The Firebox Affiliate Blog

My predictions for 2009

Everyone is doing prediction lists at the moment, so I thought I'd join in. Here is my list, its a mixture of predictions about affiliate marketing, internet marketing and general trends in product buying. Will be interesting to see which of these come true!

Video
Online videos were big news in 2008 and this will continue. At least one network will launch a fully-functional video serving system with affiliate tracking integrated, to build on the merchant solutions currently out there such as our own Affiliate Video Player.

Affiliate Programmes closing
Sadly this is definately going to be a theme of 2009. Retailers will either bring their affiliate programmes in-house to try and cut costs, or they will close them completely, normally because they've gone bust. Warning signs on an affiliate programme include creative not updated, sales not being validated and commission rates being cut (although sometimes a big increase in commissions can indicate a certain desperation for sales at any cost that doesn't bode well). On the remaining affiliate programmes commission levels and cookie lengths will be tinkered with to get maximum ROI.

Retro
Nostalgia will be a big trend in 2009, with people wanting to recapture past glories and look back to slightly happier times. Retro prodcucts will continue to sell well. We may even start to see some 90s products coming through, as we move towards the end of this decade. Possibly due for a revival are Pogs, Trolls, Tiddlywinks, Ghostbusters (a new film is rumoured), Care Bears and Sea Monkeys.

Simplicity
This is a trend already being seen in consumer technology- the move away from complex gadgets to simple stuff. Following on from the iPhone there's definately a market for a simpler easy to use mass-market mobile phone that just works. The key is making it cool- look at the Flip digital video camera and ASUS Eee laptops. Overall people will want to invest in products that work and last- we'll see less throw-away gadgets becoming popular this year.

Product Reporting
Affiliates now not only want to know that they've made a sale, but what they've actually sold. Product reporting will be adopted by more of the major networks, in addition to the click tracking already available.

Transparency
This will be the big buzzword for 2009 across all digital marketing, but particularly with affiliates. Merchants are demanding greater knowledge about what affiliates are actually doing, and the clever ones will use this to maximise revenue from the channel, tailoring campaigns to what works.

Its going to be an interesting year!

Another reason to go to A4Uexpo

As if you needed another reason to buy your ticket for A4U expo in October, they've just released a new lot of speakers, and guess who's on there...Speaker List.

Yep, that's right, if you attend this year you will get the benefit of a session conducted by yours truly. It will be aimed at merchants, networks and agencies, and will focus on how to get your programme to stand out from the crowd. I would go into further detail, but not having written it yet that would be pretty hard.

How 2: have a wider sized range of banners available without going nuts

I’ve been following with interest this post on Kieron Donoghue’s blog about merchants providing creative in a wide variety of sizes

I felt inspired to write a post about it (its been a while), not because I disagree with Kieron, but because a lot of the comments have mentioned the problems merchants have in keeping a large variety of banners up to date. It’s caused some pretty heated debate!

For a lot of small to medium sized merchants affiliate marketing is the only form of banner advertising they do, so they don’t have access to lots of resources such as ad agencies or designers. When merchants join a network they are normally advised to create banners in ‘as wide a variety of sizes as possible’ and are shown the standard IAB list of ad sizes. This can seem like an impossible task, but there are ways you can get a variety of ad sizes without producing every advert in every size, and without constantly having to update your entire stock of creative.

Here are my tips:

Our views on the recent Google Adwords change

Obviously this post would have been way more useful a few weeks ago, but I didn't have the blog running then!
The recent lifting of Google Adwords trademark restrictions caused a lot of discussion and a bit of panic within the industry. I even got quite concerned about it myself, not least because it would potentially mean a lot more work in monitoring PPC.

Before the change we sent an e-mail out to all our affiliates, and I thought it might be useful to publish this here, just to make our policy nice and clear, and it also might be useful for other merchants who want to write about policy in a non-threatening way. Incidentally, it seems to have worked, according to Keith Bond it was the e-mail out of the many he got that stuck in his mind!