Tuesday January 19th

The final day of Affiliate Summit started bright and early with the Pinnacle Awards scheduled before the last day’s keynote by Brian Clark.  This was a change for the conference agenda, which usually puts the Pinnacle Awards in the afternoon after other sessions.  I like the change because it gets the awards out of the way, and didn’t interfere with any other sessions or independent parties planned in the evening.  I seem to remember last year that some of the award winners had to jet quickly after the awards to get to a charity poker tournament, among other places.

The winners have been blogged all over, but here’s a quick recap just in case this is the only blog you read (unlikely): Affiliate of the Year – Nicholas Koscianski.  Affiliate Manager of the Year – Matt McWilliams.  Exceptional Merchant – eBay Partner Network.  Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Angel Djambazov.  Best Bloggger – Jeremy Schoemaker.  Affiliate Marketing Legend – Scott Jangro.

Next up was Brian Clark’s keynote.  He admitted at the beginning that it was his first keynote, so I guess he did pretty well all things considered.  Of course, I have a whole post devoted to the keynote that I’ll go into later.

Once again, I intended to go into more sessions on Tuesday, but got sidetracked with all the networking possibilities.  As well, I was given a demo of a new affiliate network of sorts, Impact Radius.  It gives merchants and affiliates a way to also reach out and work with more traditional media partners.  I had an opportunity to interview one of the founders, Lisa Riolo, about the launch of the new network, which will also be another blog post coming up soon.

I made it a point to get to Jim Kukral’s session How To Get Motivated For Success!, which I’ll of course be posting a recap for.  It was a great kick in the pants to get going with projects that have been stalled for awhile.  I know Eric Nagel wrote an entire post about Jim’s kick in the ass.

While in Jim’s session, I heard via Twitter that Daniel M. Clark of Geek Dads Weekly was invited to speak on the GeekCast.fm Live panel.  I was bummed since I wanted to participate with that panel/group like I did at Affiliate Summit East 2009, but happy for Daniel.  I went into the session for a moment, but left in favor of running back up to my room for a few things.  As I understand, the session was some industry talk followed up with a lot of “how to podcast” type questions, so it looks like I personally didn’t miss much information that I didn’t already know.

The evening ended with a fail on the part of the Rio.  A BlogUp mixer was planned at the VooDoo Lounge, which was official and everything, not just 100 people crashing the lounge for a mixer.  Unfortunately, it was raining and since the lounge has an indoor and an outdoor area, the lounge ended up double booked with another much larger group of people.  So we tried cramming into the bar at the steakhouse for awhile, overwhelming the poor bartender on duty.  Finally, the Rio moved the charade down to the iBar and served complimentary champagne as a mea culpa.

I stayed for awhile, the  it was on to another Las Vegas tradition – the buffet!  A large group of us went to the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio, one of my favorite buffets ever.  Then again, I haven’t been to many.  It was good times and good food with good people – one of my favorite activities!  After dinner, I went and hung out with Heather Smith & Julie Vazquez, who were still at the iBar.  Had a very pleasant last night of Affiliate Summit West 2010!

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Session Description: Product datafeeds are among the most powerful tools available to affiliate marketers. We’ll discuss the current state of datafeeds and industry progress, best practices, and moving toward standards. The panel consisted of:

• Scott Jangro, President, Mech Media Inc. (Moderator)
• Larry Adams, Product Manager, Google
• Shergul Arshad, VP Business & Corporate Development, StyleFeeder, Inc.
• Brian Smith, CEO & Founder, SingleFeed

The panel was really well organized.  Scott asked questions and then each panelist answered.  I did my best to note the questions Scott asked and who each answer came from.

Bullet Point Review!

