--- title: "Paid Acquisition Gets Pricier by the Day — Going-Global Brands Need a New Growth System" author: "Unique Research" sourcePublication: "Unique Research Substack" originalPublishedAt: "2026-06-11T12:02:00+00:00" canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20260611-02html" source: "https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20260611-02html" language: "en" --- # Paid Acquisition Gets Pricier by the Day — Going-Global Brands Need a New Growth System _Original · Unique Research · 2026-06-11_ _Editor's note: The first-person report and its judgments belong to the original Chinese author. This English rendition retains the FOSHO / Tony Sun narrative across the themed sections and the complete 8-question Q&A. All named companies, products, and figures are preserved. Company and founder statements are source attributions, not independently verified findings._ AI Industry Observation Paid Acquisition Gets Pricier by the Day — Going-Global Brands Need a New Growth System In conversation with FOSHO Co-Founder Tony Sun: AI isn't optimizing ad buying — it's rewriting global growth Many going-global brands are living through an awkward moment: budget isn't shrinking, but growth feels more and more like opening a blind box. Ad accounts are still running, creatives are still being tested, media buyers are still tweaking, and daily and weekly reports are still being read. But the end result is often: there are clicks, but conversions are unstable; there's exposure, but nothing of the brand stuck; orders come in, yet no one knows who actually brought them. Over the past few years many brands got used to one growth logic: wherever there's traffic, go buy it. But the problem is that global traffic prices are rising, user attention is fragmenting, platform rules shift constantly, and single-channel ROI looks worse and worse. FOSHO Co-Founder Tony Sun's judgment on this is blunt: "The era where buying traffic means losing money has arrived." This sounds harsh, but many brand owners should find it familiar. When public-domain traffic gets pricier, growth can no longer rely on "buying." What brands truly need is a new global growth system: find the right media, creators, websites, and content partners, and turn them into long-term partners in the global market, not one-off traffic suppliers. This is exactly what FOSHO wants to redo with AI. Tony explained FOSHO in plain language: "FOSHO gives a brand's going-global growth a 7x24, tireless, globally minded AI Chief Growth Officer." This isn't treating AI as an ad-buying assistant; it's letting an AI Agent intervene in the complete chain of a brand's global growth: from strategy, to matching overseas creators and media, to automated outreach, smart media buying, sales conversion, and precise attribution. Brands no longer pay only for intermediate metrics like exposure, clicks, and leads; they pay more closely for the final growth outcome. Behind this is a bigger shift: AI is pushing global marketing from a "labor-intensive industry" toward an "agent-driven, systematic industry." Why Does Global Growth Deserve to Be Redone with AI? The marketing industry is huge. Tony noted that annual global marketing spend is about 2 trillion US dollars. But inside this huge market, a few problems have long persisted: information asymmetry, heavy human operations, low resource-matching efficiency, and complex attribution. These problems are especially obvious in going-global growth. When a brand wants to enter an overseas market, it faces not one unified market but a pile of fragmented markets: different countries, languages, cultures, platforms, media ecosystems, and creator networks. The brand needs to know: which channels suit it? which media have real influence? which KOLs are just loud? which partners bring reach, and which bring sales? how to set commission terms without attracting a pile of low-quality traffic? how to tell whether a conversion came from an ad, content, an affiliate site, or a creator's long-term seeding? In the past, these things mainly relied on people. Rely on the marketing team to research, on BD to find resources, on operations to maintain relationships, on Excel sheets, on experiential judgment, on constant trial and error. The problem is the global market is too fragmented; human effort can't cover that many long-tail nodes. What brands can find is usually only the batch of channels closest to them, easiest to recommend, and best at packaging themselves. This is where AI's value appears. Tony believes AI is naturally good at processing massive, unstructured global data, and agents can also simulate human experts for decisions and negotiation. It can automatically connect the supply side of global traffic — media, creators, websites, content platforms — with the brand's demand side. This isn't simple efficiency gains; it changes how growth is organized. In the past, a brand going global meant the marketing team took a budget and went everywhere looking for channels. In the future, a brand going global looks more like owning a global smart growth network: AI handles