Session Description: How can marketers get the most from their budgets in a difficult economic climate?  We’ll explore how to attain more from a smaller budget via performance marketing with practical, tactical solutions.  We’ll look at the pros and cons of allocating dollars to performance marketing and we’ll discuss what technological innovations are coming to the performance marketing space that will maximize budgets and minimize challenges.

This session took place Wednesday, April 22, 2009. The speakers:

• Neil Strother, Analyst, Forrester Research (Moderator)
• Peter Bordes, CEO, MediaTrust
• Steve Schaffer, Founder and CEO, Vertive
• Jarvis Mak, Senior VP, Global Research and Insights Director, Havas Digital
• Kelly Powers, Senior Manager, Customer Acquisition, Zazzle

This session was definitely geared towards those marketing and advertising professionals that are not already in the performance marketing game.  It was very insightful to watch from that point of view in mind.

Bullet Point Review!

• Neil asks “What is performance marketing?”
  • Paying only for results, whether those results are leads, referrals, a percentage of the sale.  Advertisers get to determine how much they pay.
• You can leverage your affiliates to assist with your paid search efforts.
• You need to have good landing pages.
• What’s the real value of the actions being driven?
• What you’re paying for is marketing.
• Affiliates have more incentive to drive more qualified traffic and customers.
• Affiliates drive higher conversions, average orders.
• There’s three types of advertising, CPM, CPC, and CPA.
• Merchants only want to pay one touch point for the sale.
• There’s a mentality that affiliates are frowned upon; CEOs will be wary of the methods but CFOs will be excited about the value and efficiency of the channel.
• AM is very data driven – more money is shifted towards traceable marketing.
• Executives need to understand affiliate marketing; the whole industry is misunderstood.
• Industry is starting to get the data out and break through the black box and lack of transparency.
• Peter briefly explained what’s going on with the #advertisingtax to the crowd.
• A couple of states have been able to stop the #advertisingtax but it’s moving fast.
• Fraud has grown exponentially, especially in lead gen.
• Paying for leads welcomes fraud in som,e industries, ask yourself if you can pay for a different action.
• A major player will soon announce a ranking system (Peter couldn’t divulge who).

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Is there a metric to show brand safety?  No.  It’d be nice to take the focus off the brand.
• Yes you need brand awareness, but that’s not going to drive a sale.  The best offer is.
• It’s not infinitely scalable; you can always throw more money at search, etc. but throwing more money at affiliate marketing doesn’t work because the core is the relationships.
• Amazing how much more some merchants pay on other marketing methods and channels over affiliate marketing.
• Advertisers need to do a better job at attribution to track the sales to the correct channels.
• Feel free to launch new products with affiliate marketing; it has worked in the past when done right.
• What are some practical takeaways?
  • Continue to optimized
  • Work on attribution
  • Look at marketing channels as a holistic portfolio.
  • Focus on better, fewer networks and don’t spread your program too think.

The Q&A portion wasn’t so much a traditional Q&A as it was a case study like discussion.  The panel really wanted to help with real examples, and only one gentleman in consumer finance was willing to ask for assistance.

 Powered by Max Banner Ads 

So ad:tech has come and gone, and for my first experience at ad:tech is was pretty good.  The first day I spent most of my time connecting with some industry friends in the very cool Affiliate Summit sponsored Beer Garden.  I was surprised how much it looked like the conceptual drawing that Shawn Collins had posted on his blog when he first announced the beer garden.

For those faithful listeners of Affiliate Thing, you’ll be happy to know that there were no snuggies involved.  Unfortunately that first day I didn’t make it to any sessions, but I did take a quick glance at the exhibit hall.  I think this might be the first time I’ve seen two floors of exhibit hall.  Can you tell I’m not an old hat at ad:tech?

That evening I joined some affiliate marketing folks at AT&T Park for a Giants vs. Padres game.  Shawn was quite perturbed that he could not get a signal on his AT&T serviced cell phone at AT&T Park.  I can’t say that I blame him.  There were some great moments in the game, including the closest I’ve ever seen two runners together when rounding the bases.  The Giants won and our seats were pretty good.  Luckily it was a nice balmy night and I didn’t need a jacket, but I did get blisters on my feet walking from Moscone Center to the park in bad dress shoes.  Nonetheless, I have to send a big thanks to Shawn for the game invite!

The second day I was able to attend some sessions, notes from which will appear here next week.  They were hit and miss… I got a lot out of some of them and almost nothing from others, except for some entertainment value.

