Rakuten Advertising Innovation Labs marks a strategic expansion of how artificial intelligence is applied across affiliate marketing, as the company moves to accelerate smarter targeting, improved efficiency, and stronger collaboration between brands and publishers. The launch is significant for the MarTech ecosystem because affiliate marketing remains a major performance channel, and AI is increasingly central to how advertisers optimize spend and reach consumers at scale.
Rakuten Advertising, one of the world’s largest affiliate marketing networks, announced the introduction of Innovation Labs as a dedicated product collaboration hub within its Insights and Analytics portal. The initiative is designed to bring advertisers and publishers together to explore and test advanced AI capabilities that can improve outcomes across Rakuten Advertising’s global publisher network.
According to the company, Innovation Labs builds on years of investment in its Affiliate Intelligence suite, combining data science, AI, premium partnerships, and strategic expertise into a shared environment for experimentation and growth. “Innovation Labs is the culmination of years of work growing our Affiliate Intelligence suite of AI-powered tools, bringing together data, AI, premium partnerships, and expert strategies,” said Nick Stamos, CEO at Rakuten Advertising. “This initiative is a critical step in how Rakuten Advertising contributes to the broader Rakuten Group’s ‘Triple 20’ commitment to using AI to drive 20% greater efficiency for our employees, our internal teams, and most importantly, our clients. Innovation Labs will shorten the build–measure–learn cycle of AI transformation, helping us fast-track future investment in capabilities that improve outcomes for our advertisers and publisher partners.”
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At launch, Rakuten Advertising Innovation Labs introduces AI Recommendations designed to support both sides of the affiliate ecosystem. For advertisers, the recommendations analyze a wide range of attributes such as products, profiles, and campaign performance to identify publishers that have succeeded in similar scenarios, as well as uncover new publisher categories that can drive incremental growth. For publishers, AI driven product recommendations help reduce research time by surfacing emerging trends from both partnered and non partnered advertisers and aligning them with audience interests.
The Data Science team at Rakuten Advertising will run continuous experiments within Innovation Labs, informed by feedback from clients and partners. This creates an always active research and development environment where new AI features can be tested, refined, and rolled out on a regular basis. The company said this approach is intended to keep innovation closely aligned with real business needs rather than theoretical use cases.
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“Innovation Labs delivers on our promise to continually innovate our products in a way that benefits every participant in the affiliate marketing universe, from brands, to publishers, and ultimately, consumers,” said Adam Rostan, Chief Product Officer. “This will be a space where advertisers and publishers can experiment, collaborate, and scale new use cases with AI to deliver greater efficiency for everyone and accelerate the industry’s growth.”
As affiliate marketing evolves alongside retail media, ecommerce, and performance advertising, Rakuten Advertising Innovation Labs positions AI as a practical engine for efficiency and growth. By embedding experimentation directly into its platform, Rakuten Advertising is signaling how AI will shape the next phase of affiliate marketing performance and collaboration.
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