Author: adam

Wow, it’s been over a week since I got home from Commission Junction University, and although I am just about caught up, I thought it would be a good time to get some of my thoughts and reflections together about the event.

Arrival in Santa Barbara
I arrived mid-afternoon on Saturday and had a little trouble with my room. I couldn’t connect to the wi-fi network from the first room they gave me, and that wasn’t going to work for me. They gave me keys to another room and when I walked in, there was Joshua Slone from 1&1 ironing his shirt. Wow, I thought, good thing I knew the person in that room, it could have been really embarrassing. I called down and they finally got me a room that worked.

Saturday night, David Lewis, from 77Blue, and I went out to a nice steak house. It was great catching up with David, learning about what went wrong at ThisNext, and what he was currently working on. I was very intrigued by David’s concept if intrepreneurship. He thinks that the networks should start venture funds to help fund the development of new technologies and affiliate initiatives that will drive future revenues and commissions for the merchants in the network. 

Misinformation and Educational Session Problems
Sunday morning started early with the CJ Publisher Advisoy Board meeting. This is a group of top publishers (affiliates) that CJ has put together to bounce ideas off of, and discuss the future of affiliate marketing. It’s great to be part of this group, and always interesting to hear what other affiliates are up to and what they want most from the network to help them continue to grow their businesses.

Although the discussions are confidential, the topic of education and communication was discussed a great deal outside of the meeting as well. The major issue is that there is a lot of misinformation about affiliate marketing and many times advertising agencies will come in and convince the executive members of a business that affiliate marketing is a waste of time, especially search affiliates, and they of course should let their agency run 100% of their search campaign and not let the affilaites do any search for them. As affiliates we often make our case to the affiliate manager, but they have a hard time making the case up the chain of the business. The industry has to do better outreach and education to the CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs of these companies so that they appreciate the fixed cost, pay for performance model.

Although CJ did acknowledge this as an issue, they didn’t do a very good job using this year’s educational event, CJU, as a way to dispel these myths and agency misinformation. In fact in their Dispelling Myths of Search Affiliates session, they had someone from their own CJ Search team, and Mike Jacobs from iMarketing, speaking about restrictions that should be put on search affiliates, including not letting them use the company’s display urls. This is the critical issue that causes many top search players to switch from one company to better informed competitors. Jacobs argues that if the affiliates use the display url when he is marketing the company as their agency, than he "might" not be able to see 100% of the impression data, because there is a chance that on some keywords the affilaites’ ads might display instead of his. So in his world, his ability to see all the data is more important than the other 80% of the keyword market space that these affiliates would advertise the company on driving sales at fixed CPAs without using up the company’s search budget. Tony Pantano, our CEO at IMWAVE, actually stood up and said they propagated more myths than they dispelled, and after Tony and I both gave our thoughts on the many inaccuracies of their presentation; we had a lot of people thank us for showing the flaws in their thinking.

My biggest issue, is that CJ, who has typically been very careful about the message they present at CJU, would allow this kind of one sided presentation to take place. It seemed a bit self serving to their agency CJ search side of the business, and I think they really risked alienating some of the top search partners in their network. Odd choice…

The Good News!
I was impressed with Rebecca Madigan’s presentation. Rebecca called a lot of top merchants and affiliates in the network and had a lot of facts and figures to report about what was really important and gave us some incite as to what it would be like to "walk in the shoes" of merchants and affiliates. The presentation was most enlightening and helpful. I heard a lot of merchants discussing the presentation and specifically talking about the idea of focusing more on consumer offers and incentives as opposed to affiliate incentives. This is great advice! You can have the best commission rates in the industry but if your pages don’t convert it really won’t matter, our relative commissions per click number will be low, and we won’t be able to afford to market for you.

I don’t want to sound negative, I love CJU! The event is hands down the best networking event in the industry. The affiliate managers that attend are engaged in their programs and are actively looking to build relationships in the industry. I have made many contacts and friends at CJU this year and in the past, and wouldn’t miss it for the world! CJ knows how to run a professional event, and each activity is well planed and executed.

