Remember my post on picking my brain for free? Today is one of those days when someone is doing it, and, hopefully, for the benefit of others, as his questions are pretty broad and answers to them should address not only in this particular case, but help many others in the future too.

I have received this email:

I’m following your blog for the last half year and it helped me a lot.

There is one issue that is always a problem mostly in the Forex industry.

We have few types of Affiliates/Media partners: (1) CPC (only Google), (2) CPL, (3) CPA, and (4) Offline.

Our cookies are valid for 90 days.

There are few questions that I will be happy if you can answer…

1) Does cookie on CPC is consider same as affiliate cookie? and What about cookies for CPL?
2) Do I need to pay to a CPL in case they send me lead although he came from other affiliate/media partner? and What about CPA in this case?

I want to be fair with everyone but I also want to know what is common do to.

Being fair is a very good place to start. In fact, this (the fact that you’re trying to build a system where everyone is compensated in a just way) is one of the reasons that I’m replying to the above questions.

1. Is “cookie on CPC” the same as an “affiliate cookie” or “cookies for CPL”?

Much depends on the context, or how exactly you’re tracking and paying for the CPC program. It can be handled through an affiliate program (which is not the case in the above-quoted scenario), but even then — click (in the CPC model), lead (in the CPL model) and action/purchase (or deposit, which is frequently the CPA “action” in Forex programs) are three different types of actions. And while the affiliate cookie may be the same, since these qualifying actions (or the basis for payout/commission) are different, they are also tracked separately. So, for example, if you’re paying $0.50 on the CPC front, $1.00 for CPL, and $50.00 for those deposits (or, in other contexts, sales), then, should any one affiliate refer you a visitor that first clicks, then qualifies as a “lead” and then performs the “action”, you’ll end up paying that affiliate $51.50.

2. If before turning into a “lead” (or performing an “action”) a visitor clicks several affiliate links, could I end up paying more than one affiliate?
(I had to paraphrase the original question — I hope I’m reading it correctly)

Neither in CPL, nor in CPA scenarios will you pay twice (provided your tracking is in order, of course). The majority of affiliate programs nowadays go by the last-click-wins rule, which, basically, means that the last affiliate to set/drop the cookie on the end-user’s machine is the one who will receive the full commission. Having said this, should one affiliate refer the customer as a lead, and another set the cookie on their machine prior to them committing to buy (or deposit funds, as is probably your case), the CPL bounty would then go to affiliate #1, while the CPA payout would credit to the account of affiliate #2.

Should you have any questions related to the above scenarios, feel free to post them under this post. I will address every one of them.

In July 2009 leading advertising industry organizations introduced a cross-industry Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising [PDF here]. The essence of the Program was to bring about “consumer-friendly standards to online behavioral advertising across the Internet” — ones that would correspond with the “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” [PDF here] proposed by the Federal Trade Commission in February 2009 [source].

However, as it frequently is the case with newly-introduced rules and guidelines, up until this month there has been little uniformity on how exactly to alert web users to the behavioral targeting collection and use of their data.

Earlier this week I received an October 2010 newsletter from Gary Kibel of Davis & Gilbert LLP (D&G), where he notifies us that 5 major advertising industry associations — American Association of Advertising Agencies, the American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers, as well as DMA and IAB — have joined their forces to form the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), “which just launched a self-regulatory program for online advertising”. The essense of the program is to have participating companies display a special icon on their webpages where consumer data is collected. “By clicking on the icon, consumers will be able to access disclosure information about the participating companies’ data use and collection practies, adn they can opt-out of behavioral targeting”. D&G continues with another important bit of information:

Beginning in 2011, the Councis of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB) and the DMA will monitor and enforce compliance with the Program and will manage consumer complaint resolution.

DAA’s Implementation Guide on how marketers can implement the Self-Regulatory Principles may be found on the AboutAds.info website here.

The full D&G alert on the introduction of the Self-Regulatory Program may be found here.

I have recently noticed a banner on a blog run by a fellow marketer. You can see it on your left now.

Each word on the banner carries an enormous power, and all of them together — a powerful emotional message. We are told that this will happen — “4,500 kids will die today.” We are not called to click on the banner, but most of us will. The message is too powerful for us to ