Gossip has been rife over recent weeks and chatting to a few industry contacts a whisper of a merger between two well know networks seemed to be the talk of the town.  Today’s news that Digital Window has acquired the Newcastle based Perfiliate Ltd, better know to us as Buy.At, ended that speculation. This acquisition signals the formation of the UK’s biggest performance based marketing group. AOL purchased Buy At in 2008 for a whopping $125 million CASH!

What does this mean for affiliates?

An official statment sent to all affiliates signed up to Affiliate Window reads:

As existing affiliates of AW, you will see no change to the day-to-day service we provide. It will be business as usual, with the same desire to provide industry-leading service and technology to all our affiliates. There will be no change to the frequency or structure of your payments.

This deal will allow us to leverage the rich expertise in both businesses to deliver exciting and ground-breaking solutions for the market at a much more rapid pace. Digital Window solutions such as ShopWindow, Darwin, AWin Analytics, Snoopy and Agent99 will, over time find space alongside trusted Buy.at solutions like Offer Central, EventEngine, ProfitPlus and FlexTrack.

Exciting times. Watch this space.

When Ed isn’t tearing up dance floors at affiliate events, or trying to impress the girls with his silky football skills, he can be found working hard over at Affiliate Window HQ.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Edwyn a partnership’s account manager at Affiliate Window. I’ve been here for 18 months and manage a portion of the top 200 affiliates on our network. I first joined as an admin assistant fresh faced out of university and as I’ve learned the industry (with the help of some great mentors: Julie Wood, David Hall, Kevin Edwards etc…) I have taken on more responsibility and now look after some of the strongest performing affiliates; offering advice and implementing strategies to help grow their revenues and strengthen their relationships with our merchants and us.

What is your day to day role?

It’s difficult to answer when every single day offers so much opportunity and variation but the main tasks I undertake involve sourcing offers from merchants, promotion planning and writing performance reports.

The exciting parts of my day can involve helping to organise affiliate/merchant events, aiding affiliates to integrate new technologies and finally, analysing industry trends. When you have a base of 90,000 affiliates there is a wealth of information just waiting to be dissected. I guess now would be the time to confess that I’m a maths graduate and that evaluating stats is a dirty pleasure!

What was your previous job and was it related to affiliate marketing?

Upon graduating I took a gap year working for Arsenal Football Club (a dream come true!) I trained as a coach up to grade 2 and then proceeded to teach in the local community on Arsenal’s behalf. I did 4 months in London before being whisked off to Greece where there were 15 + soccer schools for me to teach at. I spent a couple of weeks at each one and by the end I was even taking sessions in Grenglish (my own variation on Greek: Greek/English)

Unfortunately the dream job had to end as coaching children left no time for a social life and definitely didn’t pay enough. Returning to England I was offered a job as an assistant manager at my old university bar or the far more enticing and career wise move to Affiliate Window, it was an easy choice.

What do you love about affiliate marketing?

I love that two people with opposite opinions on the best way to promote a product can both be successful. It’s so open-ended and enthralling that really anyone with a computer and an imagination can get into it.

I also love that it encourages people to make money from their passions. Everyone has something they are really interested in and affiliate marketing offers the opportunity for people to make money from their self-created dream jobs (with a little guidance of course.)

What do you hate about affiliate marketing and what would you change if you could?

I think there is nothing I hate about affiliate marketing. There are a few niggly things that bother me once in a while. The one that instantly springs to mind is some people’s expectation to be given everything on a silver platter without a track record of proven success. Sometimes it can seem that ‘everyone and their dog’ requests exclusive deals/codes/promotions.

I guess the underlying issue here is that affiliate managers face an eternal struggle to educate and inform their clients about how affiliate relationships work.

List your top 5 resources that help you with your day to day job?

1. I may be a little bias here but the affiliate window Wiki: http://wiki.affiliatewindow.com/index.php/Main_Page makes my job very easy as I often refer affiliates here to answer the common questions that they have.
2. I regularly check the affiliates 4 u forum and enjoy the topical discussions that happen on a recurring basis, it’s interesting to see how so many affiliates are able to be successful despite having completely different approaches.
3. One of the greatest resources has to be my colleagues at Affiliate Window, there are so many people behind the scenes that are inspirational, hard working and very intelligent.
4. The NMA which is great source of industry news
5. Kirsty’s blog http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk is great for new starters and helped me a lot when I first joined Affiliate Window.

If you were an affiliate how would you help someone in your role?

Just do the basics and do them well. Be polite, answer emails/calls even if it’s just to say ‘no I don’t like this promotion/idea’ and perhaps most importantly manage your expectations. Don’t expect changes to happen overnight as there will be a chain of people involved in any affiliate marketing idea.

In your opinion what is the future of affiliate marketing and how can affiliates take advantage of this?

Affiliate Window will take over the world J and affiliates can take advantage by joining us:

https://www.affiliatewindow.com/signup/index.php

In the future, I expect affiliate marketing to continue its rapid growth as online spend increases yet again and affiliates will find more innovative ways to promote products and deals. Specifically with Affiliate Window in mind, I’m excited about the recently launched Darwin which will see Affiliate Window offer a new level of transparency through the use of social network features that were pioneered by Facebook. This will increase interaction between affiliates and merchants and remove some of the barriers that networks including Affiliate Window have in place.

What is on your Ipod?

The last three songs were: Female of the species (by Space), Run this town (Jay Z) and Chan Chan (Buena vista social club) – certainly a random mix!

How can people get in touch with you?

You can email: Edwyn.mcfarlane@affiliatewindow.com or get me on msn fredwyn at hotmail.com or ring on 0207 553 0409

In July 2008 Qudico, one of the UK’s largest cash back sites, made the announcement that it was ending its relationship with Affiliate Window. Reports at the time suggested this was due to disagreements over Quidco’s sure shop scheme, essentially this scheme was an agreement between networks and Qudico designed to guarantee that networks resolve any Quidco members transaction queries within 28 days or they would be auto-approved. This didnt really offer much in the way of protection for the merchants and would mean in many cases  merchants would have been paying for sales that were not valid. Quite rightly Affiliate Window couldn’t agree to these terms as it had a duty to its merchants and other affiliates so they ended the working relathionship.

This was big news in the affiliate industry at the time and sparked huge debate about the future of many programmes as no doubt account manager up and down the land were tearing their hair out at the thoughts of losing one of their biggest affiliates.

Today it has been announced that Quidco have again resumed their relationship with Affiliate Window. Read the official Affiliate Window statement here.

Now over the last 12 months the game has changed slightly. The whole cash back and voucher code sites adding incrementality has come in to play and we have seen merchants pull out of this space all together. We also haven’t really seen the mass exodus of merchants away from Affiliate Window as some suggested at the time, suggesting that merchants will not be strong armed despite the size of the affiliate. I also think a lot of lessons have been learned from this decision by merchants, account mangers and agencies over the last 12 months. Eggs and basket spring to mind.

What ever happens in the future I think it goes to show how much Affiliate Window value its affiliates and merchants.