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The Drum • 17th May 2023

Creator-led affiliate marketing is the future of e-commerce - if you do it right

To find the best influencers for your affiliate marketing program, look for posting frequency and links, not likes and followers, says Mike Balducci (general manager affiliate, e-commerce and payment solutions, CreatorIQ).

The skyrocketing growth in e-commerce that took place during the pandemic is over.

After enjoying 20%+ growth rates for over five years, e-commerce activity is falling back to earth, forecast to sink into the single digits thanks to a combination of a post-pandemic shift bac

The Drum • 25th April 2023

For creator-led marketing campaigns, Instagram remains the place to be — here's why

Marketers today have more tools and technology at their disposal to reach and engage with prospective customers than at any other time in history.

So why does it feel like their jobs are harder than ever?

In a word: volume. There’s simply more of everything. There are more TV shows to place ads in, more social media platforms to distribute targeted messaging through, and more creators and influencers to partner with.

In fact, few sectors of the marketing world have exploded as much as creator

The Drum • 24th April 2023

Data enrichment: How to know everything there is to know about your customers

The key to delivering personalized messaging and benefits to customers, at scale, is through the collection of zero-party data.

But equally important is what you do after collecting it. Clean, organized and actionable data will pay dividends. Siloed, outdated, and forgotten data won’t. Given that consumers worldwide interact with brands through multiple channels — email, text, social, etc. — the need to create a single source of truth for customer data across platforms is more critical than eve

The Drum • 22nd March 2023

4 ways strategic partner programs can improve native marketing platforms

By Andy Gladwin, head of partnerships at Marigold

The primary ambition of any vendor is to provide the most compelling value proposition to customers.

The most successful vendors accomplish this not only by fielding the best product possible, but also by enhancing their native services with a compelling ecosystem of complementary partners.

Simply put, strategic alliances drive improved awareness, confidence, results, and ultimately satisfaction for customers. Building a robust ecosystem acts

Entrepreneur • 10th March 2023

3 Risks That Come With Rebranding \u2014 and How to Overcome Them

Here are some tips to manage three of the biggest risks companies face when rebranding.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Rebranding is not an effort to take lightly. There's no shortage of brands that got the wrong kind of attention after changing up their logo (remember Airbnb?) or their name (hello, Meta).

And while a healthy dose of fear is a good thing going into a rebrand (to keep from embarking on the effort frivolously), it shouldn't paralyze you from maki

Forbes • 3rd March 2023

Council Post: How Loyalty Programs Can Help Brands During A Recession

Wendy Werve is CMO of Marigold and has over 20 years of experience developing, leading and executing growth-focused marketing strategies.

The word recession is a scary one, particularly for businesses.

After all, when the economy gets tough, consumers tend to spend less. According to the NielsenIQ Consumer Outlook 2022 midyear report, 42% plan to reduce out-of-home spending. Another 81% report changing the way they shop to manage expenses (up from 33% in December 2021).

Clearly, brands need t

The Drum • 24th February 2023

Survey reveals top 5 trends defining influencer marketing in 2023

The following article references data collected from CreatorIQ’s 2023 Influencer Marketing Trends Report. It is based on survey data from more than 236 creators and 163 brands and agencies conducted between Aug 15 and Sept. 25, 2022, primarily in the US.

The influencer marketing industry has grown to an estimated size of $14.6bn globally. But for all its maturity, it remains an ever-evolving space.

Leading both the industry growth and constant change is the always dynamic creator economy, a co

The Drum • 23rd February 2023

How to recession-proof your restaurant with relationship marketing

Just as the restaurant industry begins to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, another storm is about to hit it head on: a looming recession. While (hopefully) not as challenging as the forced closings that the pandemic caused, recessions have their own challenges in the form of higher labor costs, food costs and fewer diners.

But in this case, there’s at least a warning, giving restaurant owners time to prepare and get their houses in order. In this article, we’ll examine the main building bloc

The Drum • 17th February 2023

Four Ways Influencer Marketing on TikTok Will Evolve in 2023

TikTok’s wild popularity among creators and consumers is nothing new, and in 2022, we saw a major surge in the number of brands teaming up with TikTokers. In fact, the total volume of creator-led TikTok campaigns run on our platform increased by nearly 300% year-over-year. Yet while TikTok itself is here to stay, the strategies brands use to win over TikTokers, and their audiences, will change with the platform’s evolving creator ecosystem.

Let’s take a look at four influencer marketing trends

The Drum • 25th January 2023

3 biggest marketing challenges of 2023 and how brands can solve them

By Tim Glomb, VP of content at Marigold

This article references data compiled in Marigold's recently released Consumer Trends Index 2023, featuring the latest global consumer attitudes and trends in personalization, privacy, messaging, advertising, and brand loyalty.