discovery, screening, matching, outreach, coordination, and attribution; humans judge strategy, define the brand, and set boundaries. What AI truly redoes isn't just an ad-buying tool, but the whole global growth operating system. The Logic of Buying Traffic Can't Keep Running Many brands' past growth path was clear: run ads, test creatives, run conversions, scale budget. This playbook worked well in the dividend era. Platform traffic was cheap, user growth fast, competition insufficient; as long as the product and creative weren't bad, placement brought growth. But today, things have changed. Traffic costs are rising, conversion paths are lengthening, and user attention is split finer. More importantly, brands increasingly can't complete conversion with a single ad touch. A user may see you on TikTok, search you on YouTube, read a review on a media site, see a recommendation on some vertical blog, and only then place an order. If a brand still only stares at the ad-backend data, it misjudges the true source of growth. Tony noted that brands need diversified growth channels and must build their own Global Partnership network. Behind this line is an important judgment: going-global growth can no longer rely only on platform traffic; it must run a long-term, effective external partner network. This network may include media, KOLs, vertical sites, content creators, review agencies, community hosts, industry platforms, and Affiliate Publishers. They aren't "traffic peddlers," but distributed touchpoints of the brand in overseas markets. When a brand enters an unfamiliar market, users don't know you, don't trust you, and don't know how you differ from local competitors. At that point, what truly shapes user judgment is often not the brand's own ads, but the people and content nodes users already trust. The core of growth shifts from "buying traffic" to "running trust." Affiliate Marketing Is Underestimated Many people understand affiliate marketing as: find creators, find sites, pay commissions, watch conversions. This understanding isn't wrong, but it's too shallow. It treats Affiliate Marketing as a low-cost acquisition channel, missing its longer-term value: the accumulation of trust and long-tail compounding. Tony's definition of affiliate marketing is closer to a global partner network. In his view, a healthy affiliate/publisher network is a brand's long-term asset. It isn't just helping the brand sell goods; it's using its own content, influence, and audience relationships to help the brand take root in different cultural soils. This line is key: "The essence of affiliate marketing isn't a transaction, but a distributed trust-distribution network." This is also why many brands can't go deep in affiliate marketing. They treat partners as one-off channels, looking only at short-term GMV, only caring how many orders came this month, while ignoring content quality, user fit, whether the brand message is accurate, and refusing to invest time building long-term mechanisms. The result: the brand found a pile of people who can move goods, but built no real partner network. There may be short-term orders, but no long-term asset was left behind. A high-quality Media Publisher or KOL's real value to the brand isn't just exposure and orders, but a "trust-distribution node." They know how local users understand a new category, what phrasing lowers the decision threshold, and what content triggers aversion. Through them, a brand gains not just traffic, but the context to enter the local market. This is especially important for going-global brands. Because globalization isn't translating a Chinese website into English, nor copying a domestic playbook overseas. Globalization is essentially a trust reconstruction. What a brand must do isn't buy a partner's one-off traffic, but turn them into the brand's long-term distributed partners in global markets through a long-term win-win mechanism. The Easiest Affiliate Pitfall Isn't Finding People, It's Misjudging Them When many brands do affiliate marketing, their first reaction is to find more creators, more sites, more publishers. But the problem often isn't quantity, but judgment. The most common pitfall is looking only at short-term GMV. Short-term sales matter, but if a brand evaluates partners only by GMV, it easily gives budget to the channels best at "grabbing conversions," not the ones best at building trust. Some channels may be good at intercepting traffic — the user was already going to buy, and it just takes a commission at the last step. Some channels have low short-term conversion but are responsible for user education, category explanation, and brand endorsement — more important for long-term growth. If attribution is too crude, the brand wrongly kills truly valuable upstream content partners. The second pitfall is ignoring content quality. Going-global brands easily treat creator collaboration as ad-creative placement and affiliate sites as traffic entrances, without seriously evaluating whether content fits the brand positioning, explains product value clearly, or truly shapes user