• Have you seen innovation in datafeeds?
  • Larry: Haven’t seen a lot of innovation on the advertiser side, but have seen innovation from publishers.  Deriving interesting information from feeds to actually provide some value.  Taking this huge library & simplifying it.  GAN is trying to figure out how to make the data more accessible & easier to consume.  Easier for the publisher to get what they want out of it.  The networks’ role is to be a facilitator.  They push advertisers to get highest quality data and make sure as many publishers who want the data can access it.
  • Shergul: 30% of the datafeeds they work with are truly excellent, 40% just acceptable, and the rest they have to mess with.  30% aren’t in the right format, and not just smaller programs but some are from big retailers.  They’re on a campaign to try to help improve this and they reach out to the merchants.  Sometimes merchants need to be shown what they’re missing by not providing accurate data.  It’s easier for people to take advantage of open source tools to innovate so more people want to access datafeeds to automate sites.  It’s hard to envision a one-size-fits-all datafeed.
  • Brian: Not much has changed, but in the last 18 months datafeeds have become more complex.  More attributes are being asked for from the merchants.  That’s a good, positive sign.  It does kind of screw things up for merchants trying to format new feeds in different formats.  Merchants are starting to recognize datafeeds are great, and they’re looking for the next great channel.  NOw they’re being forced to deal with datafeeds.
• There’s been more development of product APIs instead of downloading text files.  Is API going to take over datafeeds?
  • Shergul: API are more accessible when you’re pulling in fewer feeds.  Using thousands of datafeeds just isn’t scalable.  There’s a place for coexisting, but in general for speed and size constraints, they can’t shift towards APIs.
  • Brian: Some publishers don’t know how to use APIs, so it’s going to take awhile for publishers to move over there and mostly they’ll coexist for awhile.
  • Larry: The nice thing about an API is the data is fresher.  GAN integrated with Google Base because they have a nice API.  Working to provide more keyword targeted ads.
  • Scott: Data has never been more accessibly and most networks now offer free access.
• If someone is just starting out, how should they start?
  • Larry: Start small.  Deal with usefullness before scale.  Find out who has the best feeds and start easy.  Figure out how you’re going to use them & then you can figure out ways to imprve the bad data or ignore it until the advertiser provices high quality fdata.  Literally tens of millions of products are available to you.  You don’t need every single product on your site to have a good user experience.  There’s a fine line between copying and searching for inspiration.  Don’t do what your competitors are doing – but shop there and find what you like and dislike in the shoes of a consumer and improve upon that.
  • Shergul: It depends on what your site does.  It’s manageable to access the “right” 20 datafeeds to be comprehensive in your vertical.  Too man products can get too big and too overwhelming too quickly.
  • Brian: Go after high quality.  You might as well start with APIs and they have a wealth of information you can access.  Make some calls & learn more about them.  Start from there.  Look at the big guys pushing great data – Amazon, eBay, Shopping.com.
• What are the major hurdles in getting “good datafeeds” to a higher number?
  • Larry: That’s more of a merchant problem than a network issue.
  • Brian: The networks need to sell datafeeds better.  Case studies will work.
• Is there hope for standardization?  Can we?  What does it really mean?
  • Larry: The first thing that comes to mind is categories.  Building a common taxonomy that works for millions of products and thousands of merchants.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Shergul: Positive examples of great datafeeds and data quality: Nordstrom, Shoe Buy, Target, CSN Stores.
• Larry: It can seem like a daunting task to improve a feed, but start small with one category to see if there’s a payoff on the work you’ve put in.  Then you can more easily convince your boss it’s worth the time.
• If you have duplicate products, would you suggest changing the descriptions to avoid dupe content?
  • Use your own analytics to pick the best product and dump the other one; there are enough products that you don’t need to worry about using both.

