Moving to Outcomes

Have you ever felt like your marketing budget is a leap of faith—spending millions and just hoping it pays off? In Moving to Outcomes, Robert Glazer and Matt Wool argue that this traditional approach is outdated. They contend that the future of marketing lies in partnerships driven by measurable results rather than blind input spending. Their thesis is bold yet practical: businesses should pay for outcomes, not impressions.

The authors offer a clear explanation of how companies can escape the dysfunctional cycles of digital advertising—overbidding, overspending, and underperforming—and instead build programs where every dollar spent guarantees a return. They call this approach partnership marketing, an evolution of affiliate marketing updated for today’s world of automation, transparency, and technological efficiency.

The Problem: An Auction-Driven, Broken System

Glazer and Wool paint a vivid picture of how marketing became a high-stakes auction. Whether bidding for search terms on Google, display ads on Facebook, or product placements on Amazon, brands are trapped in a cycle similar to what Warren Buffett calls the “winner’s curse.” Marketers overbid against competitors in systems designed to reward platforms, not results. Meanwhile, returns keep shrinking, especially as privacy regulations close the loopholes that made data targeting profitable.

This system favors only the giants—the Triopoly of Google, Facebook, and Amazon—leaving small and mid-sized businesses priced out and frustrated. The authors compare this unsustainable race to the rise and fall of DailyCandy, a newsletter that once commanded enormous fees for digital ads without guaranteed ROI. In the words of Glazer and Wool: the marketing world has become a game of “digital whack-a-mole,” where success in a channel is short-lived and constantly undercut by inflationary auction pricing.

The Rise of Partnership Marketing

Partnership marketing flips the script. Instead of paying before seeing results, brands pay only after defined outcomes—like a sale, a lead, or a conversion—are achieved. This model aligns incentives for everyone involved. Partners (publishers, influencers, or businesses) earn commissions based on performance, while brands maintain control of costs and profitability.

The authors trace this evolution from early affiliate marketing programs in the late 1990s—like Amazon Associates—into today’s complex ecosystem powered by partnership automation technology. Tools now allow brands to manage thousands of partners transparently, automating onboarding, tracking, and payments. As with the shift from traditional print ads to pay-per-click advertising, the move from clicks to commissions represents a deeper transformation toward accountability.

A New Economic Logic: Pay for What You Get

The authors connect partnership marketing to sound economic principles. If a company only pays when money comes in, it protects profitability and eliminates risk. They compare this to investing strategy—diversify across partners, just as one diversifies assets. With multiple partners performing different outreach strategies, a brand spreads risk across its marketing ecosystem instead of depending on volatile channels.

Moreover, partnerships create sustainability. When brands treat their partners ethically and transparently, relationships endure. This approach eliminates churn and constant “re-bidding” seen in auction-based systems. As shown in the case of ButcherBox, a subscription meat company that scaled from parking-lot sales to millions in monthly revenue without outside funding, partnership marketing can fuel massive growth on a predictable, outcome-based foundation.

Why This Shift Matters Now

The timing couldn’t be more critical. Data privacy reforms (GDPR, CCPA) have made customer tracking harder and advertising less precise. Meanwhile, Amazon’s sheer dominance challenges every retailer’s visibility online. Brands can’t win by outspending these giants—they can only outsmart them through authentic partnerships and transparent pay-for-performance relationships. As the authors put it, “Any business that fails to diversify beyond dominant digital players will face decreased profitability and diminishing control over their marketing dollars.”

Glazer and Wool call partnership marketing the “next Microsoft, Amazon, or Tesla”—the undervalued channel that will define marketing’s future. Much like how early investors profited from getting into new asset classes ahead of maturity, marketers who adopt partnership marketing early will gain efficiency and competitive advantage before their rivals catch up.

Takeaway

Partnership marketing isn’t a trendy tactic—it’s a mindset shift from buying visibility to buying outcomes. When you align incentives across brands, partners, and customers, you don’t just win transactions; you build sustainable growth.

If you’ve ever paid for ads that made your brand visible but didn’t lead to sales, you already know the frustration Glazer and Wool describe. The authors argue that partnership marketing solves the three biggest problems in digital advertising: profitability, scalability, and sustainability.

Profitability Through Outcome Alignment

Traditional digital campaigns charge you for exposure—impressions or clicks—without guaranteeing conversion. Partnership marketing flips that by committing to a clear metric: payment occurs only when agreed-upon results are achieved. For example, rather than paying $100 upfront for uncertain ad placements, you might agree to pay $10 per completed sale. You know your margins; partners are motivated to perform. Everyone wins.

The authors use simple analogies to make this clear. Imagine a boat rental shop offering concierge commissions not per referral but per completed booking. Suddenly, the concierge chooses quality leads over quantity. That’s partnership marketing in action—fewer wasted clicks, more verified conversions.

