Mike – Thank you for your insights and comments. I'll agree that there are double hit issues that must be addressed with managing big media spends and wide spread affiliate promotions. Most of these can be mitigated with proper campaign management. Kudos to you for convincing some "legit Super Affiliates" to spend their money on your clients behalf without providing an offer – your clients must have some truly unique products or you must be a remarkable sales person. But, just to clarify, Free Shipping offers are in fact…offers…often more valuable than significant discounts. So, reactive marketing with offers sounds like it is at least some part of your client's spectacular success.

Brook – thanks, and so true. At some point it seems that big high-waste advertising is needed to achieve truly massive volume and scale for the biggest of the big, but I think it is just a matter of time. As an industry, we are not far away from being able to rival the mass exposure component the traditional media enjoys today – only we give our mass exposure away for free as a value added by-product. In fact, I think Mr. Smith had a slide or two on where the eyes are heading, and if I remember correctly, I think online media recently surpassed traditional media in amount of time "consumed".

Your still blinded to the #1 crutch leading to double dipping the clients Ad budget & cash register by lauding OFFERS (incentives). So easy for you to pontificate having never been on the receiving end of the double whammy… Advertising + Incentive Marketing. No wonder the big O has never turned a profit in 10 years.

They pay to play in both the advertising & incentive marketing game guaranteeing they'll never have enough left over in the cash register to cover company overhead. Huge traditional Agency Ad spend wastage + cost at point of sale for incentive deductions + cost & network fees to payout commissons to affiliate advertisers almost exclusively pushing Big O coupons or doing trademark poaching and forced cookie plant to get a commision on a non-commisionable action.

My merchant clients don't even bother with traditional ad agency wasteful advertising games. But unlike your idea, to push Offers via affiliates, they refuse to play to this low fruit cherry picking game. NO coupons period. Push free freight offers that automatically get placed in the shopping cart and force and commission based affiliate to actually have to push their branded products to make a dime.

They double sales annually by producing product line brocures mail to customer base and placed in each new sale box. They email specials with private offer purchase landing pages to existing customer maybe 10 times a year. Getting a 42% open rate and huge click to purchase conversion ratio after each emailing. They also never lock the office/warehouse door with a customer complaint problem not resolved to assure their brand and customer purchase experience is better then any other retailer on the face of this earth.

Guess what then happens when customer satisfaction marketing hit the road buring rubber? They grow their Tax ID reseller program to 2200+ restocking storefronts wanting in on the customer satisfying product line…. without spending a dime on reseller advertising.

They do have a few trusted affiliates who build out some customer facing creatives that average 1 sale per 20 referral clicks for over 8 years. But they sure don't rely upon them to drive and real traffic. Instead they expand through me in-house sales volume by sucker punching the legit Super Affiliates getitng them to spend money advertising their high conversion products…. LOL.

I've had clients pull back ppc spend to allocate it elsewhere and I point out that the segment of ad spend monies being repurposed is generating sales revenue at 7x it's spend… and I ask them what the expected revenue is going to be where the reallocated dollars are going to then be spent… I usually get the "well Pat, a committee studied it and decided" and I ask how that could possibly be so, given that they don't have the reports on the 7x it was earning…

Anyhow, my fellow cockroach, did love your rant! Am thinking the view down here by us, near the soles of everyone's shoes gives us a very good view of where the rubber hits the road!