That evening I had a nice dinner with the folks from eBay, Linda Woods of PartnerCentric, Shawn Collins from Affiliate Summit, Peter Bordes of Media Trust, and a couple folks from Red Anchor Media.  We had a nice discussion on quality in Affiliate Marketing.  I was honored to be invited and had a terrific time.  Any fellow creme brulee fans will be pleased to hear about the lovely Butterscotch variation at Anchor & Hope on Minna in San Francisco!

I didn’t make it over for the 3rd day of ad:tech, but overall it was a good experience and I’m looking forward to attending more in the future and getting some more done once I’m more firmly established with my new clients and with Paulson Management Group.

 Powered by Max Banner Ads 

Well, I think many people attending this session were expecting the topic to be heated, but l’m not sure they were expecting some of the venom that seemed to be in the room.  Speaking for myself, I certainly didn’t.  Originally there was only supposed to be one panelist fielding questions, but since 4 out of 5 working group leaders were in attendance, they were also recruited to speak.  So ultimately the panel consisted of:

• Rebecca Madigan, Performance Marketing Alliance
• Sam Harrelson, Publisher, Cost Per News
• Brook Schaaf, Schaaf Consulting
• Brad Waller, VP Business Development, AdJungle.com
• Peter Bordes, CEO, MediaTrust

Guns were slinging!  Unfortunately there’s not many bullet points to be had, but here you go.

Bullet Point Review!

• PMA is in germination phase – not a real entity yet.
• Why start now?
  • Misinformation & lack of representation.
  • Legislation.
  • Lack of transparency.
  • Maturity of industry.
• Formation process still underway.
  • Interviewed over 60 industry leaders, Formation Advisory Board voted in by 100 peers.
  • Working groups of 45 volunteers.
  • Working groups make recommendations on formation.
  • FAB 11 ratifies formation proposals (click here to see members).
• The working group committees are Scope/Objectives (headed by Sam Harrelson), Governance (Brook Schaaf), Fundraising (Peter Bordes), Membership (Durk Price), and Operations (Brad Waller).

Points (or other observations in this case) brought up during the Q&A

• Right off the bat the questions were hostile.  There’s animosity about the PMA using the NY Tax situation as a launching point for formation despite the fact that they can’t do anything to help.
  • Essentially there’s nothing the PMA can do since they’re NOT a fully formed organization, no matter how much they want to help.
• Rebecca acted as moderator and moved the conversation on after almost 20 minutes of hostile banter.
• The PMA blog as been quiet because the people in working groups have had their heads down working on things without much to report at this point.
• The term “Performance” has been used over “affiliate” because it is more inclusive of the larger base of members within the industry.  Inclusive of a lot more relationships than just the affiliate – merchant relation.
• The PMA has a very similar model as a chamber of commerce but the scope is still being set up.  They are looking at the chamber model in forming things.  Mostly they want to improve visibility & credibility.
• Rebecca was questioned as to why she didn’t attend the meetings in Albany that the NY affiliates had since she’s actually the only paid member.  It was decided that there was no reason because it would have been redundant and she can’t represent an organization that isn’t formed and doesn’t officially exist.
• They were asked why they divorced themselves from ABestWeb after the controversy, to which they responded that they didn’t divorce from it BUT once a particular few threads got ugly and became increasingly unprofessional they just stopped participating in those threads.
• There’s no conspiracy regarding Rebecca’s involvement – Anik Singal of Affiliate Classroom generously donated her salary for a year and she’s just being paid to “corral cats” and help form the organization.  Her comment was that if she weren’t paid for this she’d have bailed long ago based on the assumptions about her involvement and what she’s had to deal with.
• An affiliate asked how they can be assured that the PMA won’t be overtaken by large company sponsorhips and forget the little affiliate?  The affiliate industry is it’s own little ecosystem and the heart of it is the average affiliate.  They’ve been very hypersensitive to the issue to ensure that affiliates are included.

It seems that there’s lots of confusion about the organization – or lack thereof – and hopefully the Q&A has taken things in the right direction.  Perhaps Q&A wasn’t the right moniker.  Maybe Suggestion Session or Feedback Forum might have worked better.  It was disappointing to see one of the most vocal critics of the PMA – ABestWeb founder Haiko de Poel Jr – leave the session half way through in apparently disgust.  I hope that future discussions going forward will be a bit more productive than the session in Boston.

 Powered by Max Banner Ads