2011 Affiliate Industry Preview Series: Interview with Kerri Pollard of Commission Junction

As part of the ReveNews 2011 Affiliate Industry Preview Series, I interviewed industry leaders to get a sense of their plans and goals for 2011. Today’s interview is with Kerri Pollard, General Manager of Commission Junction.

How do you feel about the health of the Affiliate Industry overall?

Bearing witness to the year-over-year, double-digit growth rates of many of our advertisers & publishers – large and small – we’re very bullish on affiliate marketing. Due to the ongoing influx of more and more consumers shopping online and seeking out the promotional content provided by affiliate marketers prior to making a purchase, this channel has become a much larger transactional source for many advertisers over the last two years. Such growth has provided us greater support and visibility at the executive level resulting in more strategic growth opportunities for the future.

What adaptions will be necessary as commerce moves to mobile?

Due to the many flavors of mobile, this may be a bigger question than you realize! Does “mobile” mean shopping via a mobile device? Downloading a mobile application? Mobile advertising via SMS? Finally, what is the definition of a mobile device – smart phones only or tablets too?

Since the core of affiliate marketing is a transaction-based business, I will speak to driving sales/leads via a mobile device. Whether a consumer opens their browser on their computer desktop or mobile device to shop or populate a lead form, Commission Junction will track the initiated click and resulting action. If an advertiser has selected to create a mobile-enabled web site, we work with them to implement a Commission Junction pixel on their resulting shopping cart.

With that said and according to eMarketer, “…the mainstream of mobile commerce is not yet based around making purchases via mobile, but in using phones as a shopping aid—for store location, product research and finding deals.”

I would agree with this statement along with their follow-on statistics regarding the most popular retail apps: coupons! Based on the above, we definitely recognize a greater opportunity surrounding performance-based advertising and the application marketplace.

How will the FTC’s “Do Not Track” policy impact the industry?

At this time we are still evaluating the potential impact of the FTC’s Do Not Track.

A high profile story this year was the over $20 million dollars in cookie stuffing fraud allegedly committed by eBay affiliates. What can the industry learn from that event?

Due to an existing relationship with eBay, I am unable to comment. My apologies!

In what ways did Commission Junction improve in 2010?

I’m really proud of our team and their successful execution against our core strategy of securing more distribution on behalf of both advertisers and publishers.

In July, we launched a beta product that addresses one of the primary challenges for content sites attempting to work within the affiliate marketing model. The manual optimization of creative can be very time consuming for these sites given the dynamic nature of their content. Our beta solution leverages available targeting capabilities (i.e., contextual, categorical) in order to assume the optimization component so we can present the right offer at the right time to the right audience.

We also deployed our new feeds service offering, which not only assists advertisers with their Commission Junction product catalog, but we can manage the distribution of an advertiser’s product data to 200+ comparison-shopping engines. Publishers are very excited about this new service offering as it addresses one of their largest pain points:  stale and inaccurate product data resulting in a very, poor consumer experience.

We’re providing more opportunities than ever before for advertisers and publishers to work with us and most importantly, drive results.

How has the recent election impacted matters in California in regards to the so-called Amazon tax?

With Governor Schwarzenegger out – and apparently ready to appear on the big screen once again – our expectation is that legislative activity in this regard will increase in early 2011.

How are social media publishers changing the game for performance marketing?

I sound like a broken record, but the strength of affiliate marketing is the ability to adapt & evolve to the consumer and their ever-changing, online shopping behavior. Publishers have demonstrated this ability for the past 12 years and I have no doubt that they will continue to do so for many more.

With that said, questions remain as to what a consumer’s shopping intent is – or isn’t – when they visit a social media site. The intent of most is to interact with friends & family, not purchase a pair of khakis. Hence, we’ve seen greater publisher success in the integration of “social” strategies into their core, promotional methods – i.e., Stylefeeder.com, Savings.com, Offers.com, etc.

Although, I’m still very excited about publishers such as www.pose.com (aka Gyroscope Technologies), which we featured at this year’s CJU conference, as they not only make it very easy for consumers to share their items of interest with friends & family as they shop, but they also build a much-needed bridge between offline and online.

What are CJ’s goals in 2011?

I am a firm believer that strategies will grow and evolve over time, but they shouldn’t be constantly reinvented. Our core strategies of increasing distribution and expanding the scope of affiliate marketing will remain the same for 2011. Obviously, there are numerous tactics within each of these components – some of which, I’ve already addressed (i.e., automated targeting solutions, feeds, mobile). We utilize The Loop (CJ’s Net Promoter Score tool) to guide our prioritization of enhancement opportunities, as our client feedback is the best source in the development of our product roadmap.

Some areas we plan to revolutionize are our reporting interface along with the tools clients use to manage their relationships. We have lots of things we want to accomplish for our clients and therefore, we will be increasing the size of our technology team significantly in order do so!

About Angel Djambazov

Born in Bulgaria, Angel Djambazov has spent his professional career in the fields of journalism and online marketing. In his journalistic career he worked as an editor on several newspapers and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Wyoming Homes and Living Magazine. Later his career path led to online marketing where while working at OnlineShoes he earned the Affiliate Manager of the Year (2006) award at the Affiliate Summit, and In-house Manager of the Year (2006) award by ABestWeb.

For four years Angel served as OPM for Jones Soda for which he won his second Affiliate Manger of the Year (2009) award at Affiliate Summit.

Currently Angel serves as OPM for KEEN Footwear and MedicalRecords.com. His former clients include: Dell, Real Networks, Jones Soda, Intelius, Graphicly, Chrome Bags, Onlineshoes.com, Vitamin Angels, The Safecig, and Bag Borrow or Steal.

Angel is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher for ReveNews.com and ReveNews.org.

Angel lives north of Seattle, spending his free time reading up on obscure scientific references made by his wife MGX, while keeping up with a horde of cats and a library of books.

You can find Angel on Twitter @djambazov.

Website: http://www.revenews.com