Impact Radius launch today!

I’d like to congratulate the team at Impact Radius for the launch today of the product: Impact Radius

I was taken immediately by the concept of the product when I was first told about it back in October last year by Nicky Iapino, who was working on a consultancy brief with the development team behind the project: Estelea.

Per Pettersen, the man behind the world’s first affiliate network technology – Commission Junction – runs Estalea, and when Nicky explained to me the calibre and heritage of the management team involved with Per I immediately took note.  Todd Crawford, Wade Crang and Lisa Riolo are the three co-founders along with Per who is CEO. They are based out in Santa Barbara, a short hop from the Estalea HQ.

Nicky was integral to developing the product for the UK market and I enjoyed a 6-month contract working full time with her and Ricki Jones. Ricki remains the on the books of the UK business, heading up the team.

So what is Impact Radius?

Impact Radius links performance advertising to TV, radio, print, outdoor and online distribution channels—delivering to advertisers and media partners opportunities for growth and profit. By providing the tools and technology to negotiate and manage relationships directly on a single platform, Impact Radius is changing how performance deals are transacted across all media channels. With its “clear box” philosophy, Impact Radius is championing a new direction for performance advertising by increasing transparency in relationships and improving decision-making for media partners, advertisers and agencies.

We’ve been working with them beyond my contract period, and have launched a couple of campaigns on the platform – New Year – New business.  It’s taking time to get traction because due to it being a silent product for so long, there aren’t many media partners signed up to the directory at present.  This will change of course.

I really like the concept of advertisers being able to engage directly with key media partners and affiliates.  As we all know, Pareto’s principle is magnified in this channel traditionally, and it truly is the 5% of partners who generate 95% of revenue in all but very few cases.  For these 5% partners, the super affiliates, margin is key and if there is an opportunity to earn a higher bounty as a result of the advertiser having more commission to play with then it has to be a good thing.

In turn, advertisers know who their key partners are, so it must grate slightly to see increasing levels of revenue generated through these partners, with the incumbent affiliate network taking ever increasing levels of override. By working direct advertisers – and agencies – can remove the traditional override cost level – anything from 15% to 30% – and work with Impact Radius at an override cost starting at just 10%, and going downward as volume increases.

The three functions which every performance campaign needs are incorporated by Impact Radius into their built-for-purpose platform are tracking, reporting and payment.  The UI is really clean and logical, there are still a few bugs, and that’s to be expected.  There will be subsequent product releases, which will make the platform even slicker.

All in all it’s about time – the market’s right for this product, and there isn’t really anything else out there like it, certainly not where they are charging on the traditional – and hugely discounted – override model.  Tradedoubler have the Toolbox, DGM have a Lite, stripped down version of their interface, DC Storm have gone sideways with their PPC tracking and reporting tool and now offer an affiliate tracking solution, but they all charge on a hybrid cost model – CPC, and access fee.

Impact Radius have introduced an activation fee – £250 I believe, and that’s it.  Everything else is starting override of 10%.

It’s an obvious agency tool – provide your clients with an additional service, launch new campaigns with direct relationships with half a dozen key partners, then look to appoint a network to generate sales through the long tail – the 1 or 2 sales per month from the 50+ partners also signed up to the campaign.

Looking forward to seeing how the industry receive it.  I expect a few players will push out some ‘challenging’ PR, but ultimately the UK networks are going to have to evolve, and up their game, and demonstrate to clients what they do for the fees they charge.  Exciting times ahead.