Rakuten Advertising Unveils Audience Engine to Enhance Collaboration and Personalization of Affiliate Campaigns

Publishers can monetize valuable audience segments while advertisers gain a privacy-conscious personalization solution

Rakuten Advertising has launched Audience Engine—a groundbreaking technology that compensates publishers based on the purchasing power of their most valuable audience segments while offering advertisers innovative personalization features. Debuting at Rakuten Advertising’s annual DealMaker event, Audience Engine empowers publishers to utilize first-party data to establish tailored commission rates that leverage audiences with the highest potential value for advertisers. Publishers can then deliver personalized messages and offers to incentivize those audiences.

This collaboration between publishers and advertisers results in custom campaigns that ensure optimum performance and fair incentives for publishers.

“Audience Engine turns the traditional affiliate commission structure on its head by prioritizing audience value over clicks,” says Nick Stamos, CEO at Rakuten Advertising. “Typically, advertisers set commission rates based on campaign goals like promoting a new product or pushing for new-to-file customers. Now, publishers can put a price tag on the strength of their audience and set unique commission rates on the segments most likely to be valuable to a specific advertiser.”

“We were excited when Rakuten came to us with the Audience Engine opportunity,” said Rose Blackmore, Global VP of Partnerships at DealMoon. “DealMoon was already starting to tackle audience segmentation for more precise targeting and the potential to track results via Audience Engine was icing on the cake. By combining our technologies, advertisers now have a clear path to elevate their programs to new heights.”

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Audience Engine is a welcome and timely addition to advertiser toolkits as the industry shifts away from decades of reliance on third-party cookies. As first-party data takes center stage, brands and publishers are looking for new ways to collaborate on personalized privacy-conscious customer experiences.

In addition, advertisers will be able to enhance affiliate campaign personalization by incorporating their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data in Audience Engine. CRM and publisher first-party data will be used to set distinctive commission structures at the sweet spot of the intersection between the purchasing power of a publisher’s audience and a brand’s own customer base.

“The innovation of Rakuten’s Audience Engine grants advertisers the ability to reach defined segments of [SlickDeals’] savvy community and thereby lift core metrics with more compelling and relevant offers,” said Joe Coyle, Director of Partnerships at SlickDeals, an established shopping destination for over 12 million deal enthusiasts.

“Audience Engine brings powerful, entirely new capabilities to the affiliate channel. Publishers can activate and monetize proprietary audience segments, and advertisers gain the ability to personalize affiliate campaigns in a privacy-conscious environment,” said Stamos. “Until now, it wasn’t possible to personalize in this way through the affiliate channel, and the only workaround was to run ad-hoc campaigns that offered little visibility into performance by audience segment. Now brands can deliver tailored, optimized messaging to customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle.”

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