Direct Partnerships Are The Best Partnerships

Hey Everyone 👋

Today we are releasing new features that will forever change our business. We know that sounds dramatic, but it’s true! Hear us out...

Before we get into the details on this game-changing release, allow us to provide some context.

Historically, Jumbleberry has operated as an affiliate network that served its customers through a managed service - consisting of partner recruitment, client service, content development, CRO, and more.

Two years ago, we decided to build our own tracking & attribution technology to support this managed service. Fast forward to today, and that tracking & attribution technology has evolved into a full-fledged platform & marketplace with many new and exciting features.

Fortunately, this platform and marketplace have grown a lot. So much so, they have outpaced the bandwidth of our managed service offerings.  

We then asked ourselves an honest and objective question: Should we continue to push our clients into a managed service and try to scale the business? Or should we instead lay the foundation to enable advertisers and media partners to collaborate directly in our platform to build and scale digital marketing campaigns together, without the middle-man? Would this transparent, collaborative approach open the floodgates of groundbreaking ideas and growth opportunities between our clients?

Our Answer: YES!

After all, the collection of many minds is better than a few, isn’t it?

Which is the reason why we are making some fundamental changes to our platform starting today.  

Our objective moving forward is to build the best Partner Marketing platform that enables e-commerce brands to discover, recruit, track and grow media partnerships that drive customer acquisition in digital marketing channels.  

How do we do that?

3 Ways.

1. Community
2. Marketplace
3. Platform
   

Our mission is to build the most interactive community for advertisers, media partners & creators of all types to connect and do business together seamlessly. Imagine a community with the energetic feel of the Affiliate World trade show floor or a Geek Out mastermind event. A place where you can connect, learn, ideate, build, make deals, and more!

Wouldn’t that be awesome!? We think so too. And we are excited to continue our mission to develop a platform experience that embodies this type of environment for our clients.

Secondly, Marketplace.

Having a vibrant community is great, where digital marketers and creators of all types can come together to learn, connect and collaborate to build high-performing digital marketing campaigns. But to really be successful, you need more.

There is no shortage of Partner Marketing software that can help brands track and manage affiliate programs. However, most of these solutions lack the tools and playbooks and deal templates to build successful campaigns.

The reality is, they don’t have the recipe or understand the fundamental strategy & tactics that these partnerships require to scale.

We get it, It’s not easy. It has taken us many years to figure it out too.

But there is a formula.  

And we are confident that as we continue to build our product, informed by this formula, we will automate and share over ten years of learnings so even the most novice brands and media partners can be exceptional performance marketers.

Okay, enough context. Let’s dig into some of these features.

Introducing game-changing feature 1: Partner Profiles

In the spirit of making this vision a reality, it starts with giving our media partners an identity, or in this case, a profile that provides brands with more background on who their partners are. Continuing to showcase our media partners as a mere numerical ID in an advertiser reporting dashboard is doing them a disservice, and we want to change that. So starting today, partner profiles are going live.

What is a Partner Profile?

Quite simply, it’s a way for advertisers to learn more about the backgrounds of their media partners. Any media partner in the platform will be searchable and intelligently matched and recommended to brands based on mutual interests, expertise, and historical campaign data.

What does a Media Partner Profile showcase:

• Company name
• A short bio
• A pic (optional)
• Product verticals of interest/expertise
• Channels of interest/expertise
• Geographies of interest/expertise
• Audiences of interest/expertise by geo, lead source, device etc.
• Total revenue generated on the platform to date
• Historical campaigns they have run
• Tiered ranking based on historical performance and scale

And more.

Here’s how brands used to see our media partners:

And here's how you can see them today:

By giving our Media partners a profile, they can now be contacted directly by brands that are looking for their domain of expertise.

Why do Media Partner profiles matter?

Improving transparency and helping brands understand more about their media partners’ interests, expertise, or historical performance unlocks a lot of new benefits.

Partner Profiles - The Benefits to Advertisers:

• Advertisers can search & discover new media partners based on specific criteria they are interested in
• Advertisers can be intelligently matched with the most suitable media partners that align with their interests and needs
• Profiles provide the transparency that helps advertisers better understand the resources their media partners require to be successful.
• Advertisers can better understand how to troubleshoot issues more quickly & efficiently by knowing more about their media partner’s backgrounds.

