Lauren Newman, CRO at Button: AI-Powered Commerce
Lauren Newman is the CRO at Button, an AI-driven commerce platform enhancing creator and affiliate marketing performance.
A Familiar Model: Affiliate Marketing as the Data Layer
For those of us in affiliate and performance commerce, the recent acquisition by Publicis Groupe of LiveRamp for $2.2 billion raises a question: Why the delay?
Publicis aims to accelerate "data co-creation" for the AI age, focusing on connecting identity infrastructure, activating data across customer journeys, and attributing media spends to measurable outcomes. However, affiliate marketing has been doing this for years, driven by necessity rather than vision.
What Publicis is Acquiring
The LiveRamp acquisition follows Publicis's 2019 purchase of Epsilon to build an identity layer and their 2025 acquisition of Lotame to enhance identity graph capabilities. LiveRamp, connecting over 25,000 publisher domains and 500+ technology partners, completes the puzzle.
The strategy is clear: Epsilon provides the identity foundation, LiveRamp enables data collaboration, and Publicis's Marcel platform activates it all. This results in a "identity-to-outcome" stack, tracking consumer journeys and attributing results to marketing spend accurately at scale.
Affiliate Marketing's Legacy
Affiliate marketing, built around performance, has always been about:
- Outcome-First: Getting something measurable done means getting paid.
- Identity Resolution: Publishers and creators needed to be identified to get paid fairly.
- Journey Tracking: Tracking clicks and conversions across devices and sessions to assign attribution.
- Server-Side Tracking: Building infrastructure to maintain data integrity, ensuring publishers could survive.
As privacy regulations changed and third-party data degraded, performance-based partnerships gained traction, with 74% of brands shifting to affiliate programs and 59% dedicating a significant portion of their budgets to creators. This shift highlights that the affiliate model, with its focus on outcomes, identity, and journey connections, is better suited to today's marketing landscape.