Rakuten wesentlich besser als Rocket
by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday
Rakuten Group, a Japanese technology conglomerate with businesses primarily focused on ecommerce, fintech, digital content, and communications, has begun building an AI agentic network to integrate Rakuten AI into a wide range of its tools across the company.
AI chat, AI search with deep think, voice mode, translation, AI reading, coding, problem-solving and image creation are some of the tools the plan will support across affiliate advertising for publishers and consumers.
“When we say affiliate intelligence it’s us tripling down on a hard tech approach to solving the toughest problems in affiliate marketing,” Ben Cox, vice president of AI strategies and operations at Rakuten Advertising, said in a video interview. “We are born from Rakuten, so we are a technology company at the core. There’s no other affiliate network training and building LLMs from scratch.”
Rakuten Group, best known in the U.S. for its cash-back, affiliate and advertising programs, created a suite of AI-powered tools for advertisers and marketers. Affiliate Intelligence is based around a full-funnel global network, AI, and data—the program spearheaded by Cox.
Through the integration, consumers can input queries via text, voice-to-text conversion and image search, and choose from multiple AI-generated prompts for follow-up questions.
Rakuten Advertising Detect, released in late May, identifies ad fraud from usual performance patterns, as well as monitors financial products and competitive rankings such as spikes and dips across a variety of metrics. It is built into the company’s advertising services. Another model can identify advertising in context and determine whether something has gone wrong.
Rakuten, a division of Rakuten Group, is offered in the U.S. as a cash back program with discount codes for online and in-store purchases. It has a presence with more than 2,500 brands on its website.
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/...ns-for-full-fu.html
July 16, 2025
Back in May, Rakuten held its annual Optimism event in Carlsbad, California. It brought together 1,000 marketers across retail, finance, and travel to network and learn by beautiful West Coast beaches. I, tragically, was unable to attend.
I recently caught up with Adam Rostan, Rakuten Advertising’s SVP Product & Technology, to learn more about the platform’s wider roadmap concerning AI.
Here’s what Rostan had to say:
Sol Wilkinson: You just launched Detect, Storefronts, and Prompt. In simple terms, what do they do for your clients?
Adam Rostan: Detect gives brands the visibility they’ve long needed, identifying programme compliance issues, monitoring affiliate behaviour, and helping partnerships operate at their full potential.
Storefronts empowers creators and influencers to curate products in a way that drives authentic engagement and performance, and also helps streamline the customer experience and path to purchase.
Prompt, our newest reporting tool, applies our AI to simplify ad hoc report requests, surfacing actionable insights on performance, audiences, and trends to help marketers make faster, smarter decisions quickly and in plain language.
SW: What sets Rakuten Advertising’s AI apart from what other platforms are doing right now?
AR: What sets us apart is how deeply our AI is rooted in affiliate expertise. We’re not just applying generic models; we’ve built Affiliate Intelligence to reflect decades of network data, partner behaviours, and performance trends. This is all built on the data flywheel concept, where the continuous collection of insights from our network fuels new cycles of customer value and product iterations.
SW: Do you see AI becoming the core engine of affiliate marketing? How will that change the game for advertisers and affiliates?
AR: Absolutely, but it’s not just affiliate, AI is transforming the digital marketing landscape as a whole. What makes Rakuten unique is that we’ve made deliberate investments to be at the forefront of that change.
AI and large language models (LLMs) go beyond abstract potential — they provide the scalability and automation needed to unlock opportunities that were previously impractical, especially across large, complex networks of bespoke partnerships. With emerging capabilities like agentic reasoning, we're beginning to orchestrate proactive, context-aware decision-making support at scale, reshaping how affiliate programmes are managed and optimised.
We have the largest data science team in the industry dedicated specifically to affiliate marketing, and we've invested heavily in the infrastructure to operationalise AI across our platform. Our models are not generic — they’re purpose-built and trained on affiliate-specific, global use cases, giving Rakuten Advertising a significant uniqueness and leadership in the affiliate marketing industry.
At Rakuten, AI is foundational to our culture. It’s not just a layer of technology — it’s embedded in how we think, how we operate, and how we solve challenges for the affiliate ecosystem. We view AI as a driver of industry transformation, reshaping not only our internal processes but also the way our customers engage with our solutions.
With AI, we’re moving beyond traditional optimisation into real-time intelligence, enabling automated recommendations, proactive campaign management, and dynamic performance tuning at scale. This fundamentally changes how advertisers approach partnerships, measurement, and growth. We’re not simply responding to the AI era — we’re helping lead it.
https://hellopartner.com/2025/07/16/...dvertising-talks-new-ai-tools/
[Ono, Yomiuri Shimbun]:
I have two questions. My first question is about the financial results. I understand that each segment is performing well, but looking at the earnings summary, I'm a bit concerned that the net loss has increased compared to the same period last year. I assume this is due to a one-off factor, but if there's any factor you can explain, please let me know.
[Hirose, CFO]:
Regarding the first point about the financial figures, while the operating loss has significantly narrowed and improved, financial income/expenses impacted pre-tax profit. As explained in the video, this is due to fluctuations in the hedging of perpetual subordinated bonds. Normally, if hedge accounting was applied, this would have no impact. Originally, there would be no impact if hedge accounting were applied. However, under IFRS accounting, perpetual subordinated bonds are recorded as capital and their yen value is fixed at the historical rate at the time of issuance. This portion has unrealized gains and losses, but the valuation gains and losses are not reflected in the capital section; only the hedge gains and losses appear in the profit and loss statement. This significant deterioration is the main factor affecting pre-tax profit, with a fluctuation amount of approximately 33.8 billion yen.
[Mikitani, CEO] :
So, it's a technical factor. Basically, it's related to finance, and I hope you understand that, Mr. Ono.
Source: Media Q&A Session of the last Conference Call for Q1/2025
https://global.rakuten.com/corp/investors/