We were celebrating last week as the Affiliate Marketing industry entered into its 20th year. While the exact date it started is a matter of dispute, 2014 marks 20 years since William Tobin of PC Flowers & Gifts started applying technology for affiliate marketing in the US.
PerformanceIN’s Pippa Chambers reflects on the the evolution of performance marketing over the last two decades with some of its forefront pioneers, offering a wealth of foresight into its future with her feature ‘Affiliate Marketing Celebrates 20 years’- a must-read for anyone involved in any level of the industry.
The atmosphere is not all celebratory though; look out for the US-UK divide creeping into the comments section, and do not hesitate to weigh-in on the discussion.
Brave New Worlds
With all this continental cross-Atlantic competition it can be easy to overlook what has been going on in the rest of the world. This week we spoke to Max Bush, network director at The Affiliate Gateway Asia. Based in Singapore, Bush spoke about the challenges of directing the largest affiliate network in South East Asia against the odds of an under-developed market. Take to PI to review his three tips for success in the industry, and negotiating Jakarta at rush hour..
We are entering a brave new world of domain names, or that is how internet services pioneer Rolf Larsen sees it. With over 1,000 new suffixes coming into the market, Larsen believes now is the time to stay ahead of the curve.
“It paves the way to a future where any brand, local, regional, or international alike, can expand globally across new audiences and be identifiable by people who may live in another country, in another continent,” he believes.
Over in India, Digital media network SVG Media has created an unofficial ‘Lumascape-alike’ graphic in an effort to simplify the country’s media industry, dividing it into categories that will help marketers pick out some of India’s bigger performance players.
The Performance Muses
We have had some more advice straight from the boardroom over the last seven days with a step-by-step guide on how to utilise the benefits of social media, kindly penned by international mobile advertiser MassiveImpact’s CEO Sephi Shapira.
Opera Mediaworks’ MD EMEA Mark Slade also spread some words of wisdom – this time on startups facing an acquisition, where he emphasised the importance of maintaining a company culture of speed, flexibility and freedom even after stepping on to a global playing field.
In other news..
British energy companies have been given the go-ahead to renew their partnerships with cashback websites as watchdog Ofgem lifted rules imposed to prevent customers from buying into less suitable tariffs.
Facebook has upped its ad game again, rolling out specific mobile device targeting for its in-app advertising. Now advertisers using the social network site will be able to target ads not just by mobile model, but by what operating system is installed and whether Wi-Fi is active.
Not quite as big as Zuckerberg’s blue behemoth; the three year old social media company Glow Digital Media has secured $7 million in investment from venture capital firms Notion Capital and White Star Capital, dwarfing the previous $1.3 million the company received in February last year.
If you would like your work to feature on PerformanceIN, send your ideas over to content@performancein.com– we would love to hear them.