Happy New Year 2025!!

Wishing You a Prosperous New Year!

While sitting here in Madrid on New Year’s Eve, I want to extend my warmest wishes for the year ahead to my LinkedIn family.

This past year has been a remarkable learning experience for me—delving into the nuances of the performance marketing industry, celebrating successes, facing failures, and completely restructuring our organization to adapt to new challenges. It’s from this journey of discovery that I’ve put together the following insights on where our industry is headed.

Navigating The Landscape: Three Winning Paths

Understanding the Tensions Driving Change

At the heart of the industry’s evolution lies the tension between advertisers and publishers. Advertisers prioritize acquiring qualified leads at a lower Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), while publishers often focus on metrics like call duration, click volume, and impressions. Meanwhile, new regulations now require 1:1 consent, reducing reliance on third-party data and forcing firms to reevaluate their strategies.

Path One: Become a Publisher

Some companies opt to dive headfirst into media buying—directly acquiring ad space across multiple channels. While this can yield higher profit margins and total control over messaging, the initial investment is substantial. Firms must front heavy media costs, optimize campaigns internally, and manage large-scale creative efforts.

In our own experience, Axad Capital tried this route—investing considerable resources into media buying—but found only limited success. Rather than competing with specialized media buyers, we plan to partner with expert media-buying teams who excel in Insurance or Legal Marketing. If you’re an expert in these niches, I’d love to discuss forming an exclusive, win-win relationship. This approach lets us focus on each of our strengths.

Path Two: Become a Buyer

Others double down on robust buyer-side capabilities. This path requires a skilled labor pool (sales or fulfillment teams) and strong relationships with publishers who reliably deliver traffic or leads. The focus is on nurturing partnerships and refining the buying process to ensure maximum ROI.

Axad Capital holds a significant advantage here. We have a large, skilled workforce from our real estate brokerage operations that can be repurposed for other verticals. In Q4 2024, for example, we successfully launched AxQuotes Life, focusing on Final Expense, and will expand into Medicare with AxQuotes Health in Q1 2025. This illustrates how adaptable our talent pool is—shifting seamlessly from real estate to insurance—allowing us to scale quickly and effectively as a buyer.

Interested in pursuing this buyer path? Feel free to reach out to me separately, and I’ll be happy to share how to do it most effectively leveraging your unique strengths.

Path Three: Transform into a Tech Company

Finally, some firms transition into tech-driven service providers. Rather than heavy media buys or large internal sales teams, they develop platforms and tools that streamline campaign tracking, optimize ad performance, and reduce waste. By offering a white-label or SaaS solution, these firms deliver long-term value to advertisers and publishers aiming to cut costs and improve efficiency.

At Axad Capital, our tech development was born out of necessity. For example: we needed a solution to record, summarize, and extract intelligence from every call—leading to the creation of AxCallai. Initially built to improve the quality of our AxQuotes agency operations, AxCallai now serves as a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) based tool for monitoring call performance, gathering insights, and driving better results across multiple campaigns. We reduced QA cost by 80% by leveraging the power of AxCallai.

If you’re in the pay-per-call industry or run a phone-centric operation, we’d love to offer you a free one-month trial of AxCallai. Experience firsthand how it can revolutionize your call analytics, enhance lead quality, and sharpen your competitive edge.

Axad Capital’s Hybrid Approach

At Axad Capital, we’ve chosen to pursue both the buyer path and the tech path—#2 and #3. Throughout 2024, we strengthened our buyer-side capabilities by cultivating strong publisher relationships and refining our lead acquisition strategies. As we move into 2025, we plan to double down on developing cutting-edge technology platforms that provide cost-effective, high-quality performance marketing solutions.

By leveraging strategic partnerships and our proprietary technology, Axad Capital is well-positioned to tackle the core tension between advertisers who aim for a low CPA and publishers who prioritize engagement metrics. The industry will continue to evolve, and finding the right mix of these three paths will determine a firm’s ability to thrive in this new landscape—and Axad Capital is leading the charge.

I’ll be at Lead Generation World in Hollywood, FL from January 5th to 7th. If any of these paths resonate with you—or if you want to just meet —ping me here on LinkedIn.

Here’s to a bright and successful year ahead, my friends!