The balance of power between affiliates and the advertisers they promote is shifting, with affiliates having more choice over who they work with. Owen Hewitson, Client Strategist, Affiliate Window & buy.at, looks at the issues advertisers face now that many affiliates are calling the shots…
To what extent should affiliates have control over how they promote advertisers?
Until a couple of years ago no one in the affiliate world felt the need to ask themselves this question. It was happily accepted that affiliates would promote advertisers with whatever the latter handed down to them: usually banners, offers or ready-to-use copy that could be lifted from a newsletter or feed and pasted directly onto an affiliate’s site.
Now the relationship between advertisers and affiliates has greatly changed. Typical affiliate programmes are likely to include many affiliates that are bigger brands than the advertisers they promote, and with this new status they can call the shots. Large affiliates expect advertisers to compete for space in their marketing plans, rather than the other way round.
Does this tilt in the balance of power necessarily erode the amount of control advertisers can expect to exert over how their affiliates present them online?
If it is accepted that many customers prefer to shop via affiliate’s site to visiting the advertiser directly, then rather than seeing affiliates as middlemen elbowing their way into the customer’s purchase path, advertisers need to look at what it is the affiliate is providing that the customer is not direct.
In this way, affiliates can be considered advocates for your brand to an audience that you yourself may not be able to reach or engage with. One of the ‘hidden values’ of affiliate marketing is that the branding and advertising affiliates provide in support of a sale is effectively free: you as an advertiser only pay when they make a sale. Whilst advertisers have traditionally used banners for branding through the display channel, affiliates understand that this method is a pretty ineffective way of converting to a sale, which is a problem if you are only paid when a sale is made. Precisely because banners do not convert to sales – and perhaps are not really designed to – for affiliates branding is chiefly about content rather than banners.
So who should control this content?
Advocacy
As has become clear through a number of recent social media fails, one of the hardest things for brands to get right is tone of voice. However, the trust and authority that affiliates have achieved with their users is based on getting precisely this aspect right. This is what makes them so valuable to advertisers.
MoneySavingExpert.com is a perfect example: a site that insists on writing their own copy and has the muscle to dictate these terms to advertisers. The site is editorially-driven and deals are selected on their strength rather than the commercials for Money Saving Expert.
But what about a smaller site, a fashion blog for example, that has a large readership and is passionate about its subject matter? Would a fashion advertiser be comfortable with this affiliate posting a negative review of its product or service, or hosting its readers’ comments to this effect? Do the risks of drifting ‘off message’ outweigh the benefit in terms of sales, or the opportunities of leveraging the authority the site commands amongst its readers? Some advertisers clearly think so (a recent example can be found here).
Compliance
Advertisers usually address compliance through a process of auditing their affiliates, a process that is becoming both more common and demanding for those undertaking it. Rather than looking across affiliates’ sites to ensure they are using on-message copy – as if expecting affiliate sites to mirror the messaging provided on the advertiser’s site – would it not be better to ask how good a fit the affiliate’s site was for the brand? The essential question in an affiliate audit should be: am I happy to have this affiliate introduce a potential customer to my brand? This is simple to answer, reduces the workload on those conducting the audit, and leaves room for creativity and innovation in the way that affiliates choose to address their users in promoting your brand.
However, there can sometimes be compliance aspects that are outside the control of both the advertiser and the affiliate: the finance sector being an obvious example. But other advertisers are increasingly putting compliance considerations front-of-mind thanks to the recent extension of the Advertising Standards Authority’s digital remit.
At the same time as compliance requirements are becoming more demanding, so many affiliate relationships are developing into affinity partnerships. These considerations demonstrate the challenge for advertisers to strike a balance between compliance and advocacy on their affiliate programmes.
By Owen Hewitson
Client Strategist
Affiliate Window & buy.at
www.affiliatewindow.com/
One Comment
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Great topic and both sides have very strong arguments to fight their corner.
From my perspective, I am a strong advocate that clients need to trust their affiliates’ expertise in knowing what their visitors are looking for. Therefore, the affiliate is in the best place to select the most relevant products, write the copy, decide how to promote and where. Of course, all the efforts need to be aligned to certain brand guidelines in order to utilise the merchant’s brand equity to the max – which is why it’s advised that clients do publish such guidelines, as a means to help their affiliates though, not so that they restrict things.
Many merchants, especially those with big traditional marketing departments, have the mentality that they need to control what, how, where things are published, that they dictate the content etc – to a point, they are right in asking to either approve content or have visibility over placements, but some clients are so inexperienced with online (or are only used to display campaigns and branding placements with direct partnerships) that they fail to understand the basic notion of affiliate marketing – the visitor belongs to the affiliate. It’s not the merchant’s divine right to determine the terms.
On the other hand, certain affiliates, some of those you refer to as having their own brand equity, on certain occasions just lose the plot as well. Making demands for higher offers, further increased CPA, continuous exclusivity etc drive profitability down and make the partnership commercially unviable.
Every partnership is all about balance, it needs to make commercial sense for all parties involved. I understand the need for clients to control their brand, and I understand the need for affiliates to capitalise on their traffic, but a common ground of mutually beneficial terms should be fairly easy to be achieved.