When it comes to effectiveness, it's hard to match the appeal of performance marketing: For marketers, paying partners only when those partners actually drive value— through sales, leads, or otherwise— is a powerful proposition.

Yet, despite the effectiveness of performance marketing, it still remains relatively inefficient compared to other channels. For example, consider a food delivery app (we'll call it "FoodFastr") that's partnering with a publisher to attract new users in a specific geographic area. Via today's performance marketing technology, FoodFastr would only be able to offer a single rate to that publisher's users— regardless of where those users live.

Marketers who use other channels will likely find that lack of precision hard to fathom. Thanks to programmatic buying and the self-serve tools from Google and Facebook, the digital advertising world has evolved significantly over the past two decades. Marketers have never had more customer data at their disposal than they do now, and they're using that data to sell to people across the web with extreme precision.

At Button, we believe that the performance industry is overdue for a similar data-driven transformation. If the advances in digital advertising have proven anything, it's that marketers want— in fact demand— that data inform how they identify and reengage valuable users. They want to drive new users, increase engagement from current users, and they want to drive sales. And they also want to tweak their strategies over time to maximize results.

All of this is why the new era for performance marketing campaigns will be more dynamic, more personalized, and will give marketers far more control over how they reach consumers. This is the future of the industry, and one that Button is excited to help build.