Recap of Lobby Day Against CA AB 178
Yesterday I had the privilege of accompanying 9 of my fellow affiliate marketers to the California State Capitol building in Sacramento to help lobby legislators against the passage of California Assembly Bill 178.
I have to say on a personal level, this was my first trip to the Capitol, and the most involved I’ve ever gotten with politics in general. It was a pleasant experience overall. And yes, I got a little “star struck” for lack of a better term walking by Gov. Schwarzenegger’s office. I had to fight the urge to knock on the door and demand court!
Back to business. 10 of us were able to make it up, some coming from Southern California. We had appointments set for almost all day, so we split into two groups so we wouldn’t run the risk of running late or overcrowding offices. Our group had a few lack luster meetings with staff that really didn’t understand what we were talking about or weren’t really familiar enough with the bill to care yet. But we also had some good meetings with other staff members who were incredibly receptive to our message and offered us a lot of advice regarding how to go about the lobbying that we’re doing. Some even went so far as to call other offices we didn’t already have appointments with and help to make us appointments.
It was equal parts optimistic and pessimistic. While it looks like it’s going to be incredibly difficult to outright kill the bill because of the eagerness of the state to collect any income possible. Focusing on the message that it’s best to keep the bill as broad as possible in the definition keeps it as fair as possible. In a perfect situation the Streamlined Sales Tax Project to require the collection of sales tax across every state would make the playing field as fair as possible, but that’s already been in the works for almost a decade and doesn’t look promising to be enacted any time soon. So in the meantime, we do what we can.
You can still do what you can. Now that we’ve taken meetings at the capitol, feel free next week to take meetings in your district in California. The members will be on vacation and potentially available at their district offices. Staff will not be on vacation and will still be in Sacramento working, so if you weren’t able to join us under such short notice, feel free to schedule your own appointments and talk to the Assembly Members on the committee for Revenue and Taxation. The meetings were generally short, 15-20 minutes of a staff members’ time. We were able to leave behind the letter that Linkshare wrote in opposition along with the opposition letter from the Performance Marketing Alliance, co-signed by over 300 affiliates.
If you’d like copies of these documents for your own leave behinds materials and have the intention of taking a meeting either in the district offices or in Sacramento, please leave a comment and I’ll see how we can get those materials to you. Here’s information on the committee members to reach out to. If you live in their district, all the better (they prefer to hear from constituents whenever possible).
- The Committee for Revenue and Taxation: (916) 319-2098
- Charles M. Calderon (Chair) – Dem. 58th District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0058, Phone (916) 319-2058
- District Office: 13181 N. Crossroads Pkwy, Suite 160, City of Industry, CA 91746, Phone (562) 692-5858
- Chuck DeVore (Vice Chair) – Rep. 70th District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol Room #4102, Sacramento, CA 95814, Phone (916) 319-2070
- District Office: 3 Park Plaza, Suite 275, Irvine, CA 92614, Phone (949) 863-7070
- Jim Beall, Jr. – Dem. 24th District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0024, Phone (916) 319-2024
- District Office: 100 Paseo De San Antonio, Suite 300, San Jose, CA 95113, Phone (408) 282-8920
- Joe Coto – Dem. 23rd District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0023, Phone (916) 319-2023
- District Office: 100 Paseo De San Antonio, Suite 319, San Jose, CA 95113, Phone (408) 277-1220
- Diane L. Harkey – Rep. 73rd District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol Room #4177, Sacramento, CA 95814, Phone (916) 319-2073
- District Office #1: 29122 Rancho Viejo Rd., Suite 111, San Juan Capistrano, CA 92675, Phone (949) 347-7301
- District Office #2: 300 N. Coast Hwy, Oceanside, CA 92054, Phone (760) 757-8084
- Fiona Ma – Dem. 12th District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0012, Phone (916) 319-2012
- District Office: 455 Golden Gate Ave., Suite 14600, San Francisco, CA 94102, Phone (415) 557-2312
- Jim Nielsen – Rep. 2nd District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol Room #6031, Sacramento, CA 95814, Phone (916) 319-2002
- District Office #1: 280 Hemsted Dr., Suite 110, Redding, CA 96002, Phone (530) 223-6300
- District Office #2: 1527 Starr Dr., Suite U, Yuba City, CA 95993, Phone (530) 751-8351
- Anthony J. Portantino – Dem. 44th District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0044, Phone (916) 319-2044
- District Office: 215 N. Marengo Ave, Suite 115, Pasadena, CA 91101, Phone (626) 577-9944
- Lori Saldaña – Dem. 76th District
- Sacramento Office: State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0076, Phone (916) 319 – 2076
- District Office: 1557 Columbia St., San Diego, CA 92101, Phone (619) 645-3090
Cribbed Content for March 6th
I haven’t had the chance to do very many of these during February… the month was filled with birthday celebrations, a vacation, and a lot of Wii in the evening since I’ve been strangely obsessed with Guitar Hero and Animal Crossing: City Folk. But since I’ve been back from vacation I’ve seen some great stuff, so I want to share.