decisions. Low-quality content may bring clicks, but it can also consume brand trust. The third pitfall is a wrongly set commission mechanism. Commission too low attracts no good partners; commission too high may draw arbitrage traffic, coupon-hunting traffic, and fake conversions. More complex is that different partner types have different value; content publishers, shopping-guide sites, vertical review media, KOLs, and community nodes can't be managed crudely with the same incentive mechanism. The fourth pitfall is not knowing how to evaluate partners. Many brands only look at follower count, site traffic, and historical conversions, but these can't fully answer one question: is this partner right for me? Fit includes audience composition, content tone, category experience, geographic coverage, conversion path, historical collaboration quality, anti-fraud risk, and long-term collaboration potential. This judgment used to be highly experience-dependent and hard to scale. This is exactly where AI can create value. What AI Changes First Is "Finding the Right People" Tony noted that FOSHO's agents can now complete affiliate marketing work end to end: from strategy generation, to partner recommendation and matching, to daily operations. The most direct change here is partner-matching efficiency. In the past, finding, screening, and matching overseas vertical sites or selling creators was a very time- and labor-intensive process. Teams had to search channels, review content, check data, send emails, follow up on replies, negotiate deals, build spreadsheets, and track conversions. This process was heavy, slow, and highly dependent on individual experience. Once an AI Agent steps in, it can quickly identify suitable channels and conduct outreach and negotiation. This sounds like efficiency gains, but the real value is scalability. A human team can barely maintain tens of thousands of global partner nodes at once, nor continuously track each node's content changes, audience changes, conversion performance, and risk signals. AI can. It can discover potential partners across a wider global range, dynamically recommend partners by brand goals, and connect the actions of outreach, negotiation, operations, and attribution. For a brand this means growth is no longer fully limited by headcount and local resources. In the past, how many partners a going-global brand could cover depended on how many BDs it had, how much media resources, how much local experience. In the future, how many partners a brand can cover depends on whether it has a strong enough AI growth system. This is the real meaning of what Tony calls the "AI Chief Growth Officer." It isn't writing a few emails or making a few reports for the brand, but giving the brand a continuously running global growth hub. AI Doesn't Make Marketing More "Automatic," It Makes Growth More Controllable The hardest part of the marketing industry has never been doing the actions. Placement, finding creators, sending emails, negotiating deals, doing attribution — these actions have always existed. What's hard is: in an uncertain global market, how to keep making better growth decisions. AI's change to brand growth isn't just automated execution; it's starting to systematize the work that used to rely heavily on experience, relationships, and human judgment. It lets brands see the market faster, find better-matched channels, judge partner quality, predict conversion likelihood, optimize commission mechanisms, identify abnormal traffic, and track true contribution. This brings a new watershed. Future going-global brands may no longer just compete on who places ads better, but on who builds global partner networks better. Who finds high-quality collaboration nodes earlier, identifies real influence better, and designs long-term win-win mechanisms has a better chance of building compounding returns in overseas markets. This is also why Affiliate Marketing should no longer be seen as a "cheap acquisition channel." It's more like the infrastructure of a brand's globalization. Ads buy one touch. Content partners bring one understanding. A long-term partner network is what can actually deposit trust. The Next Step of Going-Global Growth: From Buying Traffic to Running Relationships If the keyword of past going-global growth was "placement," the next stage's keyword may be "partners." What brands need isn't more traffic, but higher-quality connections. Connecting users in different markets, connecting local content context, connecting media and creators, connecting sales conversion and brand trust. AI's role is to turn these connections — once highly scattered, inefficient, and piled up by human labor — into a continuously running system. Tony said FOSHO hopes to help brands run strategy, media, creators, affiliate, conversion, and attribution all the way through. Behind this is a more realistic question: when buying traffic gets pricier, a brand can't just ask "where's cheap traffic left?" What the brand should really ask is: who can help me build trust in this market? who can long-term, steadily, and truly shape user decisions? how