I hope I got comprehensive notes.  I was trying my best to pay very close attention, but I have to admit that I got lost in some parts.  By nature, it’s a dry subject, and though the presenters were doing their best to keep it lively, that early of a time slot might have not been the best. Here’s the presentation:

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Monday January 18th

Day 2 of Affiliate Summit for me started off a bit rocky.  I was far from hung over, but I awoke with the familiar feeling of an impending migraine.  I decided that, despite the morning keynote by Dr. Robert Cialdini not being recorded, I’d have to skip it in favor of some more quiet time before the storm to dispel the headache on the horizon.  Luckily it worked and I went down just at the end of the keynote to catch up with some folks to get the cliff’s notes version of the keynote and to find my first morning appointment.  Luckily, the staff were handing out little cheat sheet cards with the main bullet points from the keynote, which I got and took note of.

I mentioned I had a meeting.  I learned a valuable lesson at this conference – don’t just research what the person you’re meeting with does, research what they look like!  We’d decided to meet in outside the theater after the keynote, and man was that a bad idea.  A sea of unfamiliar faces and I have no idea what this guy looks like!  I hang around for about 15 minutes, trying to find someone who looks like they’re also looking for someone, to no avail.  I check my watch and decide that I have to move on in order to get to the session I wanted to go to.  So now I know that next time I have to meet with someone, I’m either going to meet them somewhere not so busy or snoop on their Facebook profile to see what they look like!

My first session of the day was Product Datafeeds: The Next Level, which by nature was dry, but sill interesting.  Scott Jangro did a great job as moderator and I did my best as a student.  I figured that I know the basics about datafeeds, but moving on in my career to a company that provides a coupon feed, I better learn more!  A full review of that will come later today.

After lunch, I did some time working in the For Me to Coupon booth in the expo hall.  I’m glad that I did some homework about the basics of the company before standing in the booth, because we certainly didn’t have a whole lot of downtime to chit chat.  People were coming by nonstop asking questions about the service, which is awesome.  I was put to the test many times on my knowledge, and thankfully only had to defer to Forrest & Nate a few times for questions I had no clue about.  But it was also a great opportunity to learn more nitty gritty stuff about the service when more technical affiliates stopped by with really detailed developer questions.  A great introduction to my new job!

I ducked away from the booth for some rejuvenation time in the blogger lounge, then on to the Oprah, Flogs and FTC: Hot Topics 2010 session.  It was interesting, but frustrated me that the presenter went through a LOT of good information in his presentation much too fast.  I’m incredibly happy though that the presentation has been uploaded to SlideShare, so when I post my recap of that, it’ll have the presentation link!

Before the activity for the evening I had a lovely few drinks with Heather Smith, Julie Vazquez, Lori Herren, & Joe Vaughn from Izea.  After playing with the Microsoft Surface table in the iBar, we moved our operation over to the All American Bar & Grill for the 20 cent chicken wings!  It’s the Rio’s 20th anniversary, so they had all sorts of deals like that.  About 60 wings, a basket of fries, and a few sodas all came in under $30!  I learned a TON more about Izea and their products sitting with two insiders and Joe, a sales manager from Izea.

After dinner, it was time for our evening activity, one of my favorite activities hands down anywhere – TRIVIAL PURSUIT!  They set up the Wii  on a large screen and popped in the game.  I was happily chosen 3rd or 4th for Team Missy Ward and we proceeded to kick ass.  Of course, another team came from behind in an upset win, but it was a TON of fun playing the game.  I know this is a game I’ll have to get for my wii.  It was good times, and everyone who played & stuck around until the end was generously given a complimentary Gold Pass for Affiliate Summit East 2010, which we’ll be using to bring Dominic along! 

For a normal, sane person, trivia’s end at midnight would have been the end of the evening, but oh no.  Now it was time to wander over to McFadden’s Restaurant & Saloon for a party once again thrown by the folks at GTO Management in conjunction with MakeBeer.net.  Coopers Brew makes some fine beer and their affiliate program is for the home brew kits that they sell, which are handy for the home brewer.  It was  a great time with displays of male competition and a punching bag game.  A few heads hit it and then headed off to another club, but I was done for the night around 2am so I headed back to the room to get some sleep before my early meeting!

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