Scalability Through Technology

Scalability used to be the Achilles’ heel of affiliate marketing, requiring manual tracking and spreadsheets. Now technology platforms such as Partnerize and Impact automate everything—onboarding, tracking, payment, and optimization. You can manage hundreds or thousands of partners globally just as seamlessly as a paid search campaign. (Note: SaaS platforms replaced legacy networks like Commission Junction and Rakuten, enabling private-label control and data transparency.)

Glazer compares this to investing across diversified portfolios. Each partner interacts with different customer audiences—some through blogs, others through loyalty programs or deal sites—minimizing risk if one underperforms. Automation delivers efficiency because costs scale linearly: if you’re comfortable paying a 10% commission on $1,000 in sales, it’s just as sound on $1,000,000 in sales.

Sustainability Through Relationships

Sustainability is partnership marketing’s hidden strength. Unlike paid search auctions that demand ever-increasing bids to maintain visibility, partnership programs rely on trust. When brands pay partners on time and offer fair commissions, those partners reciprocate with loyalty and consistent promotion. The channel’s longevity comes from this moral—and economic—alignment.

This model thrives precisely because it humanizes marketing. Instead of impersonal algorithms or keyword battles, brands work directly with people—publishers, influencers, affiliates—who share their goals. This approach transforms marketing from a money pit into a mutual growth ecosystem. ButcherBox’s story exemplifies it: by partnering with nutrition influencers and paleo blogs on performance terms, the company grew from a local meat provider to a multi-million-dollar national brand—without venture funding. It’s proof that profitable scaling doesn’t require huge budgets, just smart partnerships.

Takeaway

Partnership marketing builds a marketing ecosystem that is profitable (you pay for results), scalable (you grow through automation), and sustainable (you align incentives long-term). It’s the trifecta most modern businesses are missing.

Glazer and Wool trace how the world of commerce has dramatically shifted—from the 1960s era of Barbie and TV ads to today’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) revolution. Understanding this shift is crucial because it reveals why partnership marketing matters more than ever.

From Wholesale to Direct Relationships

In the mid-20th century, brands like Mattel sold products wholesale to retailers, using advertising to build general awareness rather than direct sales. Customers rarely interacted with brands themselves; the final purchasing decision happened in stores. Marketing’s goal was simply to create buzz, not measure conversions.

Fast-forward to the last decade, and this model became obsolete. Digital technology allowed brands to sell directly to customers, driving the immense DTC boom—think Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Caspar. When Michael Dubin’s viral $1 razor campaign challenged Gillette, it proved brands could bypass intermediaries entirely. Suddenly, marketing had to focus on customer acquisition and retention, not just awareness.

The Subscription Economy and Lifetime Value

The rise of subscriptions turned marketing into a long game. If a Dollar Shave Club member pays monthly indefinitely, the value of a single acquisition multiplies over time. As Glazer explains, brands now calculate lifetime value (LTV) instead of one-time transactions. This shift makes partnership marketing even more powerful—partners help acquire loyal customers, not fleeting clicks. Paying commissions based on high-quality, recurring buyers becomes sustainable because brands reap cumulative returns.

Blending Content and Commerce

The explosion of blogs, influencers, and review sites created new curators for consumer attention. Today’s buyers trust third-party voices more than ads. According to the book, 79% of consumers trust online recommendations more than friends. Sites like The Points Guy, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed bridge editorial authority with transactional intent—essentially turning content into commerce.

Future PLC, once a struggling UK publisher, became a partnership marketing success story. Under CEO Zillah Byng-Thorne, the company added buying links to its trusted review articles and shared commissions with retailers. Revenue skyrocketed because user experience improved—readers could instantly buy products they learned about. This perfectly illustrates partnership marketing’s contextual power: relevant recommendations delivered transparently and tied directly to measurable outcomes.

Takeaway

Commerce is no longer driven by passive visibility but by trusted recommendation networks. Partnership marketing harnesses this evolution to connect brands with customer-centric publishers, creating authentic, profitable conversions.

When you advertise on Google or Facebook, you’re essentially entering an auction. Glazer and Wool reveal how these platforms leverage this structure to their advantage—driving up bids until participants overpay. The problem isn’t the technology; it’s the economics.

The Winner’s Curse

Inspired by economist Richard Thaler’s research, the authors show that most bidders overpay when value is uncertain. Digital advertisers fall into this trap daily. They bid to “win” visibility without knowing true ROI, leading to inflated costs. It’s the same irrational energy seen in auction houses—competition overwrites reason. On eBay, winners often pay 73% more than fixed-price listings; the same dynamic repeats in keyword bidding.

