When you should Drop an Advertiser

if there are no penalties (or stigma) imposed by anyone for adware theft, and it yields financial rewards for those who do it, is it any wonder that it proliferates?

the aggregate ethical choices, made by all involved, shape and influence the environment.

i'd say collectively that we're worse than a stance we might want to label "adware intolerant", we're most often either ignorant or indifferent or complicit.

so, as has been the case for many years, the situation will not change. save the occasional zit that Ben or Kellie pops, there's no real impetis for it.

we have made it part of our natural environment, our pollution, as pointed out by Calcanis.

the purpose of PR is to convey a planned message… is ours "we'd like everyone to believe we don't tolerate cheating"?

my point is, collectively, we certainly do tolerate it.

and when PR isn't true, at its core, it won't ever gain any real traction.

so let's skip the PR too… maybe we could give away some keychains or coffee mugs instead.

"As Brad said, it’s just another good reason for an association, where best business practices are clearly defined and also bad and immoral business practices are being labeled as such. Businesses that are engaged in bad business practices would not be allowed to put up a seal for example where it claims to follow best practices as defined by the association."

And therein lies one of the biggest problems when you have people in the association that are going to be on opposite ends of what's "bad and immoral" How is that going to work when some of the biggest pushers of adware and adware folks themselves are going to be in the association?

"first of all are not all facts available yet to come to a final conclusion about how bad things really are."

Carsten, I'm not picking on you or your ethics here, I do understand this is complicated to many – not only what happens, but what lines they should personally draw given the pervasiveness of the shenanigans.

However, the naivete you display when you assert the facts on Hydra aren't in yet is laughable. Years of abuse, demonstrated and reported time and again and yet the most respected people among us (again, I'm NOT referring to just you here Carsten, but virtually all of our industry's leaders, both major and minor) cannot find the fortitude to label a poor player as exactly that.

If Hydra had used a knife, instead of adware, to rob these merchants of margins over the years, there'd be an uproar.

Also, I do understand that some merchants want to use adware – many want to spread their name as far and as wide as possible and anything goes, including spam and adware and more. But that's not the issue we're talking about here… can you give me one example of a single merchant who would knowingly want an affiliate to use adware to pop a cookie on them seconds before a consumer's purchase is completed so that this particular affiliate is paid a commission for their "work"?

Go back and read the story you linked to on mediapost… "Adware researcher Ben Edelman published a new report Tuesday saying that some affiliate marketers use adware to get commissions on sales they're not responsible for."

Or read Ben's report:
http://www.benedelman.org/news/093008-1.html

This isn't adware name spreading as a reason for merchants to accept some pilfering to get their name out… this is rogue, thieving affiliates and the networks that support them STEALING credit for sales they did nothing to help produce.

Until we can see these issues in a clear light in which they occur, our fuzziness, whether intentional or through laziness or incompetence or confusion, the players like Hydra and Clickbooth that know EXACTLY how to steal and to dismiss it as well, will continue unabated. Just as they have for many, many years.

Pat, I hear you and I also understood the part of Ben's report that showed that the Adware was triggered over the merchant website itself to get credits for sales where they played no part in the conversion. That is what adware does (not all, but too many). Nothing less can be expected from somebody who is involved in unethical business practices. Merchants who believe in "ethical thugs and thieves" are just plain stupid. The ones who know accept this "drawback" and file it under "cost of doing business".

So the Merchant is the party that should be scrutinized the most. Without him, there wouldn't be AdWare or helpers-helpers who facilitate between the unethical merchant and the adware thugs.

This does not make it nice and okay what Hydra is doing. I think that helpers-helpers and facilitators who provide the means, tools and infrastructure for the thugs and thieves are not better than the thugs and thieves themselves, but that is my personal opinion. Using this principle, half the governments of Europe and the United States would have to be imprisoned, but that is wishful thinking and far off from the grim reality. Conservatives and Nationalists probably disagree with it and they are entitled to their own opinion.

That is the whole point. The separation between editorial content and advertisement removes the element of prejudges, allegiance, personal opinion and ethics etc. because somebody has to make the decision to accept an advertiser and that somebody is a human being and not a committee that discusses each advertiser and then votes, if he will be accepted or not.

