Barclaycard Links

20-04-03

Just adding some ads to one of my sites and I decided it might be worth promoting the Premiership Barclaycard, specially as they have a 0% offer for people buying season tickets, which should go down well at this time of the year.

So I looked at the Barclaycard links and there are none at all available to promote the Premiership card. In fact most of their links are very dull, their text links are almost useless due to their rules about only using the adverts they provide, with nothing added or taken away.

Some of their text links are unusable. For example one just says "FREE price promise", another says "FREE purchase cover". No mention of the fact that it's a link to Barclaycard. Are we supposed to put these links on our site and hope that someone clicks on them out of curiosity?

If merchants are going to have such strict rules they should at least provide a decent range of links to use, but at the moment anyone wanting to promote Barclaycard has to make do with second rate creative.

I've emailed Barclaycard with a suggestion about a text link to promote their Premiership card, so hopefully I'll be able to promote it on my football sites soon.

I have one football site that's registered as an incentive site, and after initially turning me down Barclaycard accepted me after I told them what a good fit the Permiership card would be for the site. So maybe that counts as permission to make my own links for the Premiership card!

Has anyone else contacted them regarding the problems promoting them using their current ads, and what has their response been?

20-04-03

I just make my own links

20-04-03

You should be very careful making your own links - the rules concerning credit advertising are governed by the Consumer Credit Act and are very strict. The rules are enforced by Trading Standards and if you fall foul you could find both you and Barclaycard being fined - not good news for you and I don't think Barclaycard would be too happy either.

It is because the rules are so strict that all of the credit companies insist you stick to their wording - I used to work in the credit industry and you would not believe how long it used to take the legal eagles to approve every new ad we used...

20-04-03

I'm tempted to make my own links too, but they made everyone agree to new terms and conditions that specifically state we're not allowed to do this.

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> 3. Advertiser only permits Publishers registered to its program to utilise the online adverts (banners, skyscraper, buttons, text-links) that are available via the CJ interface to market Advertiser via the Publisher's own website(s).

4. Advertiser does not permit Publishers to alter the look or content of these adverts from those which are available through the CJ interface. [/quote]

28-04-03

From my experience they won't fine you. If they find out (which is unlikely to say the least), they will likely drop you or tell you to change your links. Of course if you are earning thousands with them you might not want to take the risk.