New platform transforms high-performing partnership ads into a scalable, omni-channel growth engine

NEW YORK, May 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Wayward today announced the launch of Wayward Boost™, a patent-pending platform designed to scale one of the most effective, yet historically constrained, forms of digital advertising: partnership media.

Partnership ads, featuring influencers and publishers, consistently outperform traditional brand advertising, often driving 3–5x higher performance. Despite this, they remain underutilized due to fragmented workflows and a lack of scalable infrastructure.

Wayward Boost addresses this gap by enabling brands to discover partners, produce partner-led content, transform it into co-branded creative, and deploy paid media campaigns across the open internet – turning partnership advertising into a repeatable, performance-driven channel.

“The results have always been there – the challenge has been scale,” said Ali Marino, Co-founder and CEO of Wayward. “Wayward Boost provides the infrastructure layer that makes partnership media as measurable, efficient, and scalable as any modern paid channel.”

The launch of Wayward Boost marks a significant evolution for the company, expanding Wayward from a partnerships platform into a full-scale, omni-channel performance marketing infrastructure. With this release, Wayward is building the foundation for how partnership-driven growth is executed at scale – enabling brands to manage, activate, and amplify collaborations across both organic and paid channels.

Defining Partnership Media Infrastructure

With the launch of Wayward Boost, Wayward is advancing what it calls Partnership Media – a performance marketing approach that amplifies trusted third-party voices through paid distribution at scale.

While brands have long invested in influencer marketing, publisher partnerships, and affiliate programs, these efforts have remained siloed and operationally complex. As a result, partnership-driven advertising has not scaled alongside traditional paid media.

Wayward Boost unifies these fragmented workflows into a single platform, enabling brands to run partnership media as a cohesive, scalable performance channel.

Through Wayward Boost, brands can:

• Discover partnership opportunities with influencers and publishers
• Produce partner-led content
• Generate AI-powered co-branded ad creative
• Launch campaigns to editorial content, brands’ owned websites, or retailers like Amazon and Walmart
• Apply Wayward Boost Intelligence™ audience targeting to maximize performance
• Scale partnership advertising across multiple collaborators simultaneously

Turning Trusted Voices Into Scalable Growth

The platform connects brands with influencers and publishers in a unified ecosystem where both sides can activate paid media around partnership content.

Brands gain the ability to amplify trusted recommendations through performance advertising, while influencers and publishers benefit from scaled distribution and measurable monetization opportunities.

The result is a powerful combination of authenticity, distribution, and performance accountability.

“Consumers trust influencers and publishers more than traditional advertising,” said Marino. “Wayward Boost allows brands to scale that trust through modern performance marketing infrastructure.”

Built for the Creator-Led Internet

As the creator economy reshapes how consumers discover products, brands are increasingly looking for ways to combine authenticity with scalable advertising performance.

Wayward Boost bridges that gap – transforming creator recommendations and editorial content into high-performing, measurable advertising campaigns.

With its patent-pending infrastructure, Wayward believes Partnership Media will become one of the fastest-growing allocations in modern marketing.

Availability

Wayward Boost™ launches May 1, 2026, in beta with select partners.
For more information, visit www.wayward.com or contact press@wayward.com.

About Wayward

Wayward is an AI-powered platform building the infrastructure for the future of partnership marketing. Its technology enables brands, influencers, and publishers to discover, activate, and scale high-impact collaborations across the internet.

Through Wayward Connect, an AI-powered marketplace for partnership discovery and execution, and Wayward Boost™, a patent-pending platform that enables partners to fund and scale paid media around partnership content, Wayward powers full-funnel partnerships – from discovery to activation to amplification and measurable performance. Wayward simplifies the complexities of marketing with a streamlined, intuitive end-to-end solution, redefining the historical reliance on marketing experience to run successful marketing campaigns at scale.

By combining artificial intelligence with scalable advertising infrastructure, Wayward transforms trusted recommendations into one of the most powerful growth engines in modern marketing.

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SOURCE Wayward LLC