The New Rules of Commerce Performance – What Affiliate Teams Need to Know Now

For years, the path to purchase was predictable enough that you could map it. User discovers product. User researches. User finds a coupon or cashback site. User converts. Last click gets the credit. Job done.

That model is breaking down—and fast. In this session, Lee-Ann Johnstone sat down with Jeff Segall, EVP of Revenue Operations at Shopnomix, and Todd Ulise, Global CRO of the Nomix Group, to talk through what's actually happening to consumer behavior, why attribution is getting harder to defend, and what performance teams need to do to stay ahead of it.

Here's what came out of the conversation.

The Journey Is No Longer Linear

The fundamental premise the whole session was built on: discovery, influence and intent are now happening across too many surfaces for any single channel to own them.

Consumers might encounter a product through a creator video, do their research inside an AI chatbot, price-check via a CSS partner, and complete the purchase through a cashback site. That's four touch points across four different channel categories, and in the current model, the cashback site collects the credit for a conversion it barely contributed to.

Todd framed it plainly: last click has always been easy and safe. If your channel can show a verified transaction, you can defend your budget. But easy and safe isn't the same as accurate. The whole session was essentially a case for moving past that comfort zone.

Affiliate Is a Payment Mechanism – Not Just a Channel

One of the more useful reframes from the conversation was Lee-Ann and Todd independently landing on the same idea: affiliate isn't really a channel in the traditional sense. It's a payment infrastructure. It's the mechanism through which performance gets tracked, attributed and paid out, and that actually puts it in a strong position as the rest of the media landscape fragments.

The argument goes like this: as AI drives down the cost of content creation, brands will have more budget to redirect into media. That media will need tracking and performance accountability. The affiliate ecosystem, which has spent decades building exactly that infrastructure, is well placed to absorb those dollars—as long as the industry stops positioning itself as a single bottom-of-funnel channel and starts positioning itself as the payment layer for performance across all channels.

As Todd put it, his mission is to up-level affiliate to performance marketing wholesale. The infrastructure is there. What's missing is the framing.

The Real Constraint Is People, Not Technology

When an audience member asked whether the bigger barrier to growth was technology limitations or organizational resistance, Jeff's answer was immediate: organizational resistance, by a distance.

The technology to track multi-touch journeys, value different interaction types, and build outcome-based payment structures either exists or is buildable. What slows everything down is internal channel ownership, performance teams and search teams fighting over attribution rather than building a shared strategy. Every siloed team is trying to prove their channel deserves the credit, which means nobody is looking clearly at what's actually driving the customer forward.

This was a thread throughout the whole session. Todd described brands needing to “stop fighting over channel” and start asking what they're actually trying to achieve. The clients making progress are the ones where a CMO or VP of marketing is genuinely agnostic—willing to let the data show where value is being created, rather than defending a legacy budget allocation.

Intent Is Moving Upstream

A significant chunk of the session went into what Shopnomix and the Nomix Group mean by “search intent,” and it's worth unpacking because it gets at something most affiliate teams haven't fully reckoned with yet.

Traditional search is about capturing intent at the moment of query. Someone types something into Google, sees results, and clicks. That model hasn't changed much in 20 years. What's changing now is that intent is being established before any active search happens inside AI browsers, inside devices, inside the platforms people are already in. Todd's term for this is search intent: the user is embedded in a commercial environment before they consciously decide to look for something. The practical implication for affiliate and performance teams is that if you're only capturing the intent at the bottom of the funnel (the moment of transaction), you're missing the earlier, upstream moments where brand visibility is being established. More of the purchase decision is being made inside environments that traditional affiliate tracking doesn't touch.

What the Creator Economy Gets Wrong

Creators consistently get paid less than their actual contribution to a purchase journey justifies, because most attribution models don't capture the awareness and consideration work they're doing at the top of the funnel. A creator drives someone to discover a product—that person converts three weeks later via a voucher code—and the creator earns nothing while the voucher site takes the commission.

The fix, both Jeff and Todd agreed, is making sure the attribution chain stays alive. That means defining mechanisms for keeping creator-driven intent trackable through to conversion, rather than letting it disappear into a dark funnel. It also means having honest conversations with creators about what they're worth, something the industry hasn't consistently done.

AI and Content: Where the Budget Actually Goes

Todd introduced Fanomix, the Nomix Group's AI content studio, as an illustration of a broader shift. If AI can reduce the cost of content production significantly, and Todd used the example of cutting a $6 million content budget down to $100k, that money doesn't go away. It gets redirected into media. More media spend means more performance marketing activity, more inventory to track, more opportunities for the affiliate ecosystem to operate at scale.

The fear that AI replaces creative work is misplaced, in his view. What AI replaces is the execution cost. What it can't replace is the storytelling judgement, knowing which audience to reach, what narrative will resonate, and what the brief should actually say. That human layer remains. The execution becomes faster and cheaper.

Affiverse viewers watching the replay can access free Fanomix credits to test it directly, along with a downloadable search intent ebook to go deeper on the concepts from the session.

What Brands Should Do in the Next 90 Days

Both guests landed on similar advice when Lee-Ann pushed them for a practical takeaway. 

• Jeff's priority: get the infrastructure right before anything else. If you can't measure multi-touch journeys, you're flying blind regardless of what strategy you set. Audit your tracking setup, understand what you can and can't see, and start building the reporting that will let you evaluate new channel activity properly.
• Todd's was more cultural: stop having internal channel fights and start having honest conversations about what you're actually trying to achieve. Brands that perform 10–15% ahead of target have headroom to invest in exploratory activity. Brands that are constantly defending their channel budget to protect headcount don't.

The broader point both kept returning to: the conversation between brand teams and partners needs to shift from transactional to genuinely collaborative. Not “here's our tracking pixel, show us the conversions,” but “here's what we're trying to build commercially, help us figure out how to get there.”

The Bigger Picture

The session closed with a note that felt like the honest summary of where the industry is: nobody fully knows what's coming next. The internet is cyclical. The patterns of value shifting from one medium to another, of new surfaces absorbing intent that older surfaces used to own, of attribution models eventually catching up to consumer behavior—these have happened before and will happen again.

What's different this time is the speed. The fragmentation of the purchase journey has accelerated to the point where old mental models are becoming actively misleading. The brands and performance teams that will do well are the ones that stay curious, stay flexible, and stop waiting for the industry to hand them a new playbook before they start adapting.

Hit play above to watch the full session.