Last month I had a very interesting phone call from one of the original founders of Buy.at Affiliate Network, Malcolm Cowley. An extremely intelligent and interesting man, Malcolm explained in many details the direction he believed to be the future of in house affiliate marketing optimization.

Now leading the efforts at Performance Horizon Group for ExactView, Malcolm explained many things about why ExactView would make it's mark in the future of affiliate marketing.

Here's a quick Q&A summary from our session:

Q: Tell us about Performance Horizon Group and why a merchant would be interested in you.

A: PHG offers a proprietary SaaS platform called ExactView for brands and publishers to manage their key revenue, drive relationships in-house, and make critical decisions through data analysis, thereby limiting risk across their web, social and mobile strategies. Our solutions are designed for several marketing channels including: Affiliate, Lead Generation, Mobile, and Social.

We have several high-level benefits brands and publishers receive including:

1. Efficiency and Ease-of-Use: We make measuring and managing partners and affiliates easy, ultimately ensuring more sales leads. The purpose is to bring our customers fully customizable, easy-to-use tracking and management solutions.
2. New Revenue Opportunities: Our ExactView platform brings customer’s immediate costs savings by providing better management solutions for their top partners combined with lower overhead, creating greater ROI for their brand marketing campaigns.
3. Limit Risk: We help brands and publishers limit risk by giving them access to data, which thereby allows for better decision making in a shorter amount of time.
4. Intelligence: ExactView allows brands and publishers to gain new insights into how their content is being consumed; brand is being portrayed; areas that can improve, etc., all while learning how to find new opportunities to maximize their brand marketing campaigns.

Q: After your sale of Buy.At, how did you come to launch PHG?

A: After we sold Buy.at, we knew we had only scratched the surface of  potential ways to bring innovation to the performance marketing industry. We barely even took a vacation before we started planning Performance Horizon Group. We knew if we could create a software platform that enhanced both the way brands and publishers work with each other, demand for the software would naturally grow. It took a little while to get the platform right, but once we were confident we had a winning solution, everything proceeded seamlessly from there.

Q: What would you say are the advantages of working with PHG?

A: We see many advantages to working with us. A few top advantages include: First, we offer fully customized solutions to fit our client’s needs. Second, we offer customers access to our proprietary API’s, which allows them to build the tools they need to enhance their tracking systems. Third, we’re the only company of our kind to offer full financial support to customers to maximize their performance marketing campaigns. This is a major differentiator for us. Finally, our platform allows for reduced costs and increased sales by simply allowing customers to receive a full and complete understanding of their performance marketing activity.

Q: What differentiates ExactView from others networks and technologies in the industry?

A: We see several differentiators and reasons for brands to leverage our ExactView technology platform. For instance:

1. Better account management – Our customers are able to build better long-term sustainable relationships with their top partners.
2. Better Tracking Solutions – We offer reliable data in real-time across all of our customer’s vertical platforms. Brands don’t want to deal with individual partners at an impression level, so we allow the brands to bring the tracking in-house.
3. Publisher Tools – Because our solutions are customizable. In other words, our customers offer their partners easy-to-use, constantly updated publishing tools, which allows for better interaction and real-time reporting.
4. Significant Cost Savings – By limiting the ‘over-ride’ process typical of brand/network relationships, brands will immediately see costs savings.

Q: What are PHGs competitive advantages?

We see several advantages to the ExactView platform. First, ExactView’s technology and architecture is brand new and allows for faster – as it happens- data with a flexible interface turning data into actionable information. Also, because ExactView is built on proprietary APIs it allows for better customization, ease of integration with 3^rd parties and advanced data collection opportunities.  We also believe our product features such as social integration and Finance-as-as-Service set us apart from others in the industry. Additionally, because we offer white label solutions, our customers can experience full customization to build and use the technology however they see fit.

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It was an interesting interview and one that requires a second blog post, because the conversion that went back and forth between Malcolm and I about the potential of this tracking technology was intriguing.  We talked about the automation of languages translations, the integration of unlimited APIs, the advanced tracking solutions they provide that I've never HEARD of anywhere else. The list when on and on and I likely could have spoken to him all day.

I think if you're a merchant who is very forward thinking in your mobile, social and international commerce opportunities and looking for something that can more accurately track various channels in real time, ExactView is certainly worth checking out.