Impact.com, Chief Executive Officer, David A. Yovanno’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on Partnership Economy

David, can you walk our MarTech Pulse readers through your professional journey – from leading technology solutions at Conversant to steering SaaS leaders like Marin Software, and now driving impact.com’s global partnerships?

My career has followed a single thread: how technology changes the way businesses find and keep customers. I’ve spent more than two decades leading marketing technology companies in different ecosystems – programmatic display at Conversant, paid search at Marin Software, social identity and data at Gigya. Each role gave me a different lens into customer acquisition, and each one reinforced the same conclusion: brands have been paying more and more for channels with diminishing returns and shrinking transparency.

Before any of that, I served as a lieutenant and CIO in the U.S. Navy. That experience shaped how I think about leadership, systems, and accountability in ways that still show up in how I lead people today.

What drew me to impact.com was the trend of power shifting from brands to communities. For years, brands controlled the message – they decided what to say, when to say it, and through which channels. That control has been steadily eroding as communities have taken over. What started as affiliate marketing – links and codes distributed across the open web – turned out to be an early signal of something much larger: a world where information travels through trusted people and networks rather than brand-controlled channels. That shift is now the defining dynamic of modern marketing, and impact.com is the infrastructure for it. The founding team had already built real technology around that thesis. What was missing was creating the category for this vision to scale. That’s the part I found genuinely exciting – and where I thought I could help.

With over 20 years shaping MarTech platforms, what key expertise or upcoming initiatives at impact.com are empowering brands to scale creator, affiliate, and B2B partnerships as a resilient revenue channel?

At our annual iPX event last month, we launched AI Search Visibility – our integration with Evertune and other GEO platforms that shows brands which creators and publishers are shaping AI-generated recommendations, with the ability to activate partnerships with those sources directly from the insight. That’s an industry first: the connection between seeing who influences an AI answer and being able to act on it in the same platform.

Beyond GEO, we’re broadening the signals available to brands in ways that future-proof tracking entirely. Integrations with social platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn, plus infrastructure-level integrations with CDNs like Cloudflare, give brands visibility into where influence is actually happening – independent of whether a click or promo code was ever used. It’s not a last-click attribution model. It’s an open, transparent, and directionally accurate picture of influence that helps brands decide which partners to invest in and how to structure compensation – built for a world where the signal increasingly lives upstream of the transaction.

And we’re investing heavily in making creators genuine performance drivers, not just awareness vehicles. Storefronts give creators permanent commerce destinations. In-platform social amplification lets brands turn creator content into paid media campaigns without leaving impact.com. Single-use promo codes reduce attribution leakage at checkout. Together, these close the loop from creator influence all the way to measurable business outcomes.

Read More – How Agentic AI Is Changing B2B Marketing Workflows

Following MarTech Pulse’s coverage of impact.com’s record 2025 growth, reinforcing partnership economy leadership, how has this momentum expanded your platform’s role in connecting brands with trusted creators and communities?

Our growth reflects a structural shift more than a company-specific story. The thesis we’ve been building around for years is now showing up in how brands actually allocate budget and organizational focus. Partnerships have moved from a supplementary tactic to a core growth function. That’s a meaningful change, and it’s showing up in both new customer demand and in how existing customers are expanding their programs.

That validation has let us accelerate investment in the areas customers are prioritizing most – creator commerce, AI-powered partner discovery, real-time measurement, and the automation that removes the operational friction keeping programs from scaling.

The framing I keep coming back to is this: the future of growth isn’t about buying more media. It’s about earning trust at scale. Whether a recommendation comes from a creator, a publisher, a brand advocate, or an AI system synthesizing answers for a consumer – the underlying mechanism is trust, and partnerships are how that trust gets built and distributed. Our platform exists to help brands identify, activate, and measure those relationships across the full customer journey, from first awareness through long-term advocacy.

MarTech Pulse research shows partnerships now rival paid media for ROI, with 30% higher retention. How does impact.com’s automation for discovery, tracking, and payments deliver this edge over traditional channels?

The ROI advantage of partnerships comes from the model itself – you typically pay for outcomes, not exposure, and you build with partners who have genuine influence over actual purchasing decisions. The economics are structurally different from paid media. What automation does is remove the friction that has historically kept that model from scaling.

Discovery has been manual. Contracting has been slow. Attribution has been inconsistent across channels. Payments have been delayed in ways that frustrate the partners you’re trying to retain. Each of those friction points puts a ceiling on program growth. We’ve been systematically removing them.

