Just What Is The Performance Marketing Alliance?
The Performance Marketing Alliance seems to be the latest test to see if the Affiliate Industry is ready for a group organization where everyone helps each other to better the industry kind of thing yadda yadda. It sounds like a great idea and they have gotten a lot of big industry people involved and writing about it.
The idea has been tested several times before and failed. Mostly IMO due to the fact that affiliate marketing is such a loan ranger type of career.
In the SEO Industry you have SEMPO which I can only comment on as an outsider. I have a lot of respect for most of its board members and it seems to be a good resource for people looking to get into the industry. Unfortunatly the only first hand experiences I have had with SEMPO were pretty negative. The first experience was at SES NYC in 2006 where a SEMPO member was going table to table interupting peoples lunches and passing out business cards for his SEO services with the SEMPO logo. This was my first experience with SEMPO and it left a really bad taste in my mouth. No doubt a few bad members can make the whole organization look bad and after talking to Dana Todd (President of SEMPO at the time) and Chris Boggs (vp of SEMPO at the time) they assured me it was just some rogue member and he would be delt with.
So can the Performance Marketing Alliance be the SEMPO of Affiliate Marketing? I think its a real uphill battle. To start with I had to check 3 times before really believing that performancemarketingalliance.com was their website. It looks like a plain Jane wordpress MFA theme… and no mention of their status as a business or business address….
Of the 3 main pages on their site one is a survey page where they are asking affiliates, advertisers and even agencies a lot of questions about what they want to learn in affiliate marketing. I bet they are getting a ton of great information about what people are looking to learn from these surveys. Also there is nothing about how the data will be used.
Hmm interestingly enough after poking around the site a bit it appears that it is owned by affiliateclassroom.com which sells training to affiliates, merchants and agencies.
What is even more interesting is they are both on the same IP address.
affiliateclassroom.com A 67.225.203.116
performancemarketingalliance.com A 67.225.203.116
(ADD MOMENT… Why is the affiliate classroom hiding their registration information on whois? red flag! )
So to me it looks like the Performance Marketing Alliance is just a vehicle to get industry data and email addresses to use for affiliate classroom’s use. Maybe you have more info?
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I thought the same thing about the site… it looks like crap. I guess the whole goal was to get the surveys out to people and not really to make a legit site.
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“they assured me it was just some rogue member and he would be dealt with.”
Yea, he was a rogue, isolated member, just like that corrupt NBA referee.
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i think its kind of wrong to make a statement like that? something does smell fishy though
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Eventually the Affiliate Marketing industry needs to grow up and organize. Every new industry begins with fiercely independent people, but then they consolidate and organize. You usually get great parties and networking out of it. Those that don’t want to think like a business and plan 10 years ahead will struggle and watch the competition take market share.
I think the major reason for the alliance is to eventually lobby government. The Amazon NY state tax that passed was a wake up call that affiliates need to organize and make their case.
Very interesting about the Affiliate Classroom IP address. The alliance is already off to a rocky start (lots of industry debate) and that just can’t help.
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wherever there is tragedy (affiliates getting ripped off) there is opportunity to make money (affiliate classroom)
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For all the disadvantages to openly admitting that they are behind the PMA, affiliateclassroom.com should have known that on net nothing goes unnoticed and being outed might hurt them more than anything.
If they truly are trying to do something good here, though, and were just wary of what people would think if they openly admitted to starting this venture, it’s too bad because they’ve probably just set the affiliate marketing industry back another couple of steps in terms of trust and solidarity.
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I don’t think they were outed. It’s been known since day one that a founding member of AC was leading it.
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Sounds like a “Learn how to make money from Google” type of scheme to me.
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I think there is a big difference between someone “leading” it and it being owned and it being marketed as a organization when its really just a way to feed leads and industry info into their commercial products.
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Now that I agree with. I wouldn’t want to see one company steer the organization, or feed leads from one corp into another.
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Rebecca Madigan has started the blog just as a way to keep people posted. She works for Affiliate Classroom and is most likely doing the blog on company time, hence the same IP. One company is not steering the organization.
There’s a thread about it on ABestWeb with some discussion and they are doing their best to keep it as open and fair as possible. There’s no reason to go around saying that it’s a scheme (because it’s not).
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Thanks. Could you post the organizations billing address and also their official business status. Also any actual privacy policy would be great also. I would be happy to post links to them.
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This is the most recent attempt at trying to form an industry association for performance marketing. Discussions amongst a group of us started in January when I first talked to Lisa Riolo, At Affiliate Summit in Vegas, she talked to Anik Singal and Brad Waller, who talked to Haiko de Poel, and so on. In April Anik hired me to see if we could get something kicked off. What he realized, as have others, is that earlier volunteer efforts didn’t work because it takes a lot of time, and frankly, it is really, really hard. The hard part is managing input from all the interested parties, and taking arrows in the back. I can see how a volunteer would easily walk away from any number of disagreements and brick walls. However, it is my job to keep going, to take the opinions and arrows, and focus on getting something started.
