIQ’s unparalleled data sets, but we’ve also had the honor of bringing our engineering teams together to integrate rich data from CreatorIQ directly into the CJ platform to power best-fit partner searches with metrics that matter for all CJ brands. The fruit of these efforts produced releases that brought Social Media Reach and Engagement Rate metrics into CJ’s Recruit Partners tool—with more exciting enhancements on the way.
- We filled the second half of 2021 with the launch of Affiliate Customer Journey reporting on-demand in our Insights Data visualization application. These launches brought unprecedented visibility into customer shopping journeys for both advertisers and publishers, meeting the imperative need for marketers to understand customer journey beyond the last click. With these insights, brands and partners are empowered to explore the influence of their CJ partnerships across the entire customer purchase journey—from discovery, through evaluation, to decision. Which partners and partner types enter the purchase journey early, which are trusted contributors to product research, and which help close the deal in the decision stage? Affiliate Customer Journey dashboards unlock these insights and more, so all parties in the partner ecosystem can use this understanding to reach customers where they are, and create more meaningful, engaging experiences for them. Check out this CJU session to learn more.
Client and Network Wins
We wouldn’t be here without you. Here are some highlights from our advertisers, publishers, and agencies:
- We launched nearly 800 new advertiser programs in 2021, adding to even more world-class brands in the CJ network. Check out some of the brands that were added in Q1, Q2, and Q3 of this year.
- 191 individual agency team members became CJ Ambassadors through our annual program, passing a challenging exam that covers a variety of topics including the CJ platform, the affiliate industry, and more.
- We were shortlisted for 12 Performance Marketing Awards and seven Performance Marketing Awards.
- CJ took home the award for Global Excellence at the Performance Marketing Awards alongside AT&T and RevLifter for the campaign, Keeping the US Connected.
- A study by Publisher Discovery found that CJ has more active publisher sites than any other provider (we love to hear it!).
- CJ joined the Performance Marketing Association (PMA) as an Industry Champion Member with SVP of Global Marketing and Business Systems, Nicole Ron, acting on the PMA Board of Directors.
Award-Winning CJ’ers
Clients and campaigns weren’t the only ones receiving recognition this year!
- SVP of Publisher Development, Kelly Merkel, was listed as one of the PerformanceIN Top50 industry players for 2021.
- Client Development Manager turned Product Manager, Gabby Schnaid, was crowned One to Watch at the 2021 International Performance Marketing Awards.
Events
This year was another year of many virtual and hybrid events and across many verticals and regions, but two big ones stood out to us:
Thought Leadership
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We wish everyone a safe and restful end of the year. We can’t wait to see what 2022 has in store!
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