The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced that it has held its first meeting of the Re-Imagining Interactive Advertising Task Force, comprised of top online publishers, media agencies and, for the first time, creative officers from the nation’s leading advertising agencies. Their purpose is to examine the current standards and update them, taking into consideration the evolution of online advertising.

“We believe we can make interactive advertising far more hospitable to the craft and practice of persuasion by putting creativity front and center in the development of advertising standards,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “By bringing creative agency leaders into the discussion of the standards, we highlight our industry-wide mission to showcase brands and engaging consumers in meaningful ways.”

The IAB first established a set of standards for interactive advertising in 2002.  These standards have become the golden rule in online advertising, be it traditional CPM or affiliate advertising.  The board includes players from heavy hitters like Cars.com, Disney Interactive Media Group, Google, Platform-A, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo, and Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Also coming out of the IAB today is their Impression Exchange Solution.  This document sheds light on impression data and makes it easy to convert to a single standard that all publishers will recognize.

The document identifies the key functional requirements necessary for the automated exchange of impression data between publishers and third-party ad servers, which will allow publishers and agencies to detect and address discrepancies in near real-time.

Their goal is to minimize discrepancies in online data.  Good luck to the IAB!

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his is the last of my notes, finally!  This panel promised to deliver real live examples from advertisers and publishers who have faced the best practices issues and discovered the resolutions that helped both sides continue a successful working relationship. The panel consisted of:

• Brian Conchuratt, Sr. Sales Manager, Commission Junction (Moderator)
• Matt Earls, Sr. Marketing Manager, Yahoo!
• David M. Lewis, CEO & Founder, Cashbaq
• Kurt Lohse, CEO & Founder, Keycode.com
• Maggie Tucker, Manager of Performance Marketing, Intercontinental Hotels Group

I didn’t get many notes from this session, but it was some good stuff.

Bullet Point Review!

• 2009 is the year of the data feeds.
• CJ is listening to publisher complaints about data feed accuracy and uniformity.
• Threshold of quality needs to be raised on CJ so advertisers can take advantage of IT resources effectively when asking for the creation of data feeds.
• Utilizing data feeds is top priority for the top publishers.
• Advertisers wonder if anyone’s listening?  Always looking for better ways to speak to publishers.
• Understand what your core publishers need.  Give them exactly what they want.
• Lead time is good to make it easy.
• Don’t mark offers urgent if they’re not – publishers need to appropriate their time wisely.
• Understand how your publishers want to communicate, whether it’s IM, email, phone, etc.
• It’s difficult to write one email for all publishers.
• -> Don’t worry about flashy templates, data is the most important aspect.
• -> Segment to different publisher groups and address their needs.
• Keycodes white labels their syndicated content.
• Publishers should tell the advertisers straight out if they develop a new promotional method.
• The higher the trust level, the more aggressive you can be with payouts.
• Look at click-through URLs, conversion rate, cancellation rates.
• -> Not looking for secret recipe, but just a general idea of what the publisher is doing.
• Good publishers are looking to be transparent and will let you know when they’re experimenting.
• Violation of T&Cs us more of an opportunity to start a conversation than to punish.
• Affiliates are direct marketers.
• Run the numbers before you go to publishers with unappealing offers or news to prove it’s necessary.

There was no time for Q&A on this panel, but there are definitely some good take away tidbits.  This concludes all my notes from CJU!  Until next year…

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As the first course of the conference yesterday, I’m sure there was a lot of pressure for this hour and fifteen minutes to really set the tone for the three days of Commission Junction University.  Titled “Affiliate Marketing 101: Back to the Basics”, I attended hoping to maybe pick up some things I didn’t actually know considering I taught a lot of the basics to myself a couple years back.  The speaker was:

• Jeremy Palmer, President, QuitYourDayJob.com

I converse with & follow him on twitter and I’ve heard great things about his last projects The Black Ink Projects and Black Ink 2, although haven’t had a chance to check it out myself.  I won’t know until Thursday if this session really did set the appropriate tone for the conference or not, but it was definitely worth my attendance!

Bullet Point Review!

• Choose Your Niche
  • The niche you choose should be your passion – it’s the easiest foundation to build upon.
  • Know a lot about your niche to be successful.
• Develop a Business Plan
  • Put together a SWOT analysis for you AND your closest competitors – their weaknesses can be your opportunities.
  • Just make it a simple spreadsheet.
  • Have a unique selling proposition.  It’s not enough to just copy someone else, you have to see what they’re doing and how you can do it better.
  • Learn about the customer persona.
  • Inventory your own skills objectively – what can you do yourself and what would you be best served by outsourcing?
• Write Value Added Content
  • Start writing content before you design your site.
  • Content is the key to the site.
  • Have 10-15 pages of content before you launch to improve Quality Score.
• Design Your Site
  • You must have professional tools to create a professional site.
  • Be objective about your experience and consider outsourcing.
  • TOOL: 99Designs for design contests – you only pay for the winner, and you pay much less.
• Develop Your Site
  • Outsourcing programming can be done on Elance or oDesk quite effectively.
  • Be sure to write extremely detailed specifications on what you want the site to do and how it should be done when using outsourced talent.
  • With these services you can escrow your payment so that no money is released until certain milestones are done – and done to your satisfaction.
• Test the Waters with PPC
  • Google hates “rich pages” (also referred to as “thin landing pages”) where the only intent is a conversion.
  • Google recently updated their algorithms and human QC when assigning Quality Scores, so be sure to read up.
  • Essentially Google wants you to develop your own content: they want independent reviews, content not found directly on the merchant’s website, and the comparison of several merchants.
  • Many affiliates have had good success with video reviews because they resonate more with consumers.
  • Remember that Google isn’t the only game in town – test on Yahoo & MSN to discover what works in terms of keywords and ad copy.
• Test & Optimize
  • Look at conversions using keywords.
  • TOOLS: Tracking 202 (free), Prosper 202 (free), Optimize My Site (paid), Google Website Optimizer (free).
  • Pay equal attention to conversion rate and click through rate.
  • Don’t use vague or hype laden copy – it won’t convert well.
  • Split test your landing pages.
• Build a Sustainable Business.
  • Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
  • You want to thrive without Google just in case.
  • Facebook Ads are growing with better ROI.
  • Remember the viral marketing element (what can you do that people will pass on?)
  • You want to be who people will think of when they think of your niche.
  • Create a brand for yourself.
• Random Tips
  • Some books to check out: Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell and The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, & David Weinberger.
  • When doing product comparisons, try throwing in a weaker competitor to enhance the value of the better products.
  • DO NOT use the standard Wordpress template when adding a blog to your site – make sure it looks like the rest of your site.
  • Comparison pages only need to be very simple tables.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Mobile has great opportunities for merchants and advertisers, but it’s hard for affiliates.  People are not (yet) likely to use mobile devices to make purchases.
• Outsourcing content?  Elance is ok but Jeremy expressed some displeasure with what he’s got from that site.  An audience member suggested PR Newswire and searching for keywords to find experts.
  • My own suggestion is to try going to LinkedIn & looking for experts to approach for writing.
• Go where the good designers and writers hang out to find them – when you go to freelancing sites you’re getting the people who might be hard up for work and not that great of results.
• In regards to CJ, pay a lot of attention to the Network Earnings bar.
• Once your site’s Quality Score tanks, you’re done.  You have to start over with a new site because there’s no way to get that back.

Jeremy did an excellent job mixing up the experience level of the information he put forth, knowing instinctively that most people attending wouldn’t quite be at the 101 education level in regards to affiliate marketing.

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