The Fight Over Tight Control - Day 3, 10:00 AM EST

[Garrett]

I’m on my way to see Brett Tabke and the guys of Webmasterworld at Webmasterworld’s Publishers Conference VI in Orlando, Florida… but first, I thought I’d swing by and offer you another quick report.

Yesterday, I attended the Performance-Based Marketing session at the DMA/AIM net.marketing conference, where I’ve been reporting live all week.

The session started off with basic information about what performance based marketing meant to the speakers’ individual companies and, to me, it wasn't any more interesting than a sales pitch with no real solid information.

They didn't really talk numbers and statistics but instead made statements such as, "Performance based marketing is a redundant term. If your marketing is not performance based why even bother?"

Wendy Salomon, Vice President, Account Management, LinkShare, said her company looks at affiliate channels as sales channels -- as an asset – because their affiliates are paid only for achieving certain goals.

The Fight Over Tight Control. Things got fairly passionate when a debate was sparked during an open panel session. The debate came down to the concept of control: should you try to really control who your affiliates are and their representation of your brand? Or do you try to get as many affiliates as possible and not concern yourself with brands and adjacencies?

Here are our contestants…

One key player in this debate was Wendy, who believes you should try to get as many affiliates as possible and quoted that only about 20% of affiliates will actually do good business for your company.

Jeffrey Molander, President of Afftrack, got pretty upset over this. Jeffrey believes every business should tightly control the representation of its brand. He brought up adjacencies -- you want to control where your ads are appearing, he says, and if you have thousands of affiliates you have less control.

Wendy would come back and say your key touch point should be the customers who actually buy your product. One great example is Amazon.com, which has (we can only assume) hundreds of thousands of affiliates and therefore no tight control. However, Amazon.com drives home the branding on its site at the place where its customers are actually buying books – and therein lies the key. The Amazon.com branding is so strong that there is no confusion.

As you can probably tell, this debate went round and round. Both sides had strong points and neither side would really concede to the other. When you sit down and think about it there's a good time for each; there are times when you don't need tight control and there are times when it's necessary.

Unfortunately, I didn’t catch a photo of when the speakers were red in the face but it was quite obvious that people were getting defensive and even a little upset.

It was a nice debate – and it brought back a few fond memories of the Search Engine Strategies conference. :-)

So, now that I’ve heard from the experts at this conference, I’m presenting the question to you:

What is more important? Having more affiliates or having control over your company’s branding?

[Shawn Collins]

Hi Garrett -

I agree with Jeff Molander that it's better to have a smaller program, so that you can properly monitor the goings on of the program.

Three big reasons for this:

- Brand Protection
- Fraud Prevention
- CAN-SPAM Liability

As far as Amazon, the last time I checked, they were boasting to have 900,000 affiliates in their FAQ.

I really don't think they can be considered a typical affiliate program, due to their age and size.

Also, I tend to disagree with the comment that "Amazon.com drives home the branding on its site at the place where its customers are actually buying books."

If you look at the creative they supply affiliates, it seems to all have their logo front and center, so they are branding on the affiliate sites, and leaving themselves at risk for a potentially negative presentation of their brand.