Request to OMG

[gunneradt]

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When I have been cancelled or suspended from a particular merchant pls ensure that the LINK DOES NOT WORK FROM THE SECOND I AM CANCELLED. Please make this change immediately - I am fed up with merchants benefiting when they do one of their culls.

[lauriebred]

I would prefer it if there was a minimum notice period, say a month or a fortnight at least, written into all merchant contracts; the only get-out clause being failure of affiliates to keep to their side of the contract. I have a list of merchants that will never appear again on any site that I control and another list of merchants I will never lift a finger to promote although I may carry their ads if it suits me to, and in every case my attitude has been caused by the fact that some merchants behave like 19th Century mill owners, picking up and dropping affiliates as they see fit.

The sad fact is that the affiliate marketing managers of many companies know a bit about affiliates, or a bit about marketing, but very rarely both.

[gunneradt]

I agree

but I just want links switched off after cancellatio - I do not want the merchant to have the traffic

[OMG Network]

Hi gunneradt and Lauriebred

Thanks for your postings.

We endeavour to give affiliates as much notice as possible whenever a campaign is closing or an affiliate is removed from a campaign.

If a programme is closing we endeavour to give one month’s notice and if an affiliate is removed from a campaign then we aim to give at least a week’s notice. In some cases this is not always possible, however we will always advise the affected affiliates in writing at least 24 hours beforehand.

We do not disable creative, as if we did this it may cause errors on the page loading. The banners will still show on your site, however the tracking URL will be disabled, which means if a user clicks on the link an error page would load and OMG cannot benefit.

I trust that this answers your queries.

Kind Regards,

Jennifer Smith | Service Delivery Team Supervisor

[lauriebred]

Thanks Jennifer, I have no problem myself with your policy on disabling creative, my own grouse is with merchants that cancel campaigns or throw away affiliates without any notice whatsoever and this is by no means confined to clients of OMG. A number of networks have allowed this to happen over the last few years and it is bad news for everybody; the affiliate loses out on any work which has been done to promote that merchant, the network gets blamed (unfairly perhaps) by affiliates so loses goodwill and possibly affiliates as well, whilst the merchant quite deservedly attracts the contempt and boycott of those of us who still manage to make our livings in this business despite the antics of their (quite possibly) over-promoted and under-experienced personnel. Perhaps it is the right time for a trades body to emerge to represent the rights of affiliates in matters like this - unlikely I think, given the independent nature of self employed people such as we , although not impossible - but in the meanwhile it would be good to see a network taking more of a stand against a practice which, if carried out against employed rather than self employed people, would result in quite massive sanctions by industrial tribunals. It would be good to see OMG, which is in my opinion amongst the most professionally run of all the networks, taking a lead in this matter by making it contractually impossible for their merchants to act in this way.