Forgive me, some of it will be a bit out of date.
- Geno Prussakov put together a great list of affiliate marketing events in 2009.
- California is looking into a tax for online sales. Scott Jangro has written an open letter to the California outlining why it’s a bad idea. I am going to take his advice and grab the letter to send myself as a resident of California.
- Read the full California Assembly Bill 178 and contact your representatives to explain why this is a bad idea for affiliate marketers in California!
- 20/20 contacted the Performance Marketing Alliance for some background on affiliate marketing for a series they’re doing on the proliferation of work-at-home schemes. It’s good to see that they’re able to do some positive PR for the industry already… very promising since they’re off to a slow start.
- I wrote another guest post for Marketing Pilgrim, this time on The Search Engine Known as Twitter.
- If you’re at all interested in reading about my rambles about my Caribbean cruise vacation, check out my Posterous blog.
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode 1: Almost a Fail
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
So I’ve returned rejuvenated from my vacation and I’m here to announce that I’ve started a new podcast with Michael Buechele of 11|15 Media called Affiliate Marketing Fanatics. In the podcast, hosted generously by GeekCast.fm, we discuss different tools and aspects of affiliate marketing from both the publisher perspective (Mike) and the affiliate manager perspective (mine).
We recorded our first episode just before I left for vacation and Michael worked on the editing and posting while I was gone… unfortunately as we’re just learning this stuff, there are some strange audio issues and the very end got cut off. We were using Pamela to record over Skype, so if anyone out there has any suggestions to fix them, I’m all ears.
In our first episode we discuss Zemanta, the BAAMC, RingRevenue, the PMA, and Facebook. So please, go check it out and comment and let us know what you think!
Read MoreAffsum Session: Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing
Date: Sunday, January 11th, 2009. Session 3d, 3:00pm.
Session Description: There are two sides to ethical issues in affiliate marketing, and we will entertain audience questions for a panel of industry leaders. The panel consisted of:
- Haiko de Poel Jr., Managing Partner, dp internet services LLC, DBA ABestWeb (Moderator)
- Connie Berg, CEO, FlamingoWorld.com LLC
- Chuck Hamrick, Affiliate Manager, affiliateCREW.com
- Brian Littleton, President/CEO, ShareASale.com
- Alex Butin, Rakuten Rewards (Alex stood in for Paul Nichols from Ebates, who had to bow out last minute)
With Alex on the panel and the latest big issue facing affiliate ethics being toolbars overwriting affiliate cookies, I think that swayed the tide of the questions asked by both Haiko as moderator and Q&A portion. I would have liked to hear more questions asked by audience members, but admittedly, I didn’t have any to ask myself since I’m still learning about all the different issues that eat at the ethics of the industry.
Bullet Point Review!
- Haiko made a good analogy to Las Vegas and asked: is the soul of the industry gone?
