As we head into the madness of holidays, gift giving, travel, and possibly too much time with in-laws, it is also a time of reflection on all that has transpired in another crazy year.   

We’ve seen some big shake-ups in the affiliate world over the last 12 months. The changing economy has also changed consumer behavior, resulting in advertiser spend diminishing in certain areas and drastically increasing in others. Google has, yet again, stirred up some of the top partners in the industry. The third-party cookie survived another year. And it seems like the words “influencer” and “partnership” have been used no less than 50 million times to describe 100 million different business strategies.  

Once again, the only constant in the world of affiliate is that of ongoing innovation and evolution — or, in other words, change.  

2024: The Year of the Marketplace 

Here at TUNE, we’re happy to say we’ve been doing some innovating of our own!  

In 2023, we launched what was then called the TUNE Network based on advertiser, agency, and partner demand for a single place within the TUNE ecosystem to both discover and be discoverable.  

In 2024, we’ve seen that user base continue to grow and new partnerships take shape. We’ve also received lots of valuable feedback, which has helped us to hit a few milestones and release several enhancements and improvements over the past 12 months: 

• The number of advertisers and partners who have joined more than tripled in 2024, as did the number of active partnerships 
• Rebranded from the TUNE Network to the more apt TUNE Marketplace 
• Added carousel banners in the Marketplace and in-platform placements to drive greater partner awareness 
• Established a Partner Presentation knowledge sharing series, inviting top partners to present to our in-house teams 
• Onboarded key industry-leading publishers, networks, and brands 

It has been a great year, but we’re not done yet.  

What’s Ahead in 2025 

As we look to 2025, there are still some elite partners on our wish list (you know who you are!), and we’re eager for the next round of real-world user feedback from our Marketplace users. We are off to a great start, but we know that there is still some work to be done.  

For the advertisers out there: What does your ideal TUNE Marketplace look like? Do you prefer a more curated experience with less noise and only the partners you need? Are you hoping for more partners that best match your vertical, or perhaps your payout type?  

For the partners out there: What does your ideal TUNE Marketplace look like? More responsive advertisers? On-time payments? Easy to scale? We want to know, so don’t hesitate to send us feedback in the platform or email us your thoughts at partnerships@tune.com. 

The TUNE Marketplace is still young and agile, and our teams are eager to meet your needs. Help guide our product and process as we continue to build out the TUNE Marketplace to be the best solution for your business needs.  

Acquiring new high-intent customers is a critical challenge for any business, especially in the finance market. Customers rely heavily on word-of-mouth and take many factors into consideration before converting, making the stakes even higher.

Traditional marketing strategies often miss the mark, struggling to hit the sweet spot between ad spend and customer quality. This is where outcome-based marketing (OBM) comes into play. OBM revolutionizes customer acquisition by offering a more effective, performance-based approach, positioning brands to access previously untapped high-intent traffic, all while sharpening their competitive edge in the financial services landscape.

What is Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)?

Outcome-based marketing (OBM) is a results-driven strategy ideal for financial services marketers. With OBM, you only pay when specific KPIs crucial to your business are achieved, such as acquiring a qualified lead, loan application submissions, or new account openings. Campaigns are tailored around these down-funnel events, enabling you to test performance across various channels and pinpoint the most effective placements for converting traffic into customers.

Overcoming Customer Acquisition Pain Points with Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)

Discover how an OBM model helps tackle common obstacles in scaling customer acquisition in the finance industry.

High Costs per Acquisition: OBM helps manage high acquisition costs by ensuring you only pay for specific, measurable outcomes such as qualified leads or completed applications. This ensures every dollar you invest drives growth. With continuous optimization, OBM pinpoints where your best customers come from, enabling you to scale effectively without overspending.

Inefficiency in Targeting: OBM enhances targeting by using placement-based strategies across digital channels, geo-targeting specific locations, and dayparting for optimal ad timing. For finance marketers, this means precisely directing ads to high-potential leads. AI-driven optimization further refines targeting, continuously uncovering new customer acquisition opportunities and improving campaign efficiency.

