Commission Junction becomes ‘CJ Affiliate by Conversant’

The affiliate marketing industry has seen several major rebrands at the affiliate network level in the past few years. Prior to closing last year, Performics became “Google Affiliate Network”. PepperJamExchange rebranded to “eBay:Enterprise Affiliate Network”. LinkShare became “Rakuten LinkShare” and, in a still rather baffling twist, the related company Buy.com became “Rakuten.com Shopping”.

Now the parent company to Commission Junction has taken the leap and rebranded from ValueClick to “Conversant“. In the process, several of products and services under their umbrella have new monikers:

• ValueClick Media and Greystripe are now Media Solutions
• Mediaplex’s MOJO Ad Server is now Conversant Ad Server
• Master TMS is now Conversant Tag Manager
• Dotomi is now Enterprise Solutions
• and the affiliate network we’ve called Commission Junction for 15 years is now CJ Affiliate by Conversant

CJ has already put up a detailed blog post delineating what the new name change is all about and assuring affiliates and merchants alike that the technology and service will remain unchanged. The rest of the changes will take some getting used to of course, however, we’ve all called Commission Junction “CJ” for so long that the only real marked change we’re likely to notice is the color change on the rebranded website.

While the Conversant press release regarding the name change is expectedly upbeat, Fourth Quarter 2013 Financial Results for the company are due out on February 11 and there was a little movement on their stock price today. It should be interesting to see what happens next week.

One more thing to note…the new Conversion has some name-competition:

• Conversant (conversant.com) is a leadership training and development consultant.
• Conversant Solutions Inc. (conversant.ca) is a technology and financial management services company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
• Conversant (conversant.com.sg) is a Singapore based technology and telecommunications company.
• Conversant Media Group (conversantmediagroup.com) is a faith based digital media company and content creator.
• Conversant Media (conversant-media.com) is an online company that produces the Australian culture website Lost At E Minor and the sports opinion website, The Roar.

Several of these companies have been around for many years, which makes it surprising that 1) ValueClick would select the name that it has and 2) that it was able to obtain the twitter handle “@conversant“.

What do you think of the new rebrand? Do you think we’ll see any other players in the affiliate network space take the plunge this year and recreate themselves as well?