- Online marketing is becoming the default medium for high ROI.
- From your unique vantage point, where do you draw the line?
- Chuck, as an OPM, said: Knowingly doing something that’s unethical. Working with adware and parasites knowing that’s wrong. Allowing PPC tactics you know affect other department’s performance. Being an affiliate of your own program. Playing favorites.
- Connie, as a coupon affiliate, said: Coupon sites that have a toolbar that overwrites other cookies. Auto load cookies. Social media apps. Networks owning competing affiliate sites. As new technology comes out there are new ways to cheat.
- Alex, as a technology provider, said: Be clear with your motives, evolve your business models. It’s up to merchants to decide what’s unethical, as a company they don’t want to create a tool that doesn’t do exactly what it says it does, so they’re not interested in shady features that aren’t advertised.
- Brian, as a network, said: They see “interference” to tracking as a problem period, and since parasites, toolbars, etc. interfere with tracking, they’re out. They’ve also seen a total disregard for other company’s policies (affiliates breaking Google rules was his example) and they have no interest working with those people. Don’t turn the other cheek to practices you know are unethical.
- There’s a whole movement of squeaky clean networks and businesses.
- We need to take charge because the networks won’t.
- People are pushing the term “affiliate” under the rug and re-branding as “performance” marketing. Performance is all inclusive and too broad to represent affiliates.
- Network compliance teams are a joke.
- The industry needs more disclosure and transparency, not division and separation that some organizations are actually providing (seemed to hint at the PMA).
Points brought up during the Q&A
One question asker made the statement that “cookies are dead”, referencing the new browser technology recently coming out that has been blocking affiliate ad displays and blocking cookies. Brian respectfully disagreed with the statement that cookies are dead, but said his network is looking at ways to track without cookies, but couldn’t get into specifics for obvious reasons. Other panelists agreed that the cookie issue isn’t too big yet.- Brook Schaaf asked about the negative thoughts associated with coupon sites, and Connie and the other panelists agreed that “one bad apple spoils the bunch”, so to speak. There are shady coupon sites running toolbars that overwrite cookies, stealing non-affiliate coupon codes from the merchant’s website, and stealing exclusive codes from other affiliates that have given legitimate coupon sites a bad name.
Based solely on the description of this session, I was hoping for more of a discussion, but despite the room being packed, the panel was over 20 minutes early with just two questions asked. I’m glad that it seems they took the feedback from Boston and toned the emotion of the session down a bit, and I hope to see further discussion at future Summits, or perhaps even a jam session type event to just address ethics. It seems like a discussion bigger than an hour long panel can accommodate.
There’s also a recap from Michael Buechele’s point of view on the Affiliate Summit Blog: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session Recap – Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing. Check out a different perspective.
Read MoreDays 2 and 3 of Affiliate Summit East 2008
Well, while I’d intended to recap each day… that didn’t exactly happen as you can tell. I do intend to post the notes I took from the sessions and the impressions to help everyone learn the great stuff I learned. Some of the more hot button sessions can’t be covered in mere bullet points, so it will take me a day or so longer to get my thoughts together for those.
I covered Saturday & Sunday (mostly… the ShareASale party was nice although I didn’t stay long), so let’s jump right into Monday & Tuesday, the busiest days of the conference.
Day 2 – Divide & Conquer
- In many ways this is the day that the summit starts. In the past the breakout sessions have only been on Monday & Tuesday, however this year they were extended to Sunday. Regardless, the keynote was given on Monday by Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker. If you didn’t want to jump up ready to go, you didn’t listen to what Mayor Booker had to say. It was a great speech, and I already posted my thoughts about it.
- The blogger’s lounge helped save my sanity. It was nice to be able to go in there in the 30 minute breaks between sessions & chat with people and do a little bit of work. Had the wifi worked out better for me (not sure if it was my ancient laptop or the actual connection that was the issue) I would have been able to get more posts up during the actual conference. I hope to have a better laptop by the next show I go to so I can just live blog it!
