Today, Rakuten and impact.com have announced a strategic alliance, a collaboration which will see Rakuten Advertising and impact.com deliver an integrated technology and services model.
Through the alliance, impact.com will be Rakuten’s exclusive technology platform, with Rakuten becoming a Titanium partner — a newly created tier — over time, migrating all of its customers onto impact.com’s platform.
In a correspondence with Hello Partner, Amit Patel, CEO of Rakuten International, said that Rakuten Advertising, Rakuten Rewards, and impact.com will each contribute an “essential” element to the alliance.
Rakuten Advertising will provide the strategic expertise, global execution, and hands-on program management; impact.com will provide the platform infrastructure for tracking, contracting, and payments across commerce partnerships; and Rakuten Rewards will contribute direct consumer and shopping insights.
Collaboration across tracking and attribution
The alliance will also see the two collaborate across real-time tracking and attribution.
“This is an important area for us because better attribution leads to better decisions. It reflects our shared commitment to building a more programmatic, accountable, and scalable future for performance marketing,” he noted.
The Rakuten exec shared that these collaborative projects will focus on improving tracking, attribution, and automation, including real-time shopping enhancements along the shopper journey.
Industry decoupling
impact.com’s CEO, David Yovanno, told Hello Partner that through the alliance, the two organisations are now “aligned on a shared model.”
“One of the things that this announcement signals is the decoupling of the strategy, services, program management side of the industry with the technology, platform, marketplace side of the equation,” said Yovanno.
And according to Patel, the industry is ready for a “more connected approach.”
“Advertisers want more connected, accountable platforms. Marketers want stronger visibility into performance and more confidence in where they are investing,” he said.
Patel explained that the alliance seeks to meet these needs with a more connected ecosystem, where technology, execution, and consumer intelligence “work in tandem.”
“It helps move affiliate from a standalone channel to a more central part of performance marketing infrastructure, giving advertisers a stronger alternative to traditional performance channels,” Patel added.
A broader industry shift
Indeed, Patel said that the alliance comes at a time when performance marketing is at an inflexion point.
“Advertisers are under more pressure to prove outcomes, drive efficiency, and build growth channels that are both measurable and scalable. Affiliate has moved beyond its traditional role and is becoming a much more strategic part of that equation,” said Patel.
Yovanno shared a similar sentiment, noting that partnership marketing now stands alongside major performance platforms, like Google, Meta and Amazon.
“When you put this sort of scale together, brands can now deploy large programmatic budgets at a global scale, and this hasn’t been true historically — our infrastructure and industry were just too fragmented — and so I think what the Rakuten alliance is doing is accelerating the consolidation — it makes that opportunity real for us: a single global platform operating at the scale and sophistication that those big platforms operate at,” said Yovanno.
“It’s arguably a stronger model because partnership marketing is based on advocacy. It’s publishers, creators, communities, customers that are speaking on behalf of the brand, not the brand speaking for itself.”
Yovanno said this is important amid rising paid media costs and declining consumer trust in self-promotion.
“This is a more credible, more efficient path forward to grow,” he added, noting that the alliance sends a strong signal for where the market is heading.
Patel echoed this, saying it reflects a fundamental shift in the industry: “Affiliate is no longer just a channel; it's becoming more data-driven and directly tied to real business outcomes.”
While details on specific capabilities weren’t shared, the two parties plan to announce additional information on the alliance in the coming months.
