Affiliate Association

[iaber]

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Hi Bob



Thanks for the welcome



I completely agree with you. The affiliate marketing council doesn’t match the scale of the proposal of an affiliate association as set out in the previous posts, however this is not primarily what the IAB was established to do.



The point I want to make is that the IAB has an affiliate marketing council in place, and through this council we aim to help and educate advertisers (in this case merchants – I’m not differentiating between the two), and it’s important to make the council representative of the affiliate industry - which includes having affiliates on the council.



With over 350 member companies with wildly different sectors and agendas we ask our members to keep us up to speed with what’s going on in their industry so that we can hopefully bring their passions, ideas and expertise together and channel these to advertisers. This will enable them to better understand the online world themselves and the importance of online marketing.



I’ll accept Kirsty’s challenge and I’ll add it to the council’s next agenda – however I’d also like to extend an invite to you to attend the next meeting so that you may propose this yourself?



Please let me know if you’d like to attend, I look forward to hearing from you.



Cheers



Dan

[Dr Foster]

The following is taken from the home page of the IAB’s website “we work with our members to ensure marketers can easily identify the best role for online and help them engage their customers and build their brands”

The Affiliate Marketing Council is predominantly made up of organisations and individuals who have invested time and energy into what is essentially, an IAB organised discussion group. The group gained some momentum at the beginning of the year when we realised that through the IAB, we were being given the opportunity to; A) ensure that affiliate marketing is recognised as an important and mature online marketing discipline and B) to steer the IAB over the best advice to give it’s merchant members

The Affiliate Marketing Council has an objective ‘to put affiliate at the heart of online marketing.’ An excellent goal and the council is indebted to Steve Brown for first suggesting it. This year I have the pleasure of chairing the council and I recognise the fact that we can only work towards this objective when the participants are both passionate and committed. The last meeting, centred on a set of best practice guidelines for Networks, was full of passionate and committed contributions especially from Trade Doubler, Commission Junction, Affilinet and Affiliate Window to name but a few. The result, a really good first draft with over 10 points for us to debate further next time we meet. Once finalised the IAB’s merchant members will have a new parameter to help them choose which network to work with, but this particular parameter comes with the endorsement of the IAB, an established and highly credible organisation. For our industry to be seen as established and highly credible we need these sorts of initiatives to come to fruition.

Done well, an Affiliate Association would offer affiliates security, create a focus on affiliate specific issues and ensure that some industry wide problems were fully addressed. I sincerely doubt the IAB could ever achieve this as effectively as an association. Sadly, as Drivetowin has found in the past, it can be really hard to get these ideas off the ground, mainly because not enough people get involved early on and then get disappointed that they haven’t had their say. Please, please, please remember it is never too late to get involved! If an associate is formed then be ready to be part of it.

Back to the Affiliate Marketing Council, it has taken many failed attempts to get this far. What we now have with the IAB is an opportunity. We (you, me, everyone) should get behind these opportunities if we want to see Affiliate Marketing given the credibility it so richly deserves.

David Hall