Impact

The questions fall under three different categories:

• Pricing

• Placement

• Data

Pricing

What is your business model and how do you make money?

Impact charges a flat monthly Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) fee. This fee is determined based on features required and the expected usage of our software.

Can you outline the full details of the agreement on a booking form/contract?

The SaaS fee is agreed upon up front, along with the features and usage metrics that are included in that fee, and the additional fees that will be applied if the volume exceeds the contracted metrics or if additional features are required.

Will you share who your trading partners are?

We work with many of the world’s leading brands and agencies, including Ticketmaster, Airbnb, Uber, Lenovo, and Adidas.

However, some of our largest clients (such as global leaders in the technology, retail, and financial services sectors) choose to white-label our solution and have asked us not to mention them publicly.

 

Placement

Do you own the inventory you sell?

We do not sell inventory, rather we facilitate the workflows and provide the insights for advertisers who are procuring inventory from their partners. Advertisers, agencies and partners communicate freely with each other – we enable direct relationships and we do not act as a middleman except as necessary for attribution and payment processing.

If you don’t own your own inventory then how do you access inventory and which platforms do you use?

Partners own their own inventory. Impact’s Partnership Cloud™ facilitates the workflow between brand, agency and partner, assisting in the complex activity of:

• Helping brands and agencies to discover that inventory

• Tracking impressions and clicks of that inventory

• Facilitate creative deployment to that inventory

• Reporting on the performance of that inventory, including customer journey analytics to show what role partners played in delivering the desired action

• Verification and fraud protection

Do you specify your media placements and positions?

No; partners, advertisers and agencies negotiate directly with each other regarding which media placements to leverage, and which positions on the page to use.

What insights do you provide back to advertisers?

The Partnership Cloud provides insights at the consumer, ad, product, partner, and channel levels.

• Consumer-level insights include a chronological list of each marketing touchpoint for each conversion

• Ad-level insights include the performance and usage of each offer, ad, and voucher code

• Product-level insights include the performance of each product/SKU in your catalogue, as well as breakdowns of how conversion paths for each product differ from aggregate conversion paths

• Partner-level insights include the aggregate lifetime value (LTV), purchase behaviour, and device usage of customers driven by each partner

• Channel-level insights include breakdowns of how often each partner is credited for conversions they participated in driving, and how partners and other marketing channels interact in customers’ paths to purchase

Does the inventory you own or access include UGC content?

Yes, some of the partners recruited by our platform or available in our marketplace may provide UGC content, particularly around social influencers and blogs

What brand safety measures do you use?

Partners are contractually obligated to comply with the following standards:

• Illegal gambling and casino-related content (country-specific)

• Hosting objectionable content (porn, hate, violence) on their media (website, social media properties, email, print, TV, radio, billboard)

• Promoting illicit drugs, prescription drugs, drug paraphernalia

• Copied and non-referenced content. (If the content or the site has been copied from another site without being referenced).

Additionally, each Advertiser that the Partner works with has direct terms with the Partner and may have additional or different standards. In either case, it is up to the Advertiser to enforce its relationship terms, including compliance with either or both sets of standards.

Additional considerations exist for influencer-generated content. The Partnership Cloud™ provides an easy way to visually audit a large pool of prospects during the discovery process. Influencer posts are compiled by our crawlers and brands or agencies can easily review screenshots of profiles and analyse deep analytics for audience quality and authenticity to evaluate whether the influencer is a good fit for the brand or not, before recruiting them into the program. This visual auditing capability can also be performed for influencers who are already active within your program to scan for brand safety violations.

Which industry standards have you been certified against?

There are no current industry standards for affiliate marketing or the partnerships channel. However, Impact does follow industry best practices and regularly passes stringent audits by prospective clients and investors.

Additionally, one of the Partnership Cloud’s products is Forensiq, which is a fraud detection and verification solution that enjoys a large number of certifications:

• MRC Accredited in Display and Video Served Impressions (Desktop, Mobile Web & In-App)

• MRC Accredited in Display and Video Viewability (Desktop & Mobile Web)

• MRC Compliant with the Sophisticated Invalid Traffic Provisions of MRC's Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines (Desktop, Mobile Web & In-App)

• TAG Certified Against Fraud

• TAG Certified Against Piracy

Do you have a policy in place for ad-misplacement?

Yes; in addition to our general Terms of Use, we also require partners to agree with the Media Partner User Agreement, which outlines acceptable and prohibited activities.

Are you happy to share your optimisation tactics?

While we do not optimise traffic, placements, or partnerships on behalf of our clients, we do publish many thought leadership pieces around how to optimise performance within the partnerships channel.

 

Data

Under GDPR what legal basis are you providing your services under?

As a service provider acting in the capacity of data processor, our legal basis is the pass-through legal basis of our customer (the data controller). With respect to our customers' personal data (i. e. business contact and other account information), Impact acts as a data controller and the legal basis is legitimate business needs in the fulfilment of our contract with the customer.

If consent is the mechanism then can you prove how you obtained it?

N/A

Are you using the IAB Framework?

Since the IAB framework is generally concerned with the programmatic industry, as opposed to affiliate marketing or partnership, it does not really pertain to our business. We are, however, members of the IAB, the IAB Tech Lab, and the IAB Affiliate Marketing Playbook working group.

What other 3rd party data partners require consent for your business to deliver its service?

N/A

What do you do with data you obtain from advertiser’s campaigns or data tags?

We use this data to support the workflow and analytics within the Partnership Cloud.

Are advertisers permitted to appoint their own 3rd party partners for verification and measurement?

Yes, advertisers are certainly free to use their own verification and measurement providers. We do recommend Forensiq as a fraud verification tool because it is built directly into the Impact Platform and thus provides a more native workflow and streamlined user experience than a third party tool could. However, we would never require a client to use Forensiq or prohibit the use of a third-party verification or measurement tool.

Will you provide a link to your privacy and data policies?

https://impact.com/privacy-policy/

Will you share how you build audience, contextual and targeting segments?

Impact currently does not build any audience, contextual or targeting segments. However, Advertisers can onboard their own DMP data into Impact for enhanced analytics.

 

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Please note the answers given are self-declared and are not verified by IAB UK or independently audited, unlike under industry-owned programmes such as JICWEBS. To view the latest JICWEBS Certifications, visit https://jicwebs.org/certification-process/signatories/