Rakuten International and impact.com today announced a strategic alliance to modernize the affiliate and performance marketing ecosystem. This collaboration unites Rakuten Advertising’s global managed services and performance intelligence, Rakuten Rewards’ extensive consumer reach, and impact.com’s leading technology infrastructure. Together, they aim to create a unified, scalable ecosystem for commerce partnerships that simplifies tracking, contracting, and payments at a global scale.
Integrated Model: Combines Rakuten Advertising’s strategic expertise with impact.com’s platform for contracting, tracking, and payments.
Consumer Intelligence: Leverages direct shopper signals from Rakuten Rewards to improve attribution and understand incrementality.
Unified Marketplace: Provides publishers and creators access to one of the industry's largest portfolios of advertisers and monetization models.
AI & Automation: Rakuten Advertising will focus on advancing AI and analytics, while impact.com collaborates on real-time tracking and enhanced shopper incentives.
Event Previews: Additional capabilities will be showcased at Rakuten Optimism US (May 5-6 in Scottsdale) and impact.com’s iPX (June 9-11 in Austin).
Global Scale: impact.com currently powers over 350,000 partnerships for 5,000+ brands, including Walmart, Uber, and Lenovo.
Partnership marketing is a critical growth channel, but the systems supporting it have historically remained fragmented across different platforms and service providers. This alliance seeks to offer a fundamentally stronger approach by providing a unified technology and services solution. Advertisers will gain greater control over how they plan and scale programs while benefiting from deeper insights into return on investment.
"This alliance brings together infrastructure, service excellence, global reach, and consumer intelligence," said Amit Patel, CEO of Rakuten International. "By pairing with impact.com's industry-leading platform, advertisers will have access to programmatic, data-driven programs with smarter insights and stronger execution."
By integrating Rakuten’s managed execution with impact.com’s automation capabilities, the partnership offers a robust alternative to traditional performance marketing channels. The collaboration is designed to make performance-based growth more efficient for a wider universe of advertisers, from large-scale enterprises to emerging brands.
"Bringing our platform, Rakuten Advertising’s global scale, and Rakuten Rewards’ consumer platform into a unified value proposition will make it easier for advertisers to achieve their goals with better economics," said David A. Yovanno, CEO of impact.com.
About Rakuten International
Rakuten International, a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., is a global technology leader based in San Mateo, California. Its portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, and advertising, focused on aligning members and businesses in a shared community.
About impact.com
impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform. It enables businesses to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey, supporting affiliate, creator, and advocate programs for over 5,000 global brands.
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