Last year, Steven Brown from Moonpull called me up to see if I would I be interested in participating in a panel discussion about consent and tracking at Affiliate Summit West. He went on to share that their business is witnessing a major tracking challenge in the affiliate industry due to consent management platforms.

This was news to me. What challenge? I was quickly trying to recall if we had been experiencing any similar challenges here at CAKE. (Shoot … had I missed something?!) At first, I was struggling to understand how the two were related, but I’m glad I stayed on the line and asked more questions.

From where Steven sits, which is primarily focused on big networks (think CJ, AWIN, Impact, etc.), he’s dealing with larger brands deploying universal tags onto heavily regulated websites. This is where it all started to make sense to me.

Large brands not only have to put their consent policies through the ringer, but they’re also dealing with robust and complicated tag management platforms, development challenges, and an overall understanding of how tracking works. As we continued the chat, we realized this goes well beyond consent and the management platforms that support online brands and their compliance.

Yes, consent is easily one of the biggest things to consider. Remember, consent means something different depending on where you physically sit in the world. In California, we have CCPA and updates via CPRA. In Europe, there’s GDPR. And these regulatory frameworks are really just focused on data privacy and cookies as it relates to our ability to track if the consumer completed an action.

Beyond consent, though, Steven and I continued to explore browser updates and how known marketing parameters are beginning to be targeted. In the lead generation world, whether online or over phone, the standards under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) were being challenged by new FCC regulations, which were ultimately shelved right before ASW.

The point: There’s a lot to consider when it comes to understanding how privacy and consent policies could impact the affiliate marketing industry’s ability to track consumer actions.

Are we, at CAKE and TUNE, experiencing a large-scale challenge around consent management platforms and tracking today? No. But we absolutely could down the road.

Instead, we face tracking challenges on the daily. Did the advertiser deploy server tracking properly? Were the attribution parameters configured properly? Is there a bit of javascript on the page that is blocking our conversion tag?

It was at this point in the conversation that I agreed to join the panel. The topic extends well beyond consent management – it’s a major wake-up call to our industry to train up experts in tracking.

As David from AWIN said during our panel, every company needs an expert in tracking, and I couldn’t agree more.

I want to revisit what I mentioned earlier about the FCC and lead generation. In 2024, the Federal Communications Commission announced a change to the TCPA’s rules around lead generation workflows meant to close the “lead generator workflow.” This change, if implemented, would mean that consumers would be required to provide explicit one-to-one consent for the company that would be purchasing their data. This threw a big chunk of our industry into a frenzy.

Technology companies, including us, scrambled to make product enhancements to accommodate these changes. A lot of our customers spiraled as they rushed to change lead workflows and advocated to us how our platform should behave.

And then, we all heard the news.

The Insurance Marketing Coalition (I’m still not entirely sure who they are) had appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. In their appeal, they argued that the language within the current TCPA framework was sufficient, and that the FCC ruling does not support the existing consent language. Long story short, they won, and the update was vacated the day before it was supposed to go into effect.

It made me think about how our industry advocates for itself.

Newer cookie policies exist in part because of a fear of retargeting methods. Consumers don’t want to be followed around the internet. I get it.

But why should those policies impact affiliate marketing? Our entire model is predicated on our ability to support a referral program, for lack of a better explanation. In fact, most of the cash back and loyalty sites that consumers love are dependent on this model to work.

In the end, the panel was engaging and helped me have a clearer view of the challenge. I’m grateful to Steven Brown, Santi Pierini, and David Lloyd for welcoming me to the discussion. And I look forward to seeing how our industry tackles this and other challenges in the future.