Founder & Director, The Affiliate & Partner Marketing Association: educating, advocating and elevating the affiliate industry | Also, speak to me about affiliate consulting, strategy, data, editorial and content.
Why does the industry trade press hate affiliate marketing? Ok, ok, a bit emotive I know – but even being generous it’s fair to say they generally ignore us. Search The Drum, Econsultancy, Campaign and others and you’d be hard-pushed to even know the channel exists. (Reminder - it's responsible for 10% of ALL UK retail sales.) It's unfair to say it's universal. Some do a decent job: Performance Marketing World produces a regular cadence of content (we are the original performance channel after all); Digiday produces thoughtful views and perspectives on the industry, albeit with a US skew and at less regular intervals. Weirdly if you do search you’re more likely to find content from a decade ago than from 2024, despite over-indexing for growth. I’ve long-held theories. We’re seen as bottom-feeders or nuts and bolts, not hearts and minds. Most of the budget doesn’t sit with the major media agencies which means we’re shut out of that ecosystem and therefore sidelined. Yes, there are occasional fraud and black hat tactics, but show me a channel where this doesn't happen. Frankly – as painful as it is to hear – we lack strong, in-depth leadership, willing to be vocal on the industry stage or champion initiatives. Often the channel is syphoned to junior staff; a lower rung on the career ladder. I often hear we’re our own worst enemy, that we’ve created our echo-chamber. But in a sense, if others won’t listen or engage what choice do we have other than to be the best we can be within our circles? I think we have to accept some of the blame. We’re poor at caputing the imagination. I can’t be the only one who is frustrated when major brand campaigns scoop up performance awards. They’re able to attach strong results to flashy branding activities and produce awesome story-telling. It will be a happy day when I never see another affiliate marketing case study that makes increasing ROI the major headline (let me guess, you paid lower commissions?). Racing to the bottom by focusing on price may win you business short term, but it won’t capture the imagination in the long run. And that’s part of our challenge. Those major brand campaigns didn’t just have a commission to play with. They had advertising budgets to deliver the sales. I see pockets of this happening in affiliate, brand campaigns built alongside acquisition targets. It also skews towards certain sectors. But in the way other channels came for our lunch when the heat to demonstrate performance was ramped up, so we need to make a play for theirs in 2025. We have such a strong story to tell. We're a start-up powerhouse, full of talent that is taking the latest tech and creating ecommerce solutions for embattled retailers. We need to crystalise this mission while showing how we solve problems and drive revenue. It's not easy but we have all the tools at our disposal to continue on our mission to win bigger budgets and deliver on our promises. #theapma #affiliatemarketing
We've got it covered. 😉
GARY HUNTER
3w
The thing I have always loved about being an affiliate publisher over the years is the better you perform for a brand the quicker they reduce your commissions. I remember in the early days when we did over a £1m in sales for Amazon and expected over £40k in commission, we got a call for a meeting thinking they were going to congratulate our performance to be told our commission was reducing to 1% and we would also be on hold for the current commission till they verified whether our traffic was real. After verification they said they would honour the sales but only at the 1%. And over the years I have seen this time and time again.
Andrew Abony
2w
I clearly need to start writing. In the USA, most of our clients agree we are 10-15% of spend and we’re usually the first call for startup CEO and Growth heads as they start to plan their growth and acquisition plans. We’re the last in the paid marketing mix to have budgets cut, and we’re the secret sauce to keeping an effective channel mix singing in harmony. A cacophony of terms used to describe the general channel is the first red flag that comes to mind (ambassador, referral, affiliate, partner, publisher, sub/network, etc) mixed with the obvious which is that any brand of any industry can leverage the channel to drive growth. “The industry” should seriously move to one term for the channel that we can all rally behind and I strongly feel that we need to finally move away from the term “affiliate” which is commonly used by the radio and tv industry. Let’s move forward.
John Coulson
6d
"Most of the budget doesn't sit with the major media agencies." Understand this and none of it is surprising.
Evan Weber
3w
Either because they don't know what to write about or they don't have anyone expert enough to write something intelligent about the channel. And yes, there's also the perception out there that's nothing but coupon sites and cannibalistic browser extensions driving a lot of the sales. Yet, most brands have affiliate programs and know they should have one that's growing over time under the right strategies and management.
Dave Trolle
3w
Kevin Edwards the perception can still be somewhat negative, however I would say that we’re seeing a more postive outlook from potential advertisers, who are seeing the full funnel value of the channel and don’t just tarnish affiliate marketing with some old school, antequated views.
In Germany, it is absolutely the same perception. A major challenge in this context is the fragmentation of our industry. There are no media-strong companies. And the cooperation between the big players, if you can even speak of it, is too small for us to generate media-effective events.
Couldn’t agree more with this. The strange fact is huge budgets / spend in a marketing channel gets you more media coverage and more awards. But if you’re quietly efficient, pay out only on success, and are always the 3rd or 4th main marketing channel for an advertiser instead of 1st and 2nd then no one cares about you! I also agree, affiliate marketing has a tarnished reputation, and it’s not helped by ongoing ‘you can make £100k in 3 days passive income’ courses and articles out there that continue to this day. Search Udemy, 90% of affiliate marketing courses are promising quick bucks! Lastly, CEO’s, CFO’s and even CMO’s don’t understand affiliate marketing. It’s not taught at business school, and it’s a sub page of a digital marketing textbook. No wonder we’re ignored!