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Affiliate Industry Leaders discuss 2021 Growth DriversTwo major themes emerged as potential drivers of growth in 2021: the evolutionof publishers into the space and organizational change that removes frictionfor performance marketers. To listen to the full webinar click here (Pleaseemail [email protected] for the webinar passcode).Overall, the most prominent theme was how organizations are evolving to adaptto the growth of performance and content..Nilla noted “I think the biggest reason publishers do not get into theaffiliate space is fear of operationalizing it and doing it well, and thenumber of networks they need to plug into and the number of links they have tooptimize and the various reports they need to extract from the differentnetworks, so creating some kind of operability in affiliates is the key tosuccess.”Sarah added that partners are overcoming this hurdle and new skill sets areemerging, “we are getting to a point where we have non traditional affiliatesand are able to bring different types of publishers into our ecosystem, we seea lot more biz dev mindset required to make this happen.”As publishers build their own significant brands that resonate with consumersBrian pointed out that “you need to be able to defer to their(publisher)expertise, they may know something new about your audience. You need people onyour team that can do that”New people and skillsets driving growth was a common theme, but building anorganization that can support a performance based function was a theme thegroup continued to come back to.As organizations grow, Nilla advised that removing friction for performancemarketers lay in being experts that supported performance marketing whereverit emerged in the organization. “It is super important to have a centralizedaffiliate and commerce team who are subject matter experts in all thingsaffiliate. . . we just treat it as a separate business and then support allparts of the organization and anything that may have a performance or commercecore.”Often affiliate skill sets get narrowed down to recruitment or management, butNilla was clear that to have a highly functioning affiliate team it is helpfulto “ have the luxury of a data science team …. someone to managerelationships with the networks… then distribution…someone who is thechampion for all things commerce and conversion is hugely important. In mediait is not typical to optimize for conversion, it is typically views orimpressions. So having someone focused on growth through the lens ofconversion makes all the difference for success” Staying on the theme of publishers, the panel discussed how innovation on thepublisher side is driving big growth in the industry.Sarah noted that “the combination of new publishers and partner types,influencers, and more sophisticated tech partners getting legs gives us roomfor budget expansion and as publishers develop more reputable brands it helpsaffiliates get buy in from CMOs.”Brian added that it was a matter of connecting buyers and sellers “It is aboutthe realization of what is out there. The growth will come from matching thesupply and demand. We’re going to see activation of longer tail partners thatwill get introduced to advertisers (that may not have before).’ and gavemobile as an example “There is a pent up demand to tap into the mobilenetworks. The missing piece is deep linking into their site from mweb or appis going to unlock the next wave of demand.”The panel touched on a number of drivers that any marketer would be wise toconsider in 2021, but Nila also took the big picture, noting that change iscoming regardless “There is generational pressure. Millennials and Gen Z doall their shopping online. Influencers, content, storytelling and the valuesof the brand are things they are willing to spend money on. I think that isgoing to force the hand of advertisers to take the channel more seriously.”To watch the full conversation download the webinar here. (Please [email protected] for the passcode)