Introducing the Partnership Pulse
In September, 1,106 brands started a new or returning partnership with a premium publisher. A quarter of them had never appeared in our database before. Nobody publishes who they are, which is the gap the Partnership Pulse closes.
The Partnership Pulse was built with one type of reader in mind: premium publishers' teams responsible for selling branded content, paid social and sponsored events.
The Pulse is Contalto's first intelligence product, and it is a package rather than a publication: weekly branded content and paid social files, monthly events files and a monthly report. The files are the prospecting tool and include every new and returning partnership. The report reads the market those files come from.
The report tells you what happened last month. The files tell you who to call this week.
The Contalto platform has long made its data searchable, with clients setting their own content alerts and scheduled dashboard exports against it. What has changed is what can now be done to the data: current AI classifies and resolves content at this volume fast enough to publish weekly, and every featured selection still passes an editor before it goes out.
The question nobody publishes an answer to
A publisher's commercial team knows its own pipeline in detail and the rest of the market barely at all - unless it already subscribes to the Contalto platform. Which brands are commissioning branded content right now, and with which publishers, is published nowhere. Agencies will not say. Competitors certainly will not. And a brand in the middle of a buying cycle has no reason to announce it.
Prospecting therefore runs on relationships, inbound enquiries and inference from whatever happens to be visible. That works, but it is slow, and it systematically misses the buyer nobody has met yet.
What the Partnership Pulse measures
The Pulse rests on clear definitions, applied the same way every month.
NEW: a brand–publisher partnership that had never appeared in the Contalto database until the reporting month.
RETURNING: a partnership that resumed in the reporting month after a break of twelve consecutive months or more.
EXISTING: every other partnership. New, returning and existing together make up all ACTIVE partnerships.
The Pulse reports the first two categories. The third is the installed base, available in full on the Contalto platform.
The Pulse is built on our own database: 700,000+ pieces of content tied to 42,000+ identified brands and brand groups, refreshed daily. It covers 200+ premium English-language publishers for branded content and their Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts for paid social, plus 50+ publishers for events.
Because new is a claim about history, depth counts as much as breadth: the database runs back to 2019 for branded content, 2022 for paid social and January 2023 for events.
One principle governs what we publish openly. The rankings - the league tables of publishers, brands, sectors and sub-sectors that sit at the centre of each edition - stay with subscribers, as do the weekly files that name every partnership and link to the content. What is published openly, in the free edition of Pulse, is the market in aggregate, and the partnerships the editor chooses to feature.
Inside the monthly report
Nine sections in the same order every month, so one edition reads against the last: market signals; a featured partnership for each service, drawn from a weighted matrix of eight scores and then chosen by an editor; the US, UK and international comparison; new brands; new publishers and platforms; branded content; paid social; events; and a closing read of the month with three questions for the next. The recurring dimensions are volume, the new-versus-returning split, share of all active partnerships, reach as brands × publishers, sector and sub-sector with month-on-month change, and the biggest movers by rate of change rather than size.
Every edition opens on the same snapshot, updated monthly:
Contalto Partnership Pulse, October 2026 edition · September 2026 data
Reactivation is the smaller part of the story. Most of each month's movement comes from brands a publisher has never worked with before, which is what makes the weekly files a prospecting list rather than a renewal list.
The same edition showed five titles filling their entire branded content slate with new or returning partners, and on paid social, Sports Footwear & Clothing up 1,700% against the month before with Wealth, Asset & Investment Management up 533%.
Section 02 names one partnership per service. Here are September's three:
The prospecting files
The reports explain the month. The files are what a sales team works from week to week, and they are the working core of the product rather than an appendix to it. Each week's file is published the following Thursday, which gives the last of that week's content time to reach the database.
Weekly branded content and paid social files: every new and returning partnership of the week. Every line is one partnership: the brand, the advertiser behind it, the publisher and title, sector and sub-sector, market, and the URL of the content.
Monthly events files: new and returning sponsors, by event and by publisher, including events still to come. One row per sponsor.
An entry point, by design
The Pulse was conceived as the way into Contalto, not as a product standing beside it.
The Pulse report and associated files stop at the same place: the point where the answer depends on a brand's full history rather than the current month's movement. How many partnerships has this brand run over three years, and with whom? What did the content look like, how heavily was it branded, what did it link to?
Those are platform questions. The Contalto platform holds every active partnership regardless of type - including the existing relationships the Pulse deliberately leaves out - together with the content itself and the analysis attached to it. Every section of the report carries a link straight into the matching view on the platform.
What follows
The Partnership Pulse is the first product in Contalto's intelligence series.
A Commerce Radar is in preparation, covering content commerce, the affiliate and product-recommendation content through which premium publishers increasingly sell.
Beyond it, a French edition of the Pulse, and sector reports written for advertisers and agencies.
The method does not change from one product to the next. What changes is the perimeter and the reader.
How to get it
A free edition of the monthly report will be published on our blog and sent to anyone who asks for it.
The full edition, with the weekly and monthly files, is available on subscription.
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