• Working with an outcome-based marketing expert like Perform^[cb] connects you with top-performing partners to reach your ideal consumers. For example, a national mortgage marketer achieved a 481% increase in biannual growth and a 78% boost in conversions in just one quarter by leveraging Perform^[cb]’s expertise in tracking KPIs, managing volume, and analyzing competitive payouts.
• Investing in a performance marketing solution that can accurately track cross-channel conversions while protecting consumer data and complying with industry regulations is especially important for finance brands. A privacy-centric tracking platform like TUNE can ensure that every conversion is measured, whether it takes place in a web browser or a mobile app, without using third-party cookies or storing sensitive customer information.

Regulatory Costs: OBM allows you to work with partners who understand and adhere to financial regulations. These partners handle compliance aspects related to their marketing efforts, reducing the costs and risks associated with regulatory adherence.

• From FTC and SEC advertising laws to content compliance and bank regulations, Perform^[cb] ensures brands’ campaigns are protected through enhanced compliance monitoring, in-depth partner vetting process, and patented, built-in anti-fraud technology.

Measuring ROI: OBM prioritizes measurable results, simplifying ROI tracking even with complex customer journeys and multiple touchpoints. By paying for outcomes, you gain clearer insights into which channels and partners are delivering value, improving your ability to evaluate and optimize marketing effectiveness.

Lead Quality vs. Quantity: OBM emphasizes paying only for leads that meet specific criteria and convert into customers. This is especially crucial for financial services brands, where high acquisition costs are exacerbated by a significant portion of unqualified leads. By focusing on quality over quantity, OBM helps mitigate these costs and ensures a more efficient allocation of ad spend.

How Financial Services Brands Can Get Started with Outcome-Based Marketing (OBM)

Here are a few tips on how financial marketers can begin testing on a 100% performance-based model:

1. Define Clear Outcomes: Set specific goals like acquiring qualified leads or increasing conversions. This helps measure campaign effectiveness and ensures you’re focusing on high-quality metrics.
2. Leverage Data and AI: Use tools like Google Analytics for segmentation, Salesforce for predictive modeling, HubSpot for behavioral tracking, and Perform^[cb]’s PerformSense AI to enhance traffic quality and conversion rates by filtering out non-converting traffic based on extensive data. Choose a tracking platform like TUNE’s that offers real-time measurement and a library of dashboards and reports to get insight into what’s working and what’s not. For finance brands with business intelligence tools already in place, consider using a fully automated event delivery service such as Firehose to live stream data into proprietary systems.
3. Optimizations to Scale Incrementality: Regularly review and adjust campaigns to measure and scale incremental impact. Perform^[cb] uses advanced methods to isolate and test traffic, accurately assessing the impact of your marketing efforts. Set goals for key metrics like conversion rate, then use performance automation tools to automatically optimize campaigns based on those goals.
4. Consider Speaking with an Outcome-Based Expert: Connect with performance marketing partners experienced in financial services who offer robust targeting and transparent reporting. Perform^[cb]’s Outcome Engine leverages a performance-based model to acquire new customers alongside your existing marketing channels. TUNE’s expert team is knowledgeable about the challenges of marketing for financial services and can share learnings and best practices from years of experience.

Cutting Costs, Boosting Results

Outcome-based marketing offers a transformative approach to customer acquisition in the finance and insurance sectors. By focusing on measurable outcomes, leveraging precision targeting, and utilizing advanced tracking and analytics, marketers can significantly reduce spend without losing out on qualified customers.

Are you a financial services marketer eager to dive into outcome-based marketing? Connect with Perform^[cb]’s team of customer acquisition experts and get started today!

Email TUNE’s Partnerships Team at partnerships@tune.com to learn more about performance marketing for financial services brands and how the right tracking platform can help.

I have been in the affiliate marketing universe since 2006 and the one constant about this industry is change. Nonstop, everlasting, unrelenting change. Mergers and acquisitions, search algorithm updates, the death of third-party cookies, the resurrection of third-party cookies, new toolbars, new platforms, new agencies, new promotional methods. It never ends. And that is what keeps it fresh, interesting, and challenging for all of us as we navigate the many dimensions of what affiliate can mean.  

