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Guest Post 5: Dot.com Treasure Island

This is my final guest blog post, and it comes from Nadeem Azam. Nadeem is a very skilled writer and has been involved in Affiliate Marketing for years now. Despite that, he still only looks 14! So without further ado, here it is…

Dot.com Treasure Island - The Clamour to Develop an Online Marketing Presence in Blighty

I was sipping a cranberry juice with the CEO of a German internet advertising company by Covent Garden tube station a few days ago and, after an hour of small talk, asked him with a hint of exasperation: “why are you so fixated with the British market?”

The company in question was a leader on the European continent in its sector in online advertising and dominated the market in Germany, France, Italy and other countries. They didn’t have a presence in the UK and for a year he had been trying to entice me to set up a British wing to their enterprise. I couldn’t understand why Britain was such a focus for him when they were the leading player in the major continental markets and wouldn’t even be considered one of the top twenty companies in the UK in their niche; that’s what caused me to spew out my uncharacteristically blunt question.

My directness forced him to let down his Teutonic formality and he blurted out, “Nadeem, we have to have a presence in the UK. If we don’t have a major presence in the UK we are not taken seriously… and investors will not take us as seriously.”

It gave me some understanding of his rationale and I did remind myself that for a decade the UK had been the most vibrant economy in Europe after the West German Wirtschaftswunder had ground to a standstill, but still it didn’t make sense for this über-entrepreneur, whose company had made it to the very top in territories with a combined population of hundreds of millions - and the possibility of looking eastwards to booming countries with populations of over a billion each - to be stressing himself out on a market with a population of merely 61 million and an average adult debt level of £28,600, twice as high as continental Europe.

You can be the best football player in the world, but if you never play in the World Cup, it is something that will always be held against you. And likewise, it is the same thing with Britain and online marketing.

Yes, the UK leads the world when it comes to the percentage of advertising spend going on the internet - already 14% - and it has a strong currency which means any gold coins earned goes a long way in other countries - the pound is at its highest ratio against the US dollar in 26 years - but Britain and in particular it’s majestic metropolis, London, has a pull on people’s psyches which can’t be explained by figures alone.

Internet businesses are no different from Polish builders and the mentality, as my freund from Germany exuded, is that you have to tread the gold-paved streets of London. In the last few years advertising networks like Buy.at, Linkshare and PrimeQ have set up offices in the West End of London, which has the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and, by doing so, held up a placard not unlike the students on Oxford Street, but instead of directing people to £4.99 pizzas, advertising to the world: “We Mean Business”.

So with every online marketing CEO adamant that his company has to have a presence in the UK what does this mean for the established players in the market?

“There is considerable interest in the existing companies,” says Ankit Adani (pictured below), who has studied management at the leading Business Schools in France and the UK, and keeps a close tab on the online marketing industry. “To take the example of affiliate marketing, practically every British affiliate network has had approaches from American or continental European companies to acquire them, and some of them will be receiving renewed interest in the coming weeks. The reason there have been no takeovers yet is because the UK network’s price expectations have been unrealistic – as with TradeDoubler/AOL earlier this year - and some of them are eager to go it alone, but with so many global corporations eager to join the £2 Billion and fast-growing affiliate marketing party in the UK, it is only a matter of time before one of the networks gets snapped up.”

Adani revealed that two well-known British networks are currently in discussions with foreign companies whose managers are itching to take their wives shopping in Harrods and socialising in Mayfair bars on cool summer evenings drinking champagne.

What I’m listening to right now: neighbour’s wife yelling at him for eyeing the cleaner

Who is Nadeem Azam?

Nadeem Azam is originally a writer and has been running a group of internet businesses since 1997. His online marketing agency Azam Marketing engages in PPC, SEO, Affiliate Management, Email Marketing, Online Public Relations and Web Design.

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Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 11:30 am 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.