The Hidden Strategy Brand Marketers Finally Discovered—And Why Affiliate Marketers Have Thrived for Years
Ever wonder why it took the mighty Publicis Groupe a whopping $2.2 billion to snap up LiveRamp and finally embrace what affiliate marketers have been preaching all along? Yep, it’s the classic case of the industry finally catching up — after years of affiliate marketing quietly running the show with real identity data, seamless journey tracking, and ROI accountability baked into its DNA. If you’ve been in the trenches of performance commerce like me, this move feels less like news and more like a long-overdue throat-clearing. While the big guns scramble to build their “identity-to-outcome” stacks, affiliates have been quietly perfecting this model, not out of fancy strategy, but sheer necessity. So here’s the kicker — as billions funnel into shiny new marketing tech, are CMOs finally ready to give their affiliate partners the credit (and budget) they deserve? Or will the smartest players in the room keep flying under the radar? Hang tight, because affiliate marketing didn’t just join the data-driven party — it’s been the life of it all along. LEARN MORE.
Lauren Newman is CRO at Button, an AI-powered commerce platform optimizing creator and affiliate marketing performance.
For those of us who’ve spent our careers in affiliate and performance commerce, it raises a simple question: What took everyone so long?
Earlier this year, Publicis Groupe announced it would acquire LiveRamp, a global data collaboration platform, for $2.2 billion. The stated rationale was to accelerate what Publicis calls “data co-creation” for the agentic AI era. The goal is to connect identity infrastructure, activate data across the entire customer journey and tie every dollar of media spend to measurable outcomes. To anyone who has worked in affiliate marketing for the last decade, it reads more like confirmation that what we’ve been doing for years is indeed the right way to operate. What other industry can boast proprietary, transaction-level purchase data at the scale of performance creators and affiliates? None.
The holding company world is spending billions of dollars to build systems in which real identities, connected journeys and verifiable outcomes form the foundation of advertising. Affiliate marketing built exactly that model, not by vision, but by necessity, and it’s been running at scale for years.
What Publicis Is Really Buying
The LiveRamp deal didn’t happen in isolation. Publicis acquired Epsilon in 2019 to build a proprietary identity layer. In early 2025, it acquired Lotame to expand its identity graph capabilities. Now, with LiveRamp, which connects over 25,000 publisher domains and 500+ technology and data partners across 14 markets, they are connecting all the dots in their largest and most consequential move yet.
The logic is clear: Epsilon provides the identity foundation, LiveRamp adds data collaboration and clean-room capability across publisher and partner ecosystems, and Publicis’s Marcel agentic platform activates it all across enterprise marketing functions. This solidifies the use case Publicis keeps returning to: connected retail journeys powered by CRM data, loyalty programs, in-store signals, retail media inventory and partner data, unified in one place and activated to drive measurable outcomes.
Framed that way, this is an “identity-to-outcome” stack—a system designed to know who a consumer is, follow their journey across touchpoints and attribute results to spend, accurately, at scale, across a fragmented ecosystem. Doesn’t that sound familiar?
Affiliate Marketing Has Always Been The Data Layer
Affiliate marketing was born performance-first, built around a simple and unforgiving principle: you don’t get paid unless something measurable happens. No conversion, no commission for publisher or creator, no user points or shopper cash back. That structural reality created discipline around identity resolution and journey tracking that brand advertising spent decades avoiding.
Before data clean rooms entered the marketing lexicon, affiliate networks were stitching together click-to-conversion paths across devices and sessions to assign attribution. Before identity graphs became a boardroom priority, performance marketers were resolving user identity across fragmented digital touchpoints because their economics demanded it. And, if they didn’t do this, their creators and publishers wouldn’t get paid properly. Before the cookieless era became an industry crisis, affiliate networks were building server-side tracking infrastructure to maintain signal fidelity, because their publishers needed it to survive.
As privacy regulations tightened and third-party signals degraded, performance-based partnerships gained ground: 74% of brands are increasingly shifting to affiliate programs and 59% of marketers are dedicating over a quarter of their budgets to Creators. That shift is a recognition that the affiliate model—outcome-first, identity-resolving, journey-connected—is better suited to the marketing environment we now live in.
You can build the most sophisticated identity graph in the industry, resolve users across every device and channel, and still lose the sale at the last step, because the journey itself breaks. When a consumer clicks a link from a creator, publisher or affiliate partner and lands on a degraded mobile web experience instead of the app they have installed, the conversion is lost. That loss never shows up in the analytics. It will only track completed journeys. The broken ones are invisible.
As commerce media spend approaches $100 billion and 45% of advertisers cite performance as their primary objective, the gap between data sophistication and journey execution is widening, not narrowing. Knowing your customer precisely doesn’t help if the path you send them down is broken. Plus, many brand advertisers still don’t understand foundational linking, despite now being focused on outcomes.
Affiliates have scale. What it has historically lacked is the strategic standing to match, and the positioning to walk into a CMO conversation and say, “The model you’re paying billions to build? We’ve been running it.”
This is the moment to make that case. Not defensively, but confidently. The principles that define modern marketing’s ambitions, real identity, connected journeys, measurable outcomes and performance accountability, are the principles that affiliate and commerce performance marketing has operated on since its founding and has now revolutionized the creator economy. The vocabulary has changed. The infrastructure has gotten more sophisticated and the content creators have evolved dramatically, but the model has been right all along.
The question for CMOs and revenue leaders isn’t whether this model matters. That question has been answered, loudly and expensively. The question is: Is your organization giving its affiliate and commerce partnerships the investment and accolades they deserve? Now that the rest of the industry has confirmed their model was right, are you ignoring your most valuable marketing team?
Affiliate marketing didn’t need a $2.2 billion acquisition to become outcome-oriented and data-driven. It started there. The rest of advertising is catching up, and the gap is closing faster than most people realize.
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