I have personally talked to about 100 people as part of this effort. This industry is blessed with many leaders, and I’m afraid I haven’t spoken to everyone, which is really just a limitation of my time and contact list. After being forwarded a link to this blog, I realize I failed to contact Mr. Shoemoney, and for that I apologize.
We are in the formation phase of this, which means that teams are being gathered who will help define how this association will be organized, how it will be run, how it builds membership, and what it hopes to do. So far we have about 45 volunteers who will be participating in these working groups, and we’re always happy to have more help.
I just want to reiterate TrishaLyn’s comment: Affiliate Classroom’s sponsorship of this effort has never been a secret, it is mentioned in a number of places on the site and with virtually everyone with whom I’ve spoken. Anik is the only person who so far has put actual money into trying to form an association. We have other sponsors interested as well, and as soon as we’re far enough along to become a real entity, we’ll start accepting those sponsorships.
I’m interested in speaking to as many people as I can about this, so any interested people can contact me at rebecca@performancemarketingalliance.com. Mr. Shoe, I’ll contact you directly.
p.s.: The blog, ugly as it is, is a working portal to keep anyone interested in our progress (hey, Google and eBay are ugly too, but they do pretty well).
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The challenge of doing it as a volunteer thing makes sense, nice to see someone’s willing to put some skin in the game to get it going. My company would be up for joining.
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Wow, I just read my last post, and man! That came off defensive. Not my intent at all, just rushed writing.
Just read Shoemoney’s earlier post (done while I was writing..), the PMA technically doesn’t exist yet. We’re still trying to get it formed. Pretty much everything has yet to be decided, and the working groups will help create recommendations for formation.
The one consistent thing I keep hearing is that the PMA should be a self-sustaining, professionally staffed, non-profit corporation, funded by its members. We don’t see large controlling corporate sponsorships funding this kind of association, this should have a membership structure that gives every member an equal voice. As you noted in your article, there is a cast of hundreds of thousands in this industry, so can we find enough common ground to create a unified voice? We hope so, I think so, but we’re still trying to figure that out.
Cheers!
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I think you are mistaken about them hiding their registration data. I did a whois on Godaddy and it shows:
Registrant:
Affiliate Classroom, Inc.
387 Technology Drive
Suite 3119
College Park, Maryland 20742
United States
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The affiliate tax (amazon tax) issue has been a catalyst for the PMA forming rapidly. Due to its rapid jump start the blog, ip addresses and everything else are behind in reflecting what the actually PMA brand and organization is headed towards. everything is being donated and backed to help the formation and o get the PMA to its feet as a much needed objective and well rounded organization.
Performance marketing is a very large and valuable marketing channel that needs to grow up. Stand on its own to feet so it can become an organized industry with proper governance, standards of excellence and representation across all the channels that make up performance marketing.
The PMA has a mandate to be a fair and objective association and has a call to action for everyone in the industry to participate in helping with its forming foundation. It is critical that we all support the PMA and give objective and proactive input. We all need to help support thru what ever means we have at our disposal.
The industry and everyone that is a part of it no matter how big or small needs fair representation and a single community driven voice to be able address very big issues such as the NY State Affiliate Tax. Or having proper representation on panels so that affiliate marketing bashing or misrepresentation does not happen like it did at the Internet Retail Conference
We look forward to helping support and being a part of the PMA. We hope everyone in our community will get involved and see how we can make a difference as a unified collective giant instead of a paranoid and fragmented 3bill channel that squeaks like a mouse.
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Good catch with IP thing. I do not think fast enough to catch that kind of stuff. That is why I follow you!
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Unfortunately true
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great find shoe. thanks
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I agree with you, Shoe. Looks like an easy way to gather data.
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Looks like a perfect way
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Nice find shoe, thanks…
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thanks!
great find shoe.
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It seems that you are really right. It is just an attempt to collect some essencial
information due to your own targits. I am surprised how simple everything may be.
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What’s the agenda of the group? Just to spread affiliate knowledge? I’m not sure I get it.
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I thought the same thing, agree with your point of view.
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Interesting read once again Shoe. Thanks
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Looks like they’ve found a novel way to increase the size of their database.
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You are really right I think. It’s bad business.
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hmmmm…
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In our industry “pretty” does help. Surely some designer out there will do you a “pretty” for the exposure? Unique Blog Designs spring to mind!
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Good luck! Hope you can get it together. In order to do that you’ll have to win over the community at large, starting with Jeremy….
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I think people with more credibility and transparency need to tackle this task. Noble ideals, but unfortunately it seems there are vested interests here, so I doubt if this venture is going to be successful.
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Nice find Shoe…
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Looks like a rip off in the making to me.
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