The evolution we’re most focused on right now is moving ask impact from a conversational tool into an action-oriented execution layer – helping program managers move faster inside actual workflows, not just surface information. Combined with real-time tracking, global payments, and automated compliance, the goal is to compress the time between identifying an opportunity and capturing it.

The important caveat is that AI is a force multiplier, not a replacement for human judgment. The strategic decisions – which partners to prioritize, how to structure relationships, what the right value exchange is – those remain human calls. AI helps you execute them faster and at greater scale. That combination is why partnership programs consistently outperform paid channels over time.

As brands diversify beyond walled gardens, how does impact.com’s marketplace streamline contracting, optimization, and payouts to help enterprises launch scalable affiliate and influencer programs faster?

Walled gardens built their dominance on two things: reach and attribution – their version of attribution, measured on their terms. That model is under real pressure now. Rising CPMs, signal loss from privacy changes, and growing skepticism about self-reported metrics are pushing brands to diversify. The open web is more complex to operate in, but it’s also more accountable. When a creator drives a conversion, you see it. When an affiliate brings in a new customer, you can measure the lifetime value. The transparency is built into the model.

Our marketplace is the largest in the industry, and it’s built to make that shift operationally seamless – one platform, every partnership type, full lifecycle management from discovery and contracting through performance tracking, optimization, and global payouts. Brands get a single system of record for partnerships, which creates consistency and visibility as programs scale across markets.

The retail media expansion we’ve done recently adds another dimension. Brands can now activate retailer-managed partner networks while maintaining the attribution standards that make partnerships worth measuring in the first place. And AI is accelerating the process throughout – surfacing high-potential partners, flagging optimization opportunities, and automating the administrative work that has historically required headcount.

The brands winning in this environment are the ones treating partnerships as a system, not a collection of individual relationships. That’s when the scale advantages compound.

Looking to 2026, with agentic AI automating partner discovery, what trends – like hyper-personalized commerce networks – do you foresee reshaping the partnership economy, and how is impact.com preparing?

The most important trend in marketing right now is discovery fragmentation. Consumers increasingly skip the search results page and ask AI directly. Those AI systems synthesize answers from a much smaller pool of trusted sources than the open web ever did. The creators, publishers, and experts who consistently appear in those answers have a disproportionate influence advantage. The question for brands has shifted from ‘who drives traffic’ to ‘who shapes the recommendation itself.’

AI is a power tool. We went from screwdrivers to power drills. The work gets done faster and at greater scale, but the world still needs carpenters. Trust, expertise, creativity, and authentic relationships are fundamentally human. AI amplifies them – it doesn’t replace them.

At impact.com, we’re building the infrastructure for this environment. AI Search Visibility helps brands understand who’s influencing AI-generated recommendations and how. Autonomous partnership agents can operate at a scale no human team can match. Our work with Evertune helps brands actively manage their presence in the AI answer layer – which is quickly becoming as important as search ranking was a decade ago.

Longer term, I expect partnership ecosystems to become much more dynamic. AI discovering new partners in real time, predicting partner performance before programs launch, optimizing commission structures against live business outcomes. The organizations that will compound growth over time are the ones that combine that intelligence with genuine human relationships – because trust remains the foundation of every successful partnership, and trust is still built between people.

Read More – AI Answer Engines: How Do They Work in E-Commerce

What one piece of advice would you offer MarTech Pulse readers building partnership strategies: key steps to integrate them as a third growth pillar alongside sales and advertising for sustained revenue?

Accept that your brand is no longer in full control of how consumers discover you – and build for that reality rather than fighting it.

Traditional marketing is built on a premise that brands control the message. That premise is eroding. Consumers increasingly discover products through creators, communities, trusted experts, and AI systems that synthesize recommendations from sources they already rely on. The brands that internalize that shift earliest will have a structural advantage over the ones still optimizing for channels where brand-controlled messaging is the model.

Partnerships succeed when they’re built on genuine shared value. Not as an acquisition tactic layered on top of your paid media plan, but as a way to earn credibility through relationships your customers already trust. That’s a fundamentally different operating model – it requires treating partnerships as a strategic function with its own budget, leadership, and measurement framework.

Build an ecosystem, not a program list. Creators, affiliates, advocates, publishers, business partners – collectively, they influence purchasing decisions across the entire customer journey. Invest in the infrastructure to manage and measure those relationships properly. And stay focused on trust as the primary currency, because in an environment where AI is increasingly mediating what consumers see and hear, the authentic relationships are what endure.

The brands that win over the next decade will be the ones that understand growth increasingly flows through trust. Partnerships are how that trust is built, scaled, and measured.

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