Welcome to Dadascope Affiliate Week!
Dana Smith founded Dadascope Communications in 1999. She started her career at Edelman when craft scissors and gluesticks were still part of the PR pro’s toolkit.
I’ve been in PR long enough to remember faxing pitches, building media lists with Bacon’s directories, and literally cutting and pasting coverage books. With, like, craft scissors and a gluestick. And then there were the meaningful changes: The rise of digital, the influx of influencers, the ability to broadcast your own story. Through it all, one thing has remained frustrating: PR’s impact has been notoriously difficult to prove.
I am here to declare that things are changing.
Affiliate marketing and Performance PR are giving PR professionals something we’ve been chasing for decades: a reliable way to drive coverage and prove ROI. It’s a virtuous cycle that we are gleefully tapping into for our clients and are excited to share with our peers.
“For the first time in my thirty-year career, PR’s role has become quantifiably essential.”
And that’s why we’re kicking off Affiliate Week here at Dadascope. (Spoiler: there’s so much to share, it might actually stretch into two or three weeks.)
Why Now?
Q4 holiday gifting season is here, reminding us that affiliate readiness is no longer optional to snag coveted spots in gift guides and holiday listicles. If your brand doesn’t have the right affiliate setup in place, you risk being invisible to the commerce editors shaping gift guides, roundups, and shopping stories.
Muck Rack Generative Pulse Report
At the same time, generative search (GEO) is changing the way people discover brands (and gifts). As we shared in a recent blog, more than 95% of links cited by leading AI models come from non-paid sources, with nearly 30% coming directly from journalism. That means earned media isn’t just about visibility anymore; it’s about discoverability in an AI-driven world.
So, if I had a way for you to create a flywheel that would generate more high-authority earned content, which would drive sales, which would drive more earned content, which would drive sales, and so on, and so on, and so on, wouldn’t you want to tap into it? That’s what I thought, and that’s why we created Affiliate Week.
Who Should Be Listening?
Brands that want to get in on coveted product coverage and set the foundation for 2026 success.
E-commerce managers who need to connect affiliate mechanics with visibility and conversions.
Agencies still catching up to the affiliate PR wave and looking for ways to increase opportunities for top-tier coverage and prove ROI to their clients.
What We’ll Cover
“This is the future of PR, and I couldn’t be more energized to share what we’re learning with you.”
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll launch articles and tools aimed at answering questions and empowering action:
Our new Affiliate Readiness Audit ensures you’re set up for success this holiday season and beyond. To celebrate Affiliate Week and the Holiday Shopping Season, we’re offering it for free for a limited time ($1,000 value).
The difference between Performance PR and affiliate marketing (and why that distinction matters).
How the two strategies work best together to create a growth flywheel, that we’re dubbing “The Visibility Engine”
Common mistakes we see brands make.
How agencies can tap into new growth opportunities, and how our new Affiliate for Agencies offering helps them do it.
Why I’m Excited
At Dadascope, we have always been laser-focused on positively impacting our clients' businesses. Even when the only numbers we had to share were impressions and ad equivalencies, we worked tirelessly with our clients to ensure their messages were being amplified to the right audiences. And that was great. For then. But today, as our industry — not to mention humanity — redefines itself in the context of AI, we see an opportunity to play a critical and quantifiable role in our clients’ businesses.
For the first time in my thirty-year career, PR’s role has become quantifiably essential. Every placement has the potential to generate visibility and sales. And these days, you can’t have one without the other.
This is the future of PR, and I couldn’t be more energized to share what we’re learning with you.
Stay tuned. Affiliate Week starts now.
— Dana