While as an industry we tend to take pride (and rightfully so) in the more sophisticated problems that an affiliate/partnerships program can solve for, there are many unique, valuable, and relatively untapped markets out there that need our help.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the exciting world of “Affiliate Adjacent.”  

What Is Affiliate Adjacent?

What the heck does Affiliate Adjacent mean? Let me give you a real-world example.  

Several years ago, I received an inbound lead through our website from a partnerships team at a very well-known global credit card provider. Believing that this was another affiliate opportunity I eagerly reached out, set an in-person meeting, and prepped my affiliate partnerships conversation with the limited information that was given. This was to be a working discovery session, as both sides were a bit unsure of the correct language to use in identifying the pain points that the software could solve.  

I was excited to show them our robust reporting and detailed commissioning tools and to talk about our advanced clearinghouse system for payments. I jumped right in and was ready to knock their socks off. We were going to get this deal! (Spoiler: we did!) 

But my amazing pitch was cut short. Very short. As soon as I explained that we could track activity across thousands of potential partners, that was all they wanted or needed. This was a field marketing team with thousands of representatives manually passing information through to call center reps, who then loaded it into SFDC. It was a mess. They had no need for the bells and whistles. Tracking alone was the solution.  

This was an eye-opener for me, and a significant opportunity. What was this, though? It was definitely not traditional affiliate in any form — this was Affiliate Adjacent! 

Since that time, I have seen increased interest in Affiliate Adjacent use cases from advertisers, publishers, and agencies alike, and I can say for certain that no platform is better suited to these unique engagements than TUNE.  

TUNE Affiliate Adjacent Use Cases 

The use cases below are only a few of the creative ways customers are using TUNE to accomplish their business goals. 

A digital streaming service uses TUNE to work with TV manufacturers to promote its streaming service.

• Connected TVs and streaming platforms are incentivized to promote the streaming service to their consumers via smart TV interfaces.
• The streaming service provides each brand partnership with tracking links and creatives, without needing to go through a complex application process.
• Activating a new brand partnership accelerated from two weeks to two minutes with TUNE.

A multinational automotive manufacturer uses TUNE to work with physical dealerships and collision centers to promote its branded auto insurance.

• Salespeople in the brand’s dealerships are incentivized to promote its auto insurance to consumers when they shop for a vehicle, and collision centers when they bring in a vehicle for repairs.
• Individual dealerships and collision centers use insurance-branded QR codes to allow customers to get a quote in minutes.
• The goal is to insure every brand vehicle in the U.S., and to also be able to insure other makes/models, where traditional affiliate is being added next.

A national insurance subsidiary uses TUNE to work with property management companies to promote its renters insurance product.

• Property management companies are incentivized to promote the insurance product to renters when they sign a lease.
• The insurance subsidiary provides embeddable lead forms, which the management companies embed directly into their rental agreements.
• The goal is to enable affiliate partners who have access to audiences that are uniquely positioned to purchase renters insurance.

A digital media agency uses TUNE to build technology solutions that enable brand-to-brand partnerships on checkout pages.

• The agency enables additional monetization opportunities for retailers and brands by providing them with technology that effectively turns them into affiliates.

A national real estate marketplace uses TUNE to work with niche real estate partners to drive realtors to sign up for advertising accounts on its platform.

A parking marketplace app uses TUNE to work with hyperlocal partners — MLB teams, sports arenas, airports, and more — to drive sign-ups and reservations.

• The app uses app-based activations via targeted local and regional events to offer convenient parking opportunities to attendees.
• The partners used deep linking to provide a seamless experience for event attendees to view the closest parking options near their event.

An online home improvement platform uses TUNE to work with recruitment partners to advertise jobs to contractors, and to track when individual contractors set an appointment for a job.

What’s Your Affiliate Adjacent Use Case?

Is there a unique use case your current platform can’t support? I want to hear about it — and help you make it happen on TUNE! Send me a note at partnermarketing@tune.com and we’ll tackle your challenge together.