How I ended up here
I stumbled into affiliate marketing by accident. At the time, I was managing CPA budgets, proposing tenancy placements to digital managers, and trying to protect performance spend in rooms where brand teams were pushing much larger awareness budgets. It was commercial, sometimes scrappy, and always accountable. Every pound had to justify itself, and if something was not incremental, it did not survive.
That grounding in performance has shaped how I look at the rise of retail media.
Now, working in the space between affiliate and retail media, I do not see a takeover happening. I see an expansion. In particular, I see a significant opportunity for brand-to-brand partnerships that are built on performance principles rather than traditional media thinking.
The commercial foundation was already there
Affiliate has long been pigeonholed as bottom funnel. Voucher codes, cashback, last click attribution debates that never seem to disappear. Yet beneath that perception sits a commercial model that is remarkably durable: shared risk, shared reward, and payment tied directly to outcomes.
Retail media is encouraging retailers to monetise assets they have always owned, from checkout pages and post purchase environments to CRM inventory and first-party audience data. As those environments become commercialised, the conversation naturally shifts. It becomes less about selling inventory and more about structuring partnerships that make commercial sense.
That is where affiliate thinking becomes powerful.
Brand-to-brand partnerships inside retail environments work best when incentives are aligned and when both sides benefit from measurable outcomes. Instead of relying solely on fixed media fees and broad awareness metrics, there is room to structure deals around revenue share, CPA targets, margin considerations and clear attribution. That alignment not only drives performance, but it also reduces internal friction and makes the opportunity defensible to finance and commercial stakeholders.
Looking beyond last click
What also needs to evolve is how these partnerships are judged.
Historically, affiliate activity has often been evaluated through a narrow channel lens. Did it convert? Was it incremental? Who got the last click? Those questions still matter, but they are not the whole story when brand partnerships sit within a wider retail media strategy.
A more mature view looks at incremental revenue for the retailer, margin impact across both brands, the value exchange for the customer and the longer-term commercial relationship being created. When viewed this way, affiliate is not a tactical add-on. It becomes the performance infrastructure behind scalable, accountable retail partnerships.
A bigger stage, not a replacement
The most interesting conversations I am part of today are not about whether affiliate or retail media wins. They are about how proven performance mechanics can unlock retail media budgets in a way that aligns incentives and protects commercial outcomes.
Retail media has given affiliate a bigger stage. The opportunity now is to recognise that the fundamentals which made affiliate resilient, accountability, shared risk and outcome-based models, are exactly what can make brand-to-brand retail partnerships sustainable at scale.
