The setting
runs , a shopping marketplace where consumers find, compare and buy products from merchants using buy now, pay later options. Merchants use it to reach shoppers.
Cheap affiliate traffic is pulling spend away from the merchant's acquisition commitment.
High-volume placements protect delivery, while smaller placements reach more shoppers who are new to the merchant.
Who you’d be doing this for
“My director asked how many new people yesterday's spend brought in, and I had to say most already shop with us.”
Darshan Banerjee · Electronics merchant acquisition manager · a character in this brief
Accounts for the merchant's promotional investment and must explain how many visitors are genuinely new customers.
What is at stake
An electronics merchant spent $3,000 but reached only 360 new shoppers. You must weigh a more selective placement mix against changing how the merchant pays for acquisition.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- total traffic vs new-shopper reach
- volume certainty vs cost protection
- immediate visits vs eventual purchase value
- selective allocation vs placement capacity
Why Affirm
Affiliate placements must demonstrate merchant acquisition value alongside the shopping destination's revenue contribution.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 128 more at Affirm, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Affirm. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Partner Marketing Lead (opens in a new tab)
- Execute and optimize Affirm Marketing Solutions programs across onsite Marketplace placements, offsite media, affiliate, and emerging channels.
- These campaigns will be designed to drive revenue growth, GMV, customer acquisition, and measurable value for Affirm and our merchant partners.
- Director, Partner Marketing · no longer posted
- As Director, Partner Marketing, you will define the vision and go-to-market strategy for co-marketing campaigns across our merchant network, driving growth through onsite and offsite marketing solutions.
- You will be responsible for setting the direction for how Affirm leverages merchant investment to fuel business growth through our growing ad partnerships including affiliate and other channels, and you’ll lead a team of marketers to execute against those strategies at scale.
- Partner Marketing Manager · no longer posted
- Deliver creative strategies to drive affiliate revenue growth through the Affirm marketplace.
- Nurture marketing relationships with a set of merchant partners, proactively seeking innovative opportunities to optimize performance and accelerate growth.
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
Similar problems at other organizations
Like this one, each of these turns on committing to a deal before it checks out.
Ninety-four percent of the daily budget is gone by noon while return on ad spend has fallen to 3.4.
You have to weigh earlier reach against the sales available later in the shopping day.
A cashback campaign has drawn 18,000 sign-ups, but repeat spending may include reward abuse.
You must weigh tomorrow's binding offers against a growth target that Finance will not fund on optimistic assumptions.
Paid acquisition is spending 30% of its budget on existing verified customers.
You need to weigh precise exclusions against moving the remaining budget into broader prospecting.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Affirm’s Affirm Marketplace, written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Marketplace shoppers are reaching payment and seeing the purchase flow stall after product pages load.
You have to decide where the system's trace from the alert through Ads Platform and checkout stops and where an on-call engineer's own confirmation of the cause begins.
Merchant feedback is being interpreted differently across pricing reviews, slowing decisions about conversion and incremental sales.
You have to decide at what point a cluster of merchant notes stops being a draft from the AI and becomes a problem a product manager frames for the metric review.
Time-bound home shoppers leave the marketplace when Search cannot help them narrow options for a purchase date.
You must weigh useful planning signals against clear repayment terms and realistic expectations.