a4u Blog

buy.at, the UK’s largest independent affiliate network, is planning to open its first international office. From a base in downtown New York, buy.at aims to grow its affiliate network across America to offer industry leading technologies, marketing skills and strategic relationship building to US-based merchants (advertisers) and their agencies and affiliates (publishers).

Malcolm Cowley, formerly Director, Strategic Accounts of buy.at in the UK, is to become General Manager of the US office. He will recruit staff to manage relationships with merchants, agencies and affiliates and grow the business. buy.at will retain its ethical open network approach and will replicate its model to work with media agencies in the US as well as directly with brand managers.

Kevin Cornils CEO of buy.at explains, ‘The US affiliate market is large and is dominated by a small number of networks which have not been forced to innovate at the same rate as European networks leaving merchants and affiliates underserviced. Several of our key staff have US and international experience and have worked in various marketing disciplines with US businesses.’

Cornils continues, ‘One of the founders of the network in the UK five years ago, Malcolm Cowley has an excellent understanding of the business and is already an international ambassador for the affiliate marketing industry.’

Malcolm Cowley, General Manager buy.at US adds, ‘We have researched the US market in detail and begun to establish relationships with affiliates, merchants and agencies. American advertisers can profit from our original technology and experience in managing affiliates across a wide range of industries including leading international brands such as T-mobile, MBNA, Virgin and Capital One.’

Technical innovations, such as buy.at’s Content Engine which pushes a dynamic product feed into specified content units on affiliate websites, desktop widgets, and a management area that integrates with third party tracking solutions to provide campaign analytics including integrated web services, will be rolled out in the US.
buy.at has experienced solid growth in the past six months with new clients wins including Match.com, Hillarys and Dial-a-Phone and was presented with an award for ‘Best Affiliate Advertising’ in April, 2007. The network has made a raft of senior hires including Louise Green, who left her position as MD of the OMG network to join buy.at, and former Director, UK, Ireland and Benelux at Google, Kate Burns. In September, 2007, buy.at was revealed as the UK’s fastest growing online marketing company in the Sunday Times TechTrack.

The international expansion follows research into the UK market which identified that 78 per cent of UK merchants have increased their spend on affiliate marketing over the past two years and 95 per cent consider the channel to be cost effective.