Always Be Testing #116 Scaling from $175M to $5B: Enterprise Affiliate Lessons from Fanatics | Wade Tonkin
Feb 17, 2026
Wade Tonkin, Director of Global Affiliate Marketing at Fanatics with 20+ years in performance marketing. He discusses scaling affiliate programs to massive global reach. Conversation covers pivoting from coupons to content and media partnerships, publisher performance teams, attribution and transparency challenges, BNPL trends, AI automation in affiliate ops, and experiments in compensation models.
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Set Clear Rules And Enforce Them Fast
- Be explicit with partners about rules and expectations and act quickly when they break them.
- Enforce fairness for compliant partners by removing bad actors fast and transparently.
Treat Partnerships Like Media Buys
- Treat each partner like a media buy: analyze their audience and ask for data to find incremental value.
- Test campaigns and scale only when partners prove they deliver incremental, not just reacquisition, value.
Channel Types Vary Wildly In Attribution
- Different affiliate channel types show very different sole‑touch attribution rates and economics.
- Fanatics built compensation tiers and is evolving a scoring system to pay partners based on deeper multi‑data signals.