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Buy.at Christmas Cracker Industry Issue Panel - Notes

A couple of weeks ago I participates as a panel member for the “Cracking (see what they did there?) Your Industry Issues” seminar at the Buy.at Christmas Cracker. I thought it would be worthwhile to put a few notes up here from the event, for those who missed it.

The panel was chaired by Tyson from Buy.at, I was there representing affiliates, Ross Barnes from Vizeum was representing agencies and John Maher from O2 was representing merchants.

I’ve listed below the topic discussions and some brief notes (they may be sketchy as I didn’t actually write anything down) about what was said.

How technical innovation is shaping the industry

Will technology through tools like product feeds, quote tools make affiliate sites sticker, more user friendly, easier to maintain and populate for affiliates and should all networks look to be moving in this direction?

My opinion was that while technological innovations like the Buy.at ContentEngine, the ShopWindow Toolset from Affiliate Window and the Paid On Results Content Creator are all fantastic tools they won’t make or break affiliate sites on their own. I’m not “techy” at all so emphasised that networks don’t create tools that take a degree in brain surgery to work (TradeDoubler take note).

I also made the point that networks shouldn’t go the other way and “innovate for the sake of it”. Unless there is a genuine need for a new tool then don’t build it just to show that you have a good team of techies. Instead work on the basics of affiliate marketing, which in my humble opinion are all about relationship building and taking the time to speak to affiliates and find out what their needs are in order to maximise sales. I could be accused of being “old school” but I think there’s no better way to grow business than through personal contact.

The spyware/adware dinosaur (is it an issue anymore?)

Buy.at see it making a resurgence and are now removing more affiliates than 2-3 years ago.

What is the responsibility of networks and affiliates?

What is the real impact?

Can it be stopped?

Personally I was surprised that Buy.at are removing more spyware affiliates than 2-3 years ago. The affiliate forums seem to be quiet on this subject these days so although I knew that spyware was still around, I didn’t think it was still as prolific. Again my opinion is that Buy.at (and other networks) could do more to publicise the issues still arising from spyware.  I also think that any network that publicises on a regular basis about how many spyware affiliates they have kicked off their network, would certainly get my endorsement.

Aligning CPA budgets with their acquisition channels

Are most companies aligning their CPA budgets through the affiliates sector with all other channels?

If not why not?

What are the next steps to ensure we move closer to achieving a uniformed CPA?

Ross talked about how some media buyers view the affiliate channel as a way to get “cheap sales” and how we all need to play our part in the education of people not involved in the industry to communicate how effective a sales channel affiliate marketing can be. Unfortunately if a media buyer/planner has a big budget, they seem to allocate more on traditional media, including press and TV than they do to new media. And even in new media, more budgets seem to be allocated to paid search and CPM advertising than to affiliate marketing.

I also aired my grievances about how budgets are often “wasted” on paid search. An example being a broadband merchant who pays a measly £15 per sale to affiliates yet pay £5 a click, yes £5 a click on the paid search engines. Where is the logic in that? Yet unfortunately we see this sort of pattern all the time.

Capped budgets…why? It’s a CPA channel

Viewing affiliates as a sales channel?

Viewing affiliates as an advertising channel?

Viewing affiliates as sales and advertising?

Where does the budget come from and how do we realign it when the perceived budget runs out?

This was the best part of the seminar for me, as its a personal bugbear of mine when I see affiliate programs paused or stopped because a budget runs out. I argued that as we get paid a percentage of a successful sale, and therefore from the profit that the merchant earns per sale - then there should never be a need to stop a program. John from O2 waxed lyrical that big corporations have financial tax years and lots of red tape around accounting issues that sometimes sales and budgets do run out. I countered that it was a shame that a seemingly simple process can get so convoluted due to in-house accounting practices and budget allocations that affiliates suffer when we should in fact be the most simple sales channel of them all.

I then went on to reiterate that as affiliates we put a lot of time and energy into building sites that rank well in the seach engines. And to have a campaign paused due to budget issues, when you have spent hours, days, weeks and months building a site around a particular product/service just does not go down well. After all, if we have done our jobs well then the search engines will still send our sites traffic whether the campaign is paused or not.

What’s even more annoying is that the same merchants who pause a campaign for a month or two more often or not come back to affiliates a few months later and ask us to drive more sales as they have targets to reach and can pay us increased commission to help achieve this! All we want is a campaign that runs all year round, never gets stopped and pays a fair market rate. Its not much to ask is it?

Should networks be affiliates?

Pros

Cons

Opinions what do you feel?

No, no, no of course not. I know there have been a couple of networks that have bought up agencies and affiliate sites over the last year. But I really object to networks that create affiliate sites for the sole purpose of promoting their own merchants. In effect “double dipping” as they earn commission and an overrider fee. Not to mention the massive conflicts of interest and internal metrics they can use to their benefit. Bad, bad, bad.

Overall it was a great seminar, the audience were (apart from one or two) reluctant to participate so myself and the other panel members compensated with some heated discussion, all in good humour though Roll on the next panel, its great to debate the important issues in our industry with like minded people.

Does anyone else have any opinions on any of the topics mentioned above?

What I’m listening to right now: Emily King - “East Side Story”

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Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 9:30 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.