However, this option works only for many publications, but not all of them. I pointed out that in some cases, opinion has to play a role, if the opinion is what your brand and business is all about. e.g. Kellie's site and also my own site, because it uses my name and I am a person (and thus being prejudges and opinionated).

Jimmy,

You know what I liked about your approach? YOU took the video and sent it in. Publishers of mags, or bigger merchants etc do NOT have time to investigate every infraction or complaint. Well I guess they can but it will get old fast.

Now if the business person takes out the time to document the infraction using a professional layout, and terminology then I think most places will indulge you or you will have to educate them.

In your case they had no idea so they turned to the network. Most networks do not want the hassle of adware they keep them around because of MERCHANTS.

Yep- that is who demands the relationship be there…

Some networks are dependant on big merchants to survive…network's commission is even less than an affiliate.

If one fails to survive- they die. Is it fair you have to police someone else's site or network? Not really, but business is business and if it were easy everyone would do it. You could litigate against them, and maybe someone should…who do you sue?

But I liked the fact you didn't approach them empty-handed. You backed up your claims out of the gate. Far better way to go because bitching in forums has been ineffective for years and I don't see the forecast changing soon.

-wayne

Trust,

"? If they decide its ok, yes, there would be a problem. I think you might have typed that wrong."

I made some typos what they did not affect what I meant. I was cynic and not stating an opinion with those few sentences.

"The association is only going to represent the people in the association,"

I agree with you here

“not the industry."

That depends on which people will be in the association. If those people are making up a representative cut across the entire industry that the association can claim to be representative. It probably could even act as a representation, even if it does not, because of the lack of anything better and the lack of an opposing voice and opinion that will be heart.

The association does not require that the majority of professionals in the industry will be part of the association in order to become representative of the industry itself. You should know that. Just look at the turnout data for general elections in this country to understand what I mean.

http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm

"Best practices? Carsten, we already have agreements we get into with merchants and networks."

You threw into the discussion multiple things after those 2 sentences that mean something to you and to me. Each of them is a complicated thing by itself that confuse outsiders even more. Add to this the varied interpretations and vague verbiage used and you will find yourself where we are now.

If you think, that everything is all right and peachy today, good for you, but many other folks, including me, would not agree with you on that. I do not believe that this is true though; but let us assume that this is the case, for a moment.

If you are not involved in anything that others see as a problem, you could care less about this movement.

Why, because the things it tries to change would have either no effect on you at all or would improve things that you did not consider much of an issue for yourself in the first place.

"So, this whole we better do something before the government steps in doesn’t bother me. If anybody should be worried about that, it’s not those involved in ethical marketing it’s those who aren’t."

That there are more things than business ethics shows the New York State incident, but you also could care less, if you are not living in New York. You probably would have a different attitude, if you would be living in NY or if your state implements something like it tomorrow.

Furthermore, I do not mind a government that steps in with laws that are practical and effective in doing what they were intended to accomplish. I do not know of many politicians who are involved in affiliate marketing, but see repeatedly, how outsiders conceive what the industry is and what it does and worried that politicians will make decisions about laws that will affect me and what I do, based on those misconceptions.

It will not make a difference what I actually do, because it would be irrelevant. There would not be a differentiation between people who do and who do not, because it would be assumed that everybody does it.

Pat, I used the example of the war to illustrate the significant differences between the PRO and the ANTI approaches.

I dedicated a whole post at SEJ to this subject in an attempt to better illustrate my views.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/anti-versus-pr…

I am a strong believer that the PRO approach will work better than the ANTI one. The ANTI approach has the tendency to turn into a radical witch-hunt, denunciations, black-mail, hatred and the seizure of any constructive discussion.

I will not join a denunciation campaign against Hydra, because I think that it would be a waste of time and energy and not have any positive long term effects.

On a personal note. I am looking at any CPA network with suspicion and do not trust any of them any further as I am able to spit. This includes prominent CPA networks like AzoogleAds, Neverblue, XY7 and the countless others out there.

I even extend this suspicion to the traditional affiliate networks like CJ and LinkShare and there are only a few that I trust. Trust is lost quickly and earned only slowly with a lot of efforts needed. The loss of trust was caused by the networks themselves.

