Impact acquires Activate: What that means for creators, influencers, brands, and agencies

Yes, you heard right: Activate has coupled up with partnership automation platform Impact. Like any new relationship, we’re busy getting to know each other. Today we lift the veil on Impact’s acquisition and reveal what the match means for Activate’s existing roster of creators, influencers, brands, and agencies.

Why the timing’s right for Impact and Activate

Before we get into the details of the union, let’s take a look at where things stand in the influencer world:

The influencer marketing industry continues to experience rapid growth. Alongside that expansion, Activate has grown to support creators, influencers, brands, and agencies. The Impact–Activate alliance comes at a time when the industry aspires to get the best out of creators and influencers and to fairly reward them for their contributions — even beyond last click and onsite conversions.

Introducing Impact and what they bring to the table

As a global leader in influencer partnership automation, Impact uses its Partnership Cloud™ to automate and simplify discovery, recruitment, onboarding, optimization and reporting across all types of partnerships, including influencer partnerships. The most mature partnership programs drive more than 28% of their companies’ total revenue.

Impact views creators and influencers as a powerful part of the “partnership channel” as a whole, which includes affiliates and brand-to-brand, or business-to-business partnerships — any type of partnership between a brand and an individual or entity. Because every single person or organization that works with you requires enhanced relationship management; whether that’s:

  • customized contracts

  • analytics

  • personalized automation to nurture partnerships

  • help them to leverage further opportunities to collaborate and earn more commission for value-driving activities, not just last click to sale.

The Impact Partnership Cloud™ is a SaaS platform that ignites growth by unifying and automating how you manage your partners’ life cycle, to scale your program across a whole spectrum of partnership types. In a single platform, the Partnership Cloud™ orchestrates a vibrant universe of partnerships, across their full lifecycle

What makes Impact and Activate good for each other?

Influencer partnerships are a critical component of a mature partnership program, which makes the meeting of minds between Activate and Impact highly beneficial for organizations wanting to grow faster and explore the full potential of partnerships.

In parallel, the influencer industry continues to evolve from individual creator transactions to valuable long-term partnerships. Since its inception, Activate has seen firsthand how online communities authentically connect brands and audiences. Activate’s 12 million registered global users are a natural fit for Impact’s world-leading partnership automation technology. This formidable synergy can drive the industry’s new growth stage.

Do more for brands and agencies — together

Dedicating adequate time to influencer campaign management is a top challenge for 30% of brand and agency marketers. And a full 41% find building an always-on influencer strategy high on their list of challenges. The combined power of Activate and Impact’s technologies makes it easy for all kinds of influencer managers to maintain all kinds of influencer relationships– and to do so at scale.

Activate adds market-leading campaign automation to Impact’s product, while Activate makes it easy to discover, recruit, activate, manage, and measure influencer partners. Thanks to Impact technology agencies and brands will also be able to leverage Impact’s powerful contracting, tracking, and commissioning capabilities will enable you to:

  • Customize contracts with hybrid fixed fee/performance or pure performance model

  • Generate vanity URLs and tracking links that allow you to keep track of how the traffic your creators and influencers are driving participate in your buyer’s journey to conversion

  • Pay creators and influencers based on the payout model you choose; fixed fee, hybrid fixed/performance, value-based or performance-based — in whatever currency the influencer needs

  • Measure the overall ROI for a given creator or influencer, as well as the influencer’s lifetime value for your brand

Enhanced tools, automated campaign workflows, and messaging will save brands and agencies time on the discovery, recruitment, and onboarding. Greater insight into campaign performance will increase campaign returns for brands and agencies. Agencies will prove their value and increase opportunities for stronger budgets, extended contracts, and professional advancement.

Given that 86% of marketers don’t know how to calculate influencer fees, the integration will bring along customized contracts with automated contracting, and flexible payment processing that makes paying partners their full value easier than before. Impact and Activate are working together on other developments that will help your organization understand how influencer campaigns contribute to your business goals. You’ll gain a clearer view of Activate’s aggregate and individual-level engagement, reach, sentiment, and performance reporting.

Ultimately, this acquisition will give all of our clients access to Impact’s platform, which in turn will give you enhanced flexibility and control to develop long-term, profitable partnerships.

Creators, influencers, and talent agency benefits

Impact’s Marketplace was built to make monetizing creators’ and influencers’ personal brand, well, personal. Now that Activate is part of Impact, you’ll be able to connect directly with top global fashion and lifestyle brands. In addition, the acquisition will give Activate influencers and talent agencies access to:

  • A pool of top global brands, including 15 of the world’s top 20 consumer companies

  • The largest available product catalog, which means, even more, earning potential

  • Essential criteria information at the point of discovery to enable informed decisions

  • Access to a platform that powers $50B in eCommerce and $3B in payouts

The influencer partnership tech “power couple”

Activate is known for its great SaaS product, and integrating its existing products with Impact technology enables a better customer experience. Impact and Activate are ready to take things to the next level as the number-one global influencer marketplace — with more than 300K opt-in qualified and vetted creators and influencers. Whether your organization is growing an influencer team, managing a calendar of seasonal campaigns, or are part of a holistic influencer partnership program with content sites and B2B partners, the Impact and Activate offering has everything you need to come along for the ride, and take your business to the next level, too.

Welcome to the newly empowered Activate by Impact! Find out more by contacting activate@impact.com.