Rakuten Advertising has launched a fully managed affiliate marketing platform called Accelerate. It is designed for digital marketers seeking growth opportunities and benefits from waived publisher fees and real-time expert analysis.
A natural expansion
Rakuten Advertising has tapped into its network of over 150,000 publishers to launch an affiliate marketing platform that aims to optimise performance marketing spend with unprecedented spend. This is in an attempt to streamline the process of expanding into brand-new markets and driving sales.
Chief Revenue Officer at Rakuten Advertising, Jeff Wender, explained the purpose of the platform in greater detail: “Accelerate allows advertisers to enjoy the benefits of affiliate marketing in a way that only a network of our scale and experience can deliver,” he said.
“By empowering our analysts and account teams to make strategic decisions about campaign investments, we can identify beneficial untapped publisher partnerships, establish optimized commission rates, and capitalize on even short-window opportunities to drive profits for advertisers. Accelerate has been well received by clients and has exceeded our most optimistic expectations for performance and cost efficiency.”
Off to a great start
The affiliate marketing platform offers a wide range of exciting benefits including performance-based costs, first-party data and insights, real-time expert analysis and optimisation, waived publisher fees, and a publisher matchmaking service. It can also be tailored to the short-term and long-term goals of individual brands and rewards publishers for delivering on these goals.
General Manager of E-Commerce at Cotton On, Brendan Sweeney, explained the brand’s decision to partner with the affiliate marketing platform: “We had reached the right moment to aggressively expand in the U.S. and sought a partnership that would deliver the experience and expertise we needed to reach and influence consumers in the market. That led us to Accelerate,” he said.
“Accelerate instantly gave us the strategic support, historical data and analytic expertise we needed to design an affiliate program that could effectively expand our U.S. business. As a result, our U.S. affiliate marketing sales have grown significantly year-over-year. Looking to the future, we’re excited to continue the momentum we’ve created with Accelerate in the U.S. by launching U.K., South Africa and APAC Accelerate programs to further elevate our business globally.”