The Triopoly’s Advantage

Amazon, Facebook, and Google harvest 70% of all digital ad spend. Their auction-based pricing ensures they profit regardless of advertisers’ returns. While big brands use advanced tools to optimize bids, small and medium businesses are hopelessly outgunned. The result? Rising prices and decreasing margins. Each year, as demand for digital reach outpaces supply, marketing’s cost-per-click inflation erodes ROI. Facebook’s ad cost jumped 47% in one year—far faster than brands’ profit growth.

Partnership Marketing as a Price Control

Unlike auction systems, partnership marketing defines value upfront. You negotiate commission rates based on verified outcomes. If $10 drives $100 of revenue, scaling is inherently profitable. Partners can’t arbitrarily raise costs; brands maintain control. This clarity eliminates the speculative nature of auctions, providing predictability instead of volatility.

Moreover, partners prioritize relationships and shared success. They choose brands whose ethics, communication, and audience compatibility align with their own, not those offering momentary high bids. Partnership marketing thus replaces competition with cooperation—an economic model that rewards long-term collaboration over short-term excess.

Takeaway

Don’t play the auction game. In outcome-based partnerships, you name your price based on real results, not emotional bids. That shift protects your margins and builds lasting value outside the Triopoly’s control.

One reason partnership marketing can scale globally is its technology backbone—automation. Glazer and Wool explain how partnership automation platforms have become the Salesforce of partner management.

From Affiliate Networks to SaaS Platforms

Earlier affiliate networks like Rakuten, LinkShare, and CJ Affiliate acted as intermediaries between brands and publishers, taking steep performance fees—often up to 30% of commissions. This dual representation created conflicts of interest and opacity. Then SaaS platforms such as Impact and Partnerize disrupted the model with private-label software. Brands could directly manage relationships, track performance, and pay partners, all with transparent data and flexible pricing.

These technologies mirror the evolution of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Just as Salesforce revolutionized sales visibility, partnership automation provides real-time insight into who delivers value and how. Costs are based on usage metrics instead of perpetual performance taxes, freeing brands from legacy dependencies.

Building Marketplaces of Marketing

Technology allows brands to create marketing marketplaces similar to Uber or Airbnb. Instead of owning all marketing resources internally, they connect a network of external partners who bring their own expertise—content creators, media buyers, tech providers—operating on a shared performance model. The Valpak case study demonstrates this: a food delivery company partnered with Valpak’s direct mail program to reach thousands of restaurants, tracking conversions through QR codes. The campaign succeeded because automation made collaboration seamless and measurable.

Integration Across Channels

Partnership programs now integrate with influencer platforms, business development channels, and even CRM systems. You can manage Instagram influencers, B2B referrals, and affiliate blogs all under one automated roof. This unification reduces manual work, improves data accuracy, and expands marketing reach. It also supports global scalability, enabling brands to operate cross-border campaigns with shared technology standards.

Takeaway

Automation turns partnership marketing from a manual process into an integrated, data-driven system. Technology doesn’t just support partnerships—it scales them into global ecosystems of measurable outcomes.

In their conclusion, Glazer and Wool deliver a powerful message about business ethics and economics: what gets rewarded gets repeated. The 2008 housing crisis revealed how misaligned incentives can destroy entire systems. Partnership marketing, by contrast, realigns incentives around shared success.

Why Incentives Matter

The authors recount how mortgage brokers sold bad loans because immediate rewards—CDO profits—replaced long-term stability. The same happens in marketing when ad platforms prioritize clicks and impressions instead of genuine outcomes. When incentives point toward vanity metrics, everyone loses except the middleman.

From Inputs to Outcomes

Partnership marketing fixes this by rewarding verified value creation. If your partner drives a sale, they’re compensated. If not, nothing is lost. This feedback loop builds fairness and trust. Over time, brands realize that paying for inputs—visibility, engagement—doesn’t equate to growth. Paying for outcomes does. It embodies Charlie Munger’s maxim: “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.”

The shift also promotes transparency. Real-time reporting shows which partners genuinely contribute and eliminates fraud—a past problem in affiliate marketing. Strong oversight and modern software reinforce credibility between both sides.

The Future of Marketing

Glazer predicts that outcome-based marketing will define the future, potentially expanding even to paid search and social. Imagine paying Google not per click but per conversion—an evolution already under discussion. As brands collectively redirect budgets from speculation to performance, the market itself will shift. Giants like Facebook and Amazon may adapt by offering commission-based ad models, while partnership automation platforms become as indispensable as Salesforce.

Ultimately, the authors invite you to act before the rest of the market catches on. The marketers who get in early—who build partnership programs now—will enjoy higher profitability and reduced risk for years to come.

Takeaway

Partnership marketing realigns the very incentive structure of business. By paying for outcomes and cultivating trust, companies move from transactional marketing to transformational growth.