I’m always more than a little excited to talk about brands about CLO (card-linked offers) if they haven’t yet taken the plunge.

The reason is simple: leveraged intelligently, it’s almost a can’t-lose initiative. The right CLO partner can help you drive incremental growth and performance at scale – if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and deal with some of the more manual elements of the initiative.

First, let’s look at the benefits – and why they’re particularly important right now, as tariffs are taking effect and fallout is starting to hit brands’ cost structures.

The Benefits of CLO

1) CLO has almost unmatched data, and with that comes incredible targeting

CLO leverages consumer shopping behavior data that it gets directly from financial institutions (without PII being shared, so it’s on the right side of privacy laws). They know precisely where specific consumers have shopped. So, let’s say you’re a sporting goods retailer that wants to target new-to-file consumers who have shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods within the past 18 months. You can not only target that (very large) group of consumers, but you can also determine the offer that makes sense within your pricing structure.

Of course, you can also use that data to target lapsed customers, retarget existing customers, etc. But for many brands, new-to-file customers carry the most value, so that segment is worth calling out specifically.

2) It’s performance-based – and incremental

One of the reasons we love working with Cardlytics is that they partner with Nielsen to get statistically significant incrementality testing that ensures you’re paying to get the right kind of growth. Other CLO partners offer incrementality measurement through other partnerships and/or holdout tests – although Nielsen is the gold standard, many partners strive to provide the data that proves you’re investing intelligently in incremental growth.

In short, with set-ups that give you confidence in incrementality, there’s almost no downside; you can decide what kind of customers you’d like (new, lapsed, etc.) and which competitors’ customers you’d like to target, and be assured that those customers will represent incremental gains.

In a time when budgets are more in flux than usual, a near-assurance that your marketing dollars will result in growth is an awfully strong pitch to make to your CFO.

3) Different partners can help you hit different goals

One of the first things I tell CLO-curious brands is that CLO partners are not one-size-fits-all. There are lots of CLO partners, and the right fit (or fits) comes down to the brand’s goals and the audiences they’re trying to target. The Amex shopper, say, is a lot more inclined to spend, so that’s a different audience than Cardlytics, which works with a ton of financial institutions.

The right partner fit also depends on how you’d like to run your campaigns and how much you’d like to invest. Are you looking for always-on campaigns with broader targeting, or would you prefer something like a three-month test campaign targeting one specific audience with a particular campaign goal?

Based on those answers, we go to our CLO partner network (which includes Cardlytics, Amex, Collinson, Lolli, Drop, and more), identify some good matches, and connect with those partners to get an idea of goal alignment and launch timing. Remember: if you’re curious about CLO and can tell us what’s most important to you in any future campaigns, we can find a partner to make it work.

So…

What’s the Catch with CLO?

I get this question a lot. The biggest thing to understand is how CLO partners differ from traditional affiliates, and a lot of that comes down to attribution.

Because CLO attribution doesn’t exist in the big affiliate networks, accurate attribution (and payout methods) tend to rely on a much more manual process and some tolerance for blurry areas.

Some of our CLO partners send purchase reports directly to the brands to cross-reference either hashed email addresses or the last four digits of credit cards. (Note: we don’t do the latter method because we consider credit cards to be PII, but the partner can work with the brand to match those orders and align them with the brand’s internal system.) This is not a perfect process and requires a fair amount of manpower to verify, but CLO partners are universally willing to work with brands to get them as close to 100% verification as possible.

While networks have been trying to come up with solutions, the issue stems from what gives CLO its biggest strengths: the data is coming from financial institutions. While that means scale and incredibly rich targeting, it also means a ton of stipulations and red tape that – for now – put a lot of the work of attribution on the brands.

The TL;DR of CLO

Okay, so CLO isn’t perfect. But with the right partner leading your strategy, it is as sure a bet as you’re going to get in digital marketing that your dollars will directly and effectively address your business goals. Even in rosy economic times, that’s a big selling point. In 2025, with consumer confidence on the decline and marketing budgets in danger of following suit, it could well be the competitive edge that helps you do a whole lot more than hold your ground.