Denied
By: Jennifer D. Meacham
More often than not, merchants are just saying no to affiliates and denying them entry into programs.
On a cold Minnesota afternoon, affiliate marketer Connie Berg checks her email fearing the worst: a message from a dream merchant saying her affiliate application for either iShopDaily.com or FlamingoWorld.com has been denied.
You see, Berg's sites post coupon information - a once-hot commodity now shadowed by merchant belt-tightening and recent incidences of customers getting expired or invalid affiliate-posted codes.
"No matter how much we try to convince them that 99 percent of the coupon sites are simply shopping sites that also post coupons, they don't seem to want to give us a chance," Berg says.
It's certainly a frustration for Berg, still an ideal candidate with 90 percent of her traffic from direct bookmarks or type-ins and a "deal alert" newsletter going to thousands. But she's been caught in a war between ideologies that surrounds many once-highly desired affiliate sites. Merchants are looking twice at any site that could potentially cut its profits, give the wrong idea about its brand or send an unapproved marketing message.
That's why affiliate application turndowns extend even beyond coupon sites. Under fire are affiliate sites offering coupons, incentives, discounts, email marketing, heavy search buys, forums, downloads and even mass-market and cross-cultural appeal rather than the merchant's defined niche.
"Five or six years ago, it was about who had the biggest affiliate program," says Chris Kramer, media director of NETexponent. Kramer, who approves affiliate applications for The New York Times, Financial Times and others, says, "Now it's more about 'who is this affiliate, what are they doing and do I have to worry about what they are doing?'"
Performics, for instance, denies 20 to 40 percent of the applications it receives for programs including Bose, Eddie Bauer, Harry & David, HPshopping.com and Motorola. While AffStat 2005 found onequarter of its merchants still auto-approving applications, the buzz is that the remaining three-quarters of merchants are creating additional safeguards to determine who gets in, and who stays in.
"When we talk about this issue of merchants denying affiliates, it's mostly due to brand sensitivity," says Kraig Smith, co-founder of Chicago-based Media- Impressions.com. His clients include Apartments.com, Healthcare Media, HEE Corporation, LifeGem Memorials and Performics. "Many big-brand offline marketers are concerned about protecting their brand in affiliate marketing."
After all, these days merchants can be more selective - mainly because there are plenty of affiliates to choose from.
"There's a lot of filibustering going around about how many affiliates there are," says Chris Henger, Performics' vice president of marketing and product development. "There are legitimately probably 50,000 to 100,000 types of affiliates active at any point in time. While it used to be easy to stand out as an affiliate with a professional site, now you're just one in the crowd."
"The whole [affiliate] industry has gotten more sophisticated," says Elizabeth Cholawsky, vice president of marketing for ValueClick, Commission Junction's parent company. "These are real businesses with real employees working day to day to grow their revenues and customer base."
Even Vinny Lingham, a Commission Junction super-affiliate and founder of Clicks2Customers.com, the affiliate search marketing technology provider that won CJ's 2004 Horizon Award for Innovation, gets denied for about 10 percent of the programs he applies for.
"We've mainly been denied because of the fact that we're search marketers," he says. "From a search marketing perspective, 90 percent of the merchants realize they can't market through search engines as well as the affiliates can." The result, he says, is that some merchants pin search-oriented affiliates as the culprit if their own search campaigns don't produce.
Perhaps, but Kerri Pollard, Commission Junction's director of publisher development, says it's more about being concerned with how an affiliate will fit into the merchant's overall integrated marketing strategy.
"Paid search has become such a big component of all the affiliate programs," Pollard says. "They want to make sure that whatever the publishers are doing doesn't conflict with their own search campaign."
Still, Lingham's site takes top affiliate status in many programs, even globally, and Clicks2Customer's parent company, incuBeta, is one of Business Day's "Technology Top 100 Companies." "In reality, if we or any other super-affiliates are not working for your company, we're building your competitor's business and market share instead."
Why Deny?
Oklahoma affiliate Joel Comm has begun running DealofDay.com, a community of 125,000 bargain hunters, since he sold off ClassicGames.com to Yahoo in 1997. Three to 5 percent of his applications are denied, and the bulk of those come from financial-related merchants.
"Some merchants, like financial services, just don't want to be part of coupon sites," he says.
His response if denied? "I'll just put someone else there instead," Comm says. "There are some affiliate managers that just don't get it, and others where the affiliate relationships are managed by the legal team - dotting their I's and crossing their T's. That ties their hands."
That's particularly apparent in the financial services arena.
"I don't know if it's as much price point as it is brand concern, but there is a correlation between higher price point products and brand concern; that's not accidental," says Peter Figueredo, CEO of NETexponent, the agency that manages the Financial Times' affiliate programs.
NETexponent's Kramer says one of the reasons is that financial service companies, ranging from American Express to mortgage companies, are governed by strict rules, codes and laws.
"They can't have affiliates out there advertising 'no-fee balance transfers' when there really is a fee, because they can get fined," Kramer says. "But when it comes to companies such as Financial Times, it's more based on brand integrity. They've invested a lot of money in protecting and developing their brand," and wouldn't want "just anybody" representing that brand. Financial Times also "fits a tight demographic of highly educated, higher-income customers," he says. "It doesn't serve their needs to have their ads on sites where their ideal customers are not going to be."
However, as a trend, "declines by merchants are on a case-by-case basis," ValueClick's Cholawsky says. "Some merchants are tiptoeing into affiliate marketing and are very restrictive. Others accept every application. We try to encourage merchants to be more inclusive, since we've seen that as one of the best practices. Otherwise, there is relatively little change" across the board.
Either way, the networks say tough requirements work both to the advantage of merchants and affiliates.
"Affiliates don't want to be associated with a network that has a lot of fraud running rampant on that network," says Danay Escanaverino, head of Global Resource Systems' quickly growing affiliate network, Filinet.com. Continued on Page 2...
Tags:
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