Ad:Tech Affiliate Marketing Panel Recap

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This past Monday, I joined Ryan Erwin (Oakley) and Carolyn Tang (CheapTickets, Orbitz) for an affiliate marketing panel at Ad:Tech. The panel, expertly moderated by Peter Figueredo (NETexponent), was billed as an overview of “best practices in establishing, growing, optimizing, and policing affiliate programs.”

It was a good discussion, as Ryan, Carolyn, and myself provided our divergent rationales for doing what we do with the programs we manage.

According to Jeff Molander’s second hand reporting of the event, “The same-old debates and issues seem to be discussed… (and he) didn’t miss much.”

Certainly, there are some cornerstone issues, such as recruiting methods, inhouse vs. outsourced management, etc that were covered, but there was a lot of meat in the talks.

Not only were fresh Jupiter and AffStat data points used to frame the issues, but the topics were approached from widely varying angles. Personally, I think the session was rather instructive, and the large crowd that stayed beyond the end time seemed to concur.

Brad Waller wrote a pretty comprehensive recap on the panel for the official Ad:Tech Blog.

Brad touched on our debates of affiliate program size (boutique vs. behemoth), ppc trademark bidding, and more. All items that companies in attendance are facing - the sorts of contempory issues that haven’t found solutions at most companies.

At the conclusion of the session, as the woman from Ad:Tech was waving frantically for us to wind it up, we all gave our two cents on the future of affiliate marketing.

I mentioned how I thought RSS would play a prominant role in the future - where affiliates would leverage the technology to serve up contextually relevant ads.

Lo and behold, CNET reported the next day, “This week, Google spawned a version of AdSense that allows publishers to send a text or banner advertisement alongside syndicated content using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Atom, Google’s adopted format.”

It reminds me of my undergrad days at the University of Maryland at College Park, when Sergey Brin used to borrow my notes. Just kidding, fellow Terp.