CJ Signals Subtle Shifts

Recapping CJU — and the moves CJ itself is making.

Written by Brook Schaaf

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Thank you to our hosts for another iteration of the best affiliate marketing shows in the very best location. I speak, of course, of last week’s CJU at the former Fess Parker Hotel in Santa Barbara, California, with blue ocean beside and blue sky above. After many preparatory hours in the not-the-best conference app, my two days were filled with high-quality meals and meetings (shoutout to our new sales consultant, Sam Benon). I also carved out time for a couple presentations, and I must say my picks — or at least my luck — have never been better. 

One highlight was Colin Johnson‘s demo of CJ’s new Offers and Cashback Scraping Tool, which was quite impressive. The game here is pretty well known: merchants negotiate various cashback rates with select affiliates, keeping an eye toward revenue, profitability, exposure, customer acquisition, and competitors. Affiliates do the same on their side. Both sides try to take in as much information as possible, from checking good-old consumer-facing Cashback Monitor (no surprise Yansong Wang was at the session) to aggressively scraping competitor sites.  

Another standout presentation came from Amanda Gilmour and Stacey Georgoulis on “Retail Media for Performance Marketers.” Among a number of other topics, mention of conquesting (suggesting a competing merchant in an appropriate context) jumped out at me. 

Because FMTC doesn’t normally see transactions I did not know this, but CJ’s Customer Journey tool can also be used by affiliates! While they can’t see which competing affiliates were in a clickstream prior to a transaction, the CJ Performer I spoke with can see the type and time, most helpful for business decisions.

Taken together, I regard these changes as incredibly positive for our channel because they represent not only an acceptance of obscure techniques, but also an empowerment of proper business awareness, negotiations, and, in the case of retail media and conquesting, confidence in winning more dollars for affiliate. It seems to me that old cautions that served no real purpose are being abandoned. 

I wonder if CJ’s new CEO, Santi Pierini, formerly with CAKE then TUNE (through the Constellation acquisition), has had some direction on the improved information sharing here. In an interview with Hello Partner’s Sol Wilkinson, he said, “I just felt you can make a big impact here in terms of thought leadership, in terms of driving the market. I mean, we’re losing a lot of our budgets in affiliate marketing to paid search, paid social, because there’s so much inflation around what a keyword costs and so on.”

With these offerings it seems fair to say that CJ is, if not driving the market, very much in the race. Fitting, given that their CEO’s name sounds like a race car driver — and it seems the company is shifting into a higher gear.