Nick Robertson from ASOS is ignorant, rude and I will never promote ASOS again
The following quote from ASOS CEO Nick Robertson appeared in this weeks NMA:
“Next year we’ll reintroduce affiliate marketing but as it should be, as opposed to affiliates as they were” said Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO. “(There’ll be) no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales”
Nick, I will remind you and the rest of the Affiliate Marketing community of your quote when you relaunch your program. Good luck, you will need it.
What I’m listening to right now: Donnell Jones - “Journey of a Gemini”
Popularity: 2% [?]
Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
March 8th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Cheers Kieron!
I was just looking for new opportunities and ASOS was one I had in mind to promote.
If this is the attitude from the head man, then I never wish to work with them or tbh, be a customer. (Which I have been many times)
Many more fish in the sea.
March 8th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
I gather you made a bunch of money off ASOS then Kieron?
March 8th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
To be honest I didn’t. I promoted them a little bit and generated some sales, but I’m certainly not one of their top affiliates.
Thats beside the point to be honest, I think their attitude towards affiliates is disgusting.
March 9th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Who?
March 9th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
That amuses me highly, what a prat… and the guy is the ceo of an online shopping site. Oh dear!
March 9th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Keiron, The NMA magazine do you subscribe to the full magazine or just read the daily news online?
I am thinking of subscribing to the full magazine however want it to be worth while!!
Thanks
March 9th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I used to subscribe to the actual nagazine. However I didn’t renew it this year as I found a lot of the focus was on agencies winning big brand accounts and generally lots of stuff that wasn’t really relevant or useful. Sure there was some decent info but on the whole I didn’t think it was worth it.
March 10th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Hi Kieron,
I have been an avid reader of your blog for some time – BUT I have never really participated much in the “blogosphere”. However this year I decided that I would Participate more actively!
So let this be my first comment on your excellent down to earth blog.
“(There’ll be) no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales”
I find it beyond ignorant and I am really amazed - he simply cannot be sober. Looking at the analytics for a bunch of our clients – the fact is that most retailers are having a very decent amount of their affiliated revenue coming from a long tail of smaller affiliates (or “grubby little people” as they are called now
– and any retailer would be stupid to disregard this, because it’s revenue no less attractive than the revenue coming from your super affiliates.
N.b.:
I actually used your screen in a Conversion blog post I did this evening, so now the ASOS comment is visually saved at yet another blog.
Link: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/03/conversion-tracking-outline.html
(the HTML a tag was not allowed - on purpose or?)
Dennis, IndexTools
http://www.visualrevenue.com/blog
March 10th, 2007 at 10:45 am
The question is, how *should* affiliate marketing be? Perhaps he would rather pay even more money to an ad agency which has to cover lavish office & employee costs and has no interest in spend ROI?
March 10th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I’m sure he is referring to people brand bidding against their terms, therefore paying commission on sales that are not incremental so can understand why he is annoyed ( and many, many merchants have left AM due to brand bidding ), however his choice of language and lack of a qualifier or specific reference to brand bidding makes this a silly statement. I think the affiliate reaction to this is a bit over the top, as i’m sure affiliates know what he means. It’s certainly no Ratner.
Steve
March 18th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Well put Kieron. Many more affiliates have told me they too will not promote ASOS when the company launches an affiliate program.
Love your blog - keep it up
September 26th, 2007 at 1:21 am
[...] something we should be banging our drums about, especially when confronted with bad press from the ignorant. Overall its a very positive report that shows that merchants (brands) are allocating more budget [...]
September 28th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Unbelieveable. Almost on a par with gerard ratner!
December 30th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
[...] Robertson from ASOS gives that interview with NMA. I respond in kind to his comments about the affiliate [...]