Earlier this month you may have seen the news that our company rebranded under the new name Marigold and with an updated and expanded mission. If any of you have conducted a similar rebranding effort, you know it’s not a small und

Entrepreneur • 23rd January 2023

8 Ways to Retain Customers During an Economic Downturn

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Recessions typically mean reduced consumer spending. And by many accounts, we're heading into a recession this year. So, companies need to start gearing up.

The first reaction many companies have is to start cutting back on costs. While in many cases that makes sense, it can backfire if you cut investments in areas crucial to your bottom line. One area worth investing more in during an economic downturn is customer loyalty.

As we

The Drum • 14th December 2022

Data shows email is still the top channel for revenue - but only if it's done right

Email is only a format. The key to effective email marketing is in the message delivered, says CM Group's Tim Glomb.

Don’t call it a comeback. Email may be an old format, but it continues to be one of the most effective marketing channels brands can use to drive revenue - if used correctly (and that’s a big if).

According to the 2022 Digital Consumer Trends Index, email crushes all other forms of customer outreach — banner ads, social media ads, organic posts, and SMS combined — by up to 108%.

Forbes • 1st December 2022

Council Post: What Marketers Say And What They Should Mean In The Modern Marketing Environment

Wendy Werve is CMO of CM Group, and has over 20 years of experience developing, leading, and executing growth-focused marketing strategies.

Like any industry, the marketing field is full of wonky language, cliches and jargon.

For an industry that’s reliant on using language to communicate, too often the language it uses serves only to confuse, or worse … obscure.

Also, like many industries, the marketing field is changing and evolving. In fact, we’re in the midst of what is possibly one of th

VIZIO • 28th February 2022

Smart TV Owners Still Watch Ad-Supported Video

A lot of people in the industry think AVOD only reaches people who don’t want to spend on premium subscriptions or can’t afford them. Those people are wrong, according to new research from Magid and VIZIO.

Consider this—smart TV owners who pay more for premium subscription services are surprisingly active users of ad-supported services as well. In fact, they stream more ad-supported programming than those without smart TVs.
• - Smart TV owners spend more on SVOD subscriptions than those without

VIZIO • 28th February 2022

How To Launch A New Channel In Today’s Smart TV Landscape

At VIZIO, we add new content from partners at a pretty regular clip, with hundreds of FAST channels and fan-favorite streaming services.

One of the more recent, and successful, additions was POLARIS, a newly launched channel curated exclusively to VIZIO focused on Black history, culture, and entertainment as part of our Features program. Features is an exclusive content offering that leverages VIZIO’s first party, opted-in viewership data and homescreen targeting capabilities to deliver persona

CreatorIQ • 28th February 2022

Influencer Marketing Measurement: How to Crawl, Walk, and then Run

There’s a well-established axiom in the business world—“What gets measured gets managed.”

As the influencer marketing space grows in size, complexity, and importance, it’s going to have to increase in sophistication as well. And that means measuring its impact with more science and accuracy.

Establishing a useful and meaningful measurement program—as well as the analysis around it—is a crucial step anyone engaged in influencer marketing should start taking now, before someone else measures (an

VIZIO • 11th November 2021

Post-Peripherals—How Smart TVs Will Take Over Streaming Consumption and Access

VIZIO commissioned Magid, a leading research-based strategic consulting firm, to understand how streaming device choices impact streaming entertainment consumption, and what that means for programmers and advertisers alike. The company conducted a quantitative online survey of over 1,600 U.S. streaming TV users aged 18 - 64, supported by a 2-day online community qualitative study of both smart TV and peripheral owners.

The following is the first of several insights gained as a result of this re

Royalty Exchange • 29th April 2021

Music Multiple Mania: What Buyers Are Really Paying for Music Catalogs, And Why – Royalty Exchange

By now, it’s no secret that investors are willing to pay top-dollar to buy music catalogs.


Just how much though is a matter of debate. Almost overnight, the once-obscure investment term “earnings multiple” is now thrown around by artists and managers as commonly as “chart position” or “market share.”


A multiple is how much a buyer pays for a music catalog compared to how much it earned in the last 12 months. So if a catalog earning $5,000 in the last year sold for $50,000, it earned a 10x

Royalty Exchange • 2nd December 2020

What Royalty Investors Look For In Catalogs (And What They Don’t) – Royalty Exchange

Seems like every week there's another news story about a big financial outfit buying up music rights. And we facilitate multiple similar transactions on our marketplace every week.

But what are these investors looking for when buying music royalties? After all, most aren't music companies looking to expand their repertoire. They're financial companies seeking assets that will generate a return.

As such, they evaluate catalogs a little bit differently than a label or publisher would.

Since we'