- Of the 3 sessions I attended, the best was Content That Kills. It was informative, had great tips and information, and there were good questions asked by the audience. I may be biased being a writer by heart, but it was good stuff.
- The other sessions I attended that day were the Performance Marketing Alliance Q&A, which turned more into a witch hunt filled with personal issues unfortunately, and How is Social Media Changing Affiliate Marketing, which apparently it isn’t because that question was never really answered. More on those in their own posts.
- The Great Affiliate Road Rally was a slaughterhouse win! With just three cars in it this time, the first place car took off like a shot and left the others in their dust! Congrats to them & to the others? Well remember the entry fee went to charity & you won’t feel so bad 🙂
- Monday night I had dinner with a lovely group of new friends & colleagues and then headed over to the LinkShare event at Tia’s. The event was a whole new group of people to talk to and had a great time talking some shop and reminiscing over Police Academy flicks with Wil Reynolds & Jim Kukral.
- Oh no, that wasn’t the end! After that we headed back to the hotel where we shut down the bar there and moved across the street to a small bar by the water & had a great time chatting with people and generally schmoozing before rolling into bed.
Day 3 – Epic Games
- It was a matter of sleep vs. sessions I wasn’t overly excited about attending, so I missed the Ask the Experts table discussions & The Future of Affiliate Marketing to sleep in & get refreshed for the Copywriting Clinic, which I very much wanted to attend. I hear I didn’t miss much.
- Speaking of the Copywriting Clinic, Lisa Riolo did an excellent job moderating and the panelists were excellent. I took 3 full pages of notes on this session, so you’re in for a huge post later on!
- The Ethical Issues in Affiliate Marketing session turned into the biggest fail session of the conference for me. The moderator Haiko de Poel Jr was doing a pretty bad job… usually when you’re the moderator of a panel of “experts” your job is to pass questions to the best suited panel member, not challenge the question back to the audience member who asked it. I have much more to say, so I’ll save it for later.
- The un-keynote was very relaxed and I actually got up & talked…which was big for me knowing that it was being video taped! I just hope when I look back at it that I don’t look like a fool lol.
- Luckily I was able to attend the Red Sox vs. Rangers game at Fenway with some fellow baseball loving conference attendees. Being a moderate baseball fan I was really thrilled to be there & the game was crazy! The Red Sox almost blew a 10-0 lead in the 1st but came back in the last inning to tie it up and then ultimately overtake the Rangers with an epic score of 17-19 Red Sox. We only spent a few innings in the stands before the rain started, but I got some great pictures and we continued watching the game from inside near the concessions so it wasn’t a waste.
- More bar shenanigans, then some piano playing until late kept me up long enough to decide not to go to bed before my early flight out of town. Overall what a great end to a great conference.
Final Thought – Springer Style
Overall I had the best time at this conference – not just because it was fun and I met a lot of terrific people who I’ve had the chance to get to know online and now have had the opportunity to meet in person – but because I just learned so much that I “get it” now. I remember back in February going to the Affiliate Summit West and having a conversation with my husband that I was actually starting to understand more and more about the industry and that I really felt like this was an industry I could get excited about.
And I have… and this reinforced so much for me how much I really like this industry! I’m back to the “real world” here and ready to conquer it!
Read MoreCribbed Content for July 4th
Happy Independence Day! You should be out enjoying a parade, a nice BBQ, or some spectacular fireworks! I’ll forgive you if you’ve chosen to give my innocent blog a quick view amidst all the celebration though ;).
- A few months ago, Google officially acquired DoubleClick Performics, an affiliate network. This week they’ve rebranded as Google Affiliate Network. Shawn Collins wrote up his perspective on this – definitely seems to be a step in the right direction for the reputation of affiliate marketing.
- Last week I mentioned an irresponsible attack on the PMA by Shoemoney. Swift to clear up any confusion, the team posted What Exactly Is Affiliate Classroom’s Role in the PMA?
That’s it! Go forth and have fun this 4th!
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