Excited about Borders
The folks at Commission Junction were very excited this year about the soon to be launched Borders Books program. I think CJ felt the sting of losing Barnes and Noble to Performics. If you recall Barnes and Noble was one of the first affiliate programs in the industry, after Amazon, and was the initial program that helped bring BeFree into existence. So it must of hurt on many levels. But, Honestly I think they might have been a bit too over the top. As you can see in this exclusive video captured late night at CJU of Tom Vadnais, CJ’s General Manager, and Kerri Pollard, CJ’s VP Client Development celebrating:

Affiliates Gone Wild
After a night of drinking and networking, I got back from the Dell sponsored Tonic Party around 1:30am. Apparently I was an early bid and missed some of the action. I have been piecing bits of the story together, but from what I can tell, a bunch of affiliates ended up breaking into the Pool at the hotel around 2:30am for a little late night swim. Jeremy Palmer was among the crowd and gave a video interview about the events, I am sure that will surface soon. Apparently Jeremy had someone take Scott Jangro’s iPhone from him and then Jeremy pulled Scott, fully clothed, into the pool. Scott said he was glad he brought an extra pair of shoes and that he would have his revenge. Apparently the entire crew, approx 40, got thrown out of the pool by hotel security. There are also rumors of security video and pictures, but none have surfaced so far. 🙂

Later rumors, confirm that Scott and Jeremy have since made up and are actually on vacation together in Hawaii.  This exclusive Wiseaff video shows that they have actually become quite close…

Rumors, Tends and Issues Overheard at CJU
I overhead a bunch of tends and thoughts in the industry. Here are some of them:

Consolidation
There was a lot of talk about consolidation in the industry at all levels. We have already seen a number of acquisitions by and of the networks. I have written about the distribution land grab that I see happening in the near future. Someone close inside of CJ told me that in their network 1% of the top affiliates drive 99% of the revenues. I think CJ and the other networks have to take a hard look at the 1% and ask them what their business would look like if a competitor acquired those companies out from underneath them.

Direct vs. Network Relationships
I think at events like this, it’s always interesting to listen to what people are saying after they have had a few drinks in them. I had one affiliate manager practically falling over dunk tell me over and over again that if I wanted to make any money with her program, that I had to go direct. Apparently search affiliates just can’t make money with the commissions they offer though the CJ program. Are more and more merchants trying to get top affiliates to go direct? What does this mean for the networks, and how much harder will it make for affiliates trying to automate their business if top tier commissions can only be achieved by going direct?

Employees today, Top Performers Tomorrow
The issue of CJ employees being affiliates is long behind us. Even though Chad Darling hasn’t surfaced at a CJU event since leaving the network. Come on Chad, we miss you man! It was interesting to run into an x-employee of Traffic Strategies who has apparently become a CJ Performer less than a year since leaving the company. I approached him at the CJ Peformer event and asked him about it. He said all he did was web design for Traffic Strategies, and never realized they even did affiliate marketing. Yeah Right!!! Nice one!!!

Search Affiliates vs Agencies
As I pointed out earlier, paid search affiliates are increasingly seeing competition from agencies that are being hired by companies to manage their campaigns. There needs to be a lot more discussion about this and the use of display urls and how affiliates and agencies can work better together. From what I heard the general consensus is that companies are making some bad decisions based on some bad advice. Honestly I think there are ways search affiliates and agencies can and should work together. This discussion needs to continue and for us, is probably the most important issue. It’s tough to sit back and watch companies making a "less is more" decision when it comes to sales and leads. Companies should be expanding the reach of their search campaigns using expertise and budgets of top paid search affiliates. More is More, more sales and more customers at fixed pre-set costs shouldn’t be bad.

The beauty of online advertising is that everything can be tested. I don’t know how many times I heard myself saying that EVERYONE has an agenda, and that companies should take in all the advice they hear, and setup tests to determine how they can get the most customers at the least amount of costs.

All in all, CJU is a great event! Here are some of the other good summaries I have seen on the net:

• Janet Meiners – NewspaperGirl:
  How to Rile up the Crowd at CJU
• Brook Schaff – Revenews:
  Reflections on CJU
• Sam Harrelson – Revenews:
  Selling Postcards From the Hanging: Reflections on CJU
• Vinny Lingham – VinnyLingham.com:
  The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Search Engine Marketing
• Angel Djambazov – Revenews:
  In Defense of Cockroaches
• Shawn Collins – AffiliateTip:
  CJ 2007 Horizon Award Winners
• Lisa Picarille – Revenew Magazing:
  Communication is Key in Marketing