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Massive Charade or Effective Strategy?
Alright, Porter, I’ll bite on this.
I’m sitting here sipping my morning tea reading the Wired piece… again and again. I keep shaking my head, asking myself “Doesn’t this mean that what we’ve done (in building an industry) is a massive charade?” How can it not be when so much of it rides on search and so few affiliates have strong content… or add any value at all?
I am beginning to think that affiliate marketing is ONLY good as a testing bed for “lesser” and/or un-proven traffic sources… potential partners who, in the end, an advertiser will pay for clicks but for now they can’t justify it.
Why? Mainly since the prospective partner can’t stand on a strong foundation, doesn’t have a media kit, etc.
Am I the only one who sees it this way?
Folks, what I’m getting at here is clear and simple. If we can all agree that most search engines or tactics (let’s take the Mother of All Charades - paid inclusion) are not exactly screaming out “THIS IS AN AD, MR. CONSUMER” then how far are we from agreeing that what we participate in is quite a sham? I’ll extend this to the affiliate marketing realm - one that clearly benefits from search trickery.
“Official Site”
Two innocent words, eh? Until you work in our business and understand that it’s a lie… a trick… a tactic that is no better than squatting on a trademark or mis-spell variation URLs and cashing in on someone’s mistake (failure to secure it).
Each of the above examples are *still* common… permitted and dare I say a “best practice” among some affiliates. Have we (advertisers, affiliate networks, affiliates) no shame? Does the almighty dollar command our every move as marketers? I suppose it does but how long before it bites us in the rear?
THAT, friends, is my entire point in making this entry.
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Okay, before you all get too worked up, at the bottom it says,
“The Pew telephone study was conducted May 14 to June 17 and involved 2,200 adults, including 1,399 internet users.”
So, to start with, one full third of the users in the study didn’t even use the internet.
As for the best practices, there are a lot of shady people out there, all you have to do is look at Metricsdirect and their ilk. People aren’t going to be mad at affiliates, they’re going to be mad at whoever is responsible for spyware/adware and crashing their machines.
Good point Jimmy. I am interested to know if the ones who would stop using the search engine if they knew the financial relationship are the ones actually online?
I wonder if they would quit watching tv if they knew commercials were advertisements.
Another great point Jimmy. Why are the rules different online than they are are offline?
When is the last time Channel 3 made you read a privacy policy? Oh wait- you can’t interact with Channel 3. (Well some folks can and we try to ignore those types.)
Another data point from the survey: “Pew says that 108 million Americans, or 84 percent of adult Internet users, have used search engines.”
In other words, 16% of the people don’t know what a search engine is…
“In other words, 16% of the people don’t know what a search engine is”
I think that’s about right. If you’ve reason to doubt, take an anecdotal survey of friends, family, and acquaintances that are casual “average joe”-type users and/or users age 40 and up. Ask them exactly what they do when they want to find something on the internet. If the answer is “I type in (keyphrase)” - don’t make the assumption that they’re typing the keyphrase into a search engine’s searchbox … dig deeper and ask them where they type it.
I started doing this about 18 months ago after several conversations with long-time casual users and was surprised to find many - even those who use the net several hours a day for 5 or more years - who simply type a phrase into the browser address bar. They don’t go to Google or some other page first to type in their searchstring because the browser bar seems to serve their purpose. Technically, they are using their browser’s default search engine - for IE users that’s usually MSN - but it’s transparent enough to the user that many are unaware that’s what they’re doing. Hence many don’t know what a search engine is, because they’ve never knowingly used one.
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Jeff,
The line between advertising and “programming” is increasingly blurred across all media. Whether you’re talking about product placement, sponsorships, or entire stories built around a corporate message, things aren’t that clear anymore. Rember that Tom Hanks movie a few years ago that was one giant FedEX infomercial? Castaway, I think it was called.
There is no doubt that a lot of money changed hands to make that happen - and the FedEx corportate image probalby benefitted from being associated with a popular movie star.
Not to say that this is good, but the “traditional marketing” world isn’t populated exclusively by saints either.