do I turn these partners into part of a global growth network? This may be the most important change in brand going-global growth in the AI era. Growth is no longer just spending budget. Growth becomes a network, a mechanism, a continuously learning and optimizing system. And those brands still stuck at "find creators, pay commissions, watch conversions" may increasingly struggle to understand: why, having spent money, they never truly entered the market. Selected Interview Q&A Q1: Without an official intro, what exactly does FOSHO do? Tony Sun: In plain language, FOSHO gives a brand's going-global growth a 7x24, tireless, globally minded AI Chief Growth Officer. The brand's marketing team no longer has to spend lots of time and resources on strategy, finding and screening media and creators, negotiation, or pulling Excel sheets for attribution. An AI agent can help the brand run everything through, from strategy setting, to overseas creator and media matching, automated outreach, smart media buying, sales conversion, and precise attribution. The brand only pays for the final growth outcome. Q2: Why do MarTech, global brand growth, global media, affiliate, and influencer business deserve to be redone with AI? Tony Sun: Brand marketing itself is a huge industry; annual global marketing spend is about 2 trillion US dollars. This industry has long had information asymmetry, heavy human operations, and low resource-matching and utilization efficiency. AI is naturally good at processing massive, unstructured global data, and agents can also simulate human experts for decisions and negotiation. It lets the global traffic supply side and the brand demand side achieve more precise, more automated connection. Q3: In the past many brands' going-global growth relied on ad placement and platform traffic; what's the biggest change today? Tony Sun: The biggest change is that the era of "buying traffic means losing money" has arrived. Simply relying on public-domain traffic, costs keep rising and ROI keeps falling. Brands need diversified growth channels and must build their own Global Partnership network, bringing more diverse traffic channels into long-term growth plans. Q4: What is Affiliate Marketing's value in brand globalization? Tony Sun: Affiliate marketing is a means combining marketing and sales; essentially it unifies brand and performance. It can keep high ROI while using content-type affiliate partners to lift the brand's voice. Affiliate marketing is also an important part of diversified traffic channels and the global partner network. FOSHO's media business is also deeply combined with the affiliate business, helping brand clients lift voice while bringing conversion and sales growth. Q5: Many people understand affiliate marketing as finding creators, sites, paying commissions, watching conversions. Where is this understanding too shallow? Tony Sun: This understanding misses the accumulation of trust and long-tail compounding. A healthy affiliate/publisher network is an important long-term brand asset. They aren't just helping you sell goods; they're using their endorsement to help the brand take root in different cultural soils worldwide. The essence of affiliate marketing isn't a transaction, but a distributed trust-distribution network. Q6: What is the true value of a high-quality Media Publisher or KOL partner to the brand? Tony Sun: Short-term it may bring exposure and orders, all easily quantified. But long-term, the true value of a high-quality publisher and KOL to the brand is becoming a trust-distribution node. This should be treated as part of long-term brand assets. What going-global brands should do isn't buy their one-off traffic, but through long-term win-win mechanisms turn them into long-term distributed partners in the brand's global markets. Q7: What's the easiest pitfall for brands doing affiliate marketing? Tony Sun: The easiest pitfall is looking only at short-term GMV, ignoring content quality, and not designing a good commission mechanism. Many brands evaluate all partners with one set of metrics, but content publishers, vertical media, KOLs, and shopping-guide sites have different value. Some partners handle the final conversion; some handle user education and trust building. If attribution and incentive mechanisms are unreasonable, the brand may reward the wrong people and miss partners with real long-term value. Q8: Which part of Affiliate Marketing can AI improve first? Tony Sun: FOSHO's agents can now complete affiliate marketing work end to end, from strategy generation, to partner recommendation and matching, to daily operations. In the past finding, screening, and matching overseas vertical sites or selling creators was very time- and labor-intensive. Now an AI Agent can quickly and precisely identify suitable channels and conduct outreach and negotiation. This scaled, precise automated operation is something humans simply can't match. --- Original publication: https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20260611-02html On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20260611-02html