• by Ray Schultz , January 23, 2019

Pepperjam has launched an affiliate marketing lifecycle platform called Ascend.

The product is designed to help marketers “overcome the legacy challenges of the affiliate category” and provide the capabilities needed to make affiliates a critical part of the marketing mix, states Pepperjam CEO Matt Gilbert.

Those capabilities include discovery, recruitment, attribution, commission, fraud prevention, and payment, the company says.

The marketing business is becoming crowded with the brand name Ascend.

For one, there is the company Ascend2, which provides research services for technology companies and digital marketing agencies.

There is also the suite of marketing products for small businesses announced last week by Wix, which is also called Ascend.  

According to the company, Pepperjam’s Ascend platform allows marketers to:

• Automate the manual process of utilizing advertiser data to identify and recruit publishers to an affiliate program.
• Track performance with standardized dashboards.
• Facilitate payment options across the customer journey.
• Customize a commission strategy to align with a company’s attribution model. These include fractional, first, preferred and last-click capabilities, the firm says.
• Protect users from fraud with a monitoring and enforcement solution.

Everlane uses the Ascend platform to automate and drive affiliate marketing tasks, states Loren Simon, head of digital at the direct-to-consumer retailer.

Gilbert states: “With Facebook continuing to charge higher fees to access their audience, and Google and Amazon deploying similar pricing leverage, each incremental customer acquisition becomes more expensive and marketers need an alternative.”