Acquinity Interactive, has started calling partners telling them that they are immediately shutting down all “promotional” type offers, often called e-mail and zip submit offers. This comes as a surprise to many people, as they were seen as the leaders in the space for many years – and because of that, people were talking this past week about what prompted them to make this seemingly sudden change.
PMI had the opportunity to speak with Garry Jonas, the CEO and Co-Founder of Acquinity and former CEO of ModernAd Media, LLC, and he was able to clarify the situation. Despite all the rumors, according to him, since he started Acquinity in 2011, they have been in process of leaving the space completely following Modern Ad’s transfer of its registration path business to Indian company RevenuePath. Jonas told us “some within the industry were under a impressionism that Acquinity was the operator of the free gift path when Acquinity only provided traffic to the Indian company and in exchange, the Indian company ran Acquinity’s offers”.
“I wish this transition would have come earlier,” Jonas told us,” but there was so much on our plate at the time.” He mentioned that they have been working in the last year or so on properties such as Political.com, BSaving.com, and Sweepstakes.com, which according to him are much more “consumer friendly.”
Jonas was very honest about this business model, saying “it is not a consumer friendly experience”. He points out that he “has reason to believe that the regulatory agencies are fed-up with the free gift space” and that inevitably action may be taken against companies that continue to do business in this space.
Their new focus, BSaving.com, Political.com and Sweeptsakes.com all provide long term relationships with the consumers and allow them to market to them long term and provide more value to both the consumer and Acquinity’s advertisers. He believes this traffic is cleaner, more lucrative and long lasting – and because of their experience in buying media, driving traffic, and being innovative, they will be able to make huge inroads into the market.
