Affiliate Marketing Blog from UK Offer MediaWelcome to Kieron’s blog - the life and times of an Internet Marketeer

The Coke Zone campaign on Tradedoubler - what a shambles

So last Wednesday the 26th March I spotted a new campaign on Tradedoubler for the Coke Zone. Here’s the blurb:

Coke Zone Campaign

We will be running an exciting short term lead campaign for Coca Cola - beginning in March 2008. Coca-Cola have created a unique microsite entitled: The “CokeZone”.

The CokeZone is a reward site for Coca Cola customers – which enables them to enter the unique codes found on all Coca-Cola products in exchange for, “Passion Points, which can then be redeemed for a variety of consumer goods via the site. The site is organised by the verticals of fashion, entertainment, gaming, music and travel and also has a “Win It!” section where users can enter into sweepstakes and competitions. You will be paid for generating unique registrations to the site, at rate of £0.45 per lead.

OK I thought, not bad, something which I’m sure my UKOffer.com users will find interesting. So I then looked at the terms and conditions, and this stuck out to me:

- No use of brand terms within the advertiser site URL or domain name

Now as my site is a Wordpress site, if I were to create a new entry that mentiones “Coke Zone” in the title of the post then Wordpress automatically puts that into the URL. So I emailed the named contact for the campaign with the following:

Hi Samina,

I would like to run the Coke Zone campaign on my site www.ukoffer.com, however I am confused by the rules.

My site is a Wordpress Blog and if I was to create a post along the lines of “Coke Zone – sign up for great offers” then Wordpress would create a new URL that would read something like www.ukoffer.com/coke-zone-sign-up-for-free-offers

But according to your T’s and C’s this would not be acceptable as it mentions “Coke Zone” in the URL.

So how do I promote Coke Zone in www.ukoffer.com? I would have to do it without somehow mentioning Coke Zone in the title of my blog post, which would seem very pointless.

This was last Wednesday, I then got an email saying I had been accepted to the programme this Wednesday 26th March (7 days later - sigh) as well as another email saying this:

You have been moved to a different segment of Coke Zone Campaign (Push). To find out the terms that apply to that segment, please log in and look under “Your programs”.

These emails allows annoy me, I don’t know why they can’t state in the actual email what the commission change is, rather than making me log into Tradedoubler. But nonetheless I did log in and found that the commission rate for the Coke Zone campaign has been set to…wait for it….0.00p. Woohoo! I can promote Coke Zone for free if I wanted.

So for some reason I have been accepted and the commission rate set to zero. But why? Well I would love to tell you but my 7 emails to the named contact for the Coke Zone over the last 9 days have all gone unanswered. Maybe they are on holiday? But even so you would think they would have a system in place where emails are monitored wouldn’t you?

All in all I’m really disappointed with Tradedoubler. The communication for this programme has in my experience been non existent. I’ve tried to contact them but aren’t getting any replies. The sad thing is that once upon a time I would have 4 or 5 Tradedoubler contacts on my MSN list who I could have just pinged and asked “what’s up with this Coke Zone business then?” Sadly they have all now moved on so I follow protocol and email the named contact and this is what happens. Come on Tradedoubler, you can do so much better than this…can’t you?

What I’m listening to right now: Usher Vs Mary J Blige – “MJB In The Club” (Mashup Mafia Remix)

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Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Networks. 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.