I do most stuff today outside the large networks, most of the time via direct relationships with merchants, using their in-house tracking platform (custom or out-of-box solutions like Kowabunga). I used to be performance partner with BeFree once to see that networks can do better, if they want to. If they would treat all of their publishers like their special performance partners, things would be better, including for the networks themselves. Many of the "privileges" don't cost the networks anything to justify the limitation to only a few selected publishers.

Back to the issue and the PRO and ANTI approach. I believe that it will be more efficient and long term successful, if we recognize and highlight the good players and reward businesses who self-restrict themselves by adopting clearly spelled out best practices. The reward would be official recognition like a seal of approval or something of that sort. This would have to be advertised not just within this industry, but to the outside as well, that industry outsiders are able to easily recognize good players in the industry who are recognized by their peers and also able to find out quickly what being a good player means.

This implies what not being a good player means to the industry itself. Those "not good" players distance themselves from the rest of the industry and if legislation decides to target those, it will be fine with me.

Does this make sense?

Pat, I would not give Hydra network a seal of approval or badge labeling them as a player who is a good example for a company who is following best practices. I would also not recommend them. If you don't do your homework and make business decisions based on flashy ads that you see, sorry, but you should know better than that.

They operate in a grey area that was not created by them. They do that for business reasons and probably don't feel bad about it. I worked in a big corporate environment long enough to know that ethics are rarely high up on the priority list.

Ethics usually only move up on that list, if there are clear and measurable business benefits that come along with it. If that is not the case, ethics only have a chance, if they come as an added bonus or minimal expense (in time and money).

Highlighting and promoting ethical players would be such a business benefit. A badge or seal to show this must be strong and branded to make it desirable to get one. As I said, I am for a PRO approach and not an ANTI.

Pat, I have to admit that I did not look at all details about the Hydra network due to the lack of time. I have my whole family from Germany here, but I don't want to use that as a cheap excuse. I only want to say that I did not dive knee deep into the Hydra issue. What I am missing to make strong statements like you want me to make are information and statements from all involved players. I still miss any comment from Vista Print. If there is any, please let me know. The merchant is supposed to be the victim as well, even more so than its affiliates, because they lost (lose) more than just commissions on some orders like their affiliates. They pay commission on a lot more transactions.

If the merchant does not consider this expense theft, then it changes the game significantely. I am saying this, because there are merchants who accept knowingly this extra expense is exchange for traffic and sales at all cost. That can be a profitable excercise for everybody involved (except the clean affiliates of that merchant), if product margins are high enough to still make profits after all those expenses.

That is the reason why I still call it grey, because I have to assume that Hydra did what they did in consensus with the advertiser. It still looks black from an affiliate point of view, but it does not require adware to make it look black for an affiliate. I have always a bad feeling in my stomach, if I think about all the business that I bring to my partners that is not tracked and where I do not get a penny in commissions for. Some industries are more affected by this than others though. I see it mostly for the stuff that I do outside of paid search, but that is a different topic all by itself.

Now my point is that I believe that hunting down and researching all those cases is energy that could be much better spent on a different approach at the whole thing, the promotion of good players and the specification and discussion of the specification of what best practices actually are, the work on industry standards and communication channels, the establishment of an arbitration mechanism where conflicts between the different parties in this industry can be resolved as an option before legal actions are taken, which are costly and more time intensive.

This will help everybody. You can spend today all your time and energy on cases like the Hydra Network/Vista Print one and what are you going to do after that? The next case of unethical behavior by somebody else, after that the next one and so on and so forth. This will never end, because new bad players will enter the market and the industry continues to stay as it is today. The only thing you accomplish is the creation of a "trophy" list with bad players you exposed and maybe even put out of business. This is a waste of time in my opinion and the only thing gained by it, is an ego boost and a moment where you feel better, because justice was served, only to fall back into all this crap to start all over from where you left off before.

Does this make sense?

p.s. I am no leader, I just have a head to think for myself and no fear to say out loud what I really think.

Some call it being blunt, others call it stupid, but I just call it "being the real me, no fake, no acting."

It's also not as hard as some people think it is.

It also has an advantage, which is hard to beat … … it's natural and feels right. I encourage anybody to try it for themselves. Maybe you get a kick out of it too.

You have to accept the consequences of it of course, the good and the bad. But you do not have to worry about the bad ones, since the good ones should be overwhelmingly exceed the bad ones, except if you are an asshole… by heart