Lately there has been much talk about how affiliate marketing fits into the overall advertising and marketing industry. There has also been an increased effort to bring major brand advertisers into the space and how to best introduce more key advertisers to the opportunities (and profits) we can provide as affiliates.
It has been suggested that we have outgrown the simple term affiliate and should now call ourselves performance marketers.
Overall, this makes sense. Few people I encounter offline understand anything about what it is that we do. So I conducted a small experiment. While I was meeting with a few people at a local business networking event, I described my company as a performance marketing company. Someone (thankfully) asked, “What’s that”? So I gave the following explanation:
“Performance marketing is where advertisers, working through an agency, place creatives with publishers who accept payment (generally via a neutral tracking network) as a result of consumer action on the advertising instead of an arbitrary payment based on possible reader/viewership”.
The reaction was quite interesting in that everyone in the small group instantly understood the model. The similarities to traditional marketing and advertising channels made sense to them.
They were able to associate their existing knowledge and experience with their own business advertising with what it is that we do without me having to give a larger explanation of affiliate marketing.
Then I added that 90% of what my performance marketing company does is online. I ended up making a couple referrals to friends in our industry that day; businesses that understood what we do and needed to explore creating an affiliate program for their companies.
That experiment in self definition occurred a couple months ago when several affiliate tax issues were front and center. This got me thinking about how our self definition as affiliates has been hurting us.
TV stations regularly air infomercials during the weekend nights on a performance basis. So do radio, cable, and sometimes even newspapers will do a hybrid deal (fixed fee plus a performance “commission” for coupons).
And why were those performance marketers “left out” of the affiliate tax law proposals? And what would happen if we describe our industry structure in the terms of the rest of the advertising and marketing industry?
It seems to me (and I am not a lawyer) that by reclassifying ourselves as performance marketers and describing our structure like the rest of the advertising and marketing community, that if and when affiliate tax legislation is being debated it would be more difficult to separate us from the larger performance marketing industry.
This would mean that online, TV, cable, radio, and print media would be affected along with us and that we can stand united to fight unfair and burdensome taxation.
We’re all performance marketers. Whether a performance marketing affiliate, performance marketing network, performance marketing agency, etc. It’s time to redefine ourselves as performance marketers to help others understand our businesses, create larger opportunities with brand advertisers, and to help mitigate being separated, targeted, and taxed unfairly.
Scott Medlock is the Administrator of the AffSpot Affiliate Forum and Blog
Download the entire FeedFront issue 11 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/29057000/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-11
FeedFront issue 11 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2010/07
