Our ability to face headwinds and turn them into opportunities to thrive sets our channel apart.
Uncertainty has been a key theme over the past few years, but one thing that’s become increasingly clear is that the affiliate channel is well-positioned to weather any storm—including the economic downturn we’re facing in 2023.
This year, CJ is focused on four key areas to help our clients navigate these uncharted waters and bring their success to new heights. Note that list below is not in order of priority—these areas of focus are equally important and will play a vital role in CJ’s client investment plans and 2023 innovation roadmap.
Let's hoist the sails and set our course for a prosperous year as we move forward, together!
Channel Amplification
Our collective understanding of the value of the affiliate channel has evolved, and a great deal of that is a result of the huge strides in measurement we’ve made in recent years. CJ’s Cross Channel Customer Journey analytics have proved what many in our industry have long suspected: whenever an affiliate engagement is part of the customer journey, an advertiser’s results are far better—search is better, social is better, retargeting is better. Affiliate amplifies ALL marketing efforts. Affiliate is the channel of channels.
As macroeconomic headwinds and underlying uncertainty continue, every dollar, euro, or pound invested in marketing needs to be spent wisely. Our industry’s success in 2023 is going to be driven by how effectively we retain and grow affiliate investment even if overall marketing budgets decline. Luckily, no channel is better than the affiliate channel at increasing ROI and amplifying every single marketing effort—it’s just a matter of making this fact known.
The Amalgamation of Affiliate and Influencer Marketing
In 2023, we’ll see influencer marketing combine more seamlessly with performance marketing and its exacting and accountable approach. It’s always been a challenge for advertisers to scale their influencer marketing efforts and results. However, supercharging influencer marketing by fully integrating affiliate’s advanced-level insights, analytics, and expertise will take the influencer channel far beyond what it is capable of today.
True and reliable measurement is key. For advertisers, it’s crucial to understand how a partner drives revenue for their business and to be able to convey that value effectively to decision-makers within their company. On the flip side, it's important for publishers to be able to prove the value they generate for their advertiser partners. Affiliate networks play a huge role in solving this challenge. CJ provides standardized performance data to both advertisers and publishers means advertisers can see where and how value is created, while publishers can harness their performance data and insight for advanced reporting and optimization.
While CJ has provided reach, strategies, execution, and performance for influencer marketing for over a decade, over the last two years these two channels have been steadily converging as we continue to build, buy, and partner to scale CJ Influence even further. This year, we’re fully focused on helping our clients scale their influencer marketing efforts by combining our performance marketing approach, unparalleled data and analytics (including CJ’s Customer Journey and Competitive Benchmarking) with our partnership with CreatorIQ, our strategic expertise, and our recent acquisition of influencer networking platform, Perlu.
Capturing Every Single Affiliate Interaction
Tracking provides the data that gives us transparency, data, insights, and most importantly, performance measurement. CJ’s goal is to track every single interaction for every client. However, it has become much more challenging to track the connections between a publisher’s engagement with consumers that results in advertiser outcomes. Ever-changing browser policies, privacy regulations, third-party cookie deprecation, consumer shifts to in-app and mobile, omnichannel engagement, and pixel erosion—all of these elements shape the current tracking landscape.
CJ is best suited to solve these challenges through our suite of tracking solutions that continue to evolve and grow stronger—Universal Tag (with server-to-server, reverse proxies, and ecommerce plugins), partnership with Button, and standardized templates across the tag ecosystem, Clickless Tracking, API tracking, offline tracking, and so on.
Global Expansion
Ecommerce has made it quicker (and in many cases easier and cheaper) for advertisers to launch in new markets. More brands are going global and want to work with fewer vendors, giving CJ an opportunity to help clients consolidate their global programs. With a multi-language and multi-payment platform, global reach, teams worldwide including our newest members in Central and Eastern Europe via VIV Networks, and as part of one of the largest global marketing networks (Publicis Groupe), CJ is best-suited to make the most of this opportunity.
Share