Partner Profiles - The Benefits to Media Partners:

• Profiles can be a promotional tool that helps media partners promote their company’s capabilities to attract new brands & collaborations.
• Similarly, partner profiles can be algorithmically matched with brands that match their interests, expertise & historical results.
• Profiles can lead to more trusting & collaborative relationships with advertisers because they know more about you.

Partner profiles provide the required transparency that helps brands & partners discover, match, connect and collaborate based on needs and fit. We firmly believe that data, automation and machine learning algorithms are simply a more effective way to connect successful partnerships directly.

Directly?

That leads us to our second game-changing feature.

Introducing game-changing feature 2: Messaging

As a media partner, you might be thinking, what is the point of being more discoverable if you can’t communicate directly with advertisers?

Glad you asked. Today, You will now have access to our brand new messenger feature that allows advertisers and media partners to communicate directly.

This may seem like an absurd concept because historically, affiliate networks have always attempted to broker these relationships and keep their identities hidden - likely due to circumvention risks. However, our position is simple: if we have succeeded in building a platform that indeed provides value for our clients at a fair and transparent price, why do we care if our clients know exactly who our media partners are, and vice versa?  Remember, our value proposition is to provide tracking technology, a vibrant partner marketplace and to bring the digital marketing community together all in one place.  Profiles and Messenger are foundational pieces in helping our clients begin their journeys together.

Why does messaging matter?

Plain and simple: It helps advertisers and affiliates communicate more quickly and efficiently. By eliminating the middlemen, deeper, more trusting relationships can build between brands and media partners. When these relationships are strengthened via transparency, it increases the probability that both parties will be successful.

Below you can see some examples of how our chat functionality works.

Messenger - The Benefits to Advertisers:

• Advertisers are no longer reliant solely on an account managers ability to recruit or scale media partnerships
• Advertisers can increase the frequency of testing they receive from media partners
• Advertisers can recruit and grow a larger pool of media partner relationships
• Advertisers can directly incentivize the media partnerships they want to scale
• Advertisers can better plan & develop their optimal channel mix of partnerships
• Advertisers can more strategically ideate or optimize campaigns with partners that can help them grow
• Advertisers can more quickly plug holes or capitalize on new opportunities with partners when they need them

Messenger - The Benefits to Media Partners:

• Partners can forge more profound and trusting relationships with brands that could unlock bigger and better opportunities
• Partners can improve operational & communication efficiencies by cutting out the middleman
• Partners inherit a greater sense of control by working directly with the brand
• Partners can negotiate CPAs or additional incentives that will improve commitment & campaign profitability
• Partners can make ad hoc requests directly to the brand to uncover new opportunities or improve the performance of existing campaigns.
• Partner agencies can add an entirely new revenue stream to their business by offering their clients Partnership (affiliate) Marketing services powered via our platform.

Introducing game-changing feature 3: Partner Approvals, CPA Overrides & Radically Transparent Pricing

Starting today, we are enabling advertisers with the permissions to manage who they approve or don’t approve to run their campaigns. They will even have complete control over setting affiliate payouts. Advertisers can set campaign-wide payouts or provide custom payouts for specific partners with a few clicks of a mouse. Jumbleberry, no longer takes a spread on the payout displayed on the platform. Instead, we will begin our transformation into a marketplace platform with radically transparent pricing.

The history of how our business model worked:

Nearly all CPA affiliate networks (including ourselves) operate on a brokerage business model where a ‘spread’ is taken on each sale. If a customer pays $50 per sale, the Network might only pay out $40 to an affiliate, earning a $10 (or 20%) commission in the process. We have committed to moving away from this model and into a world where we charge a transparent, fixed platform fee per sale instead. The fee discounts are based on tiered weekly revenue thresholds that are met and could also be lower or higher based on desired payment terms issued.

In Closing:

These are a lot of changes. The changes will inevitably lead to a lot of questions or feedback. And our team is here as always to answer them. All we ask is that you keep an open mind. The Partnership Marketing space is quickly maturing and evolving into a massive channel. We firmly believe it can be the largest channel in a brand’s marketing mix when executed properly. We will continue building products, content and a community that helps our clients grow their businesses. We couldn’t be more excited about the future of working with you, and we hope the feeling is mutual.

Thank you for reading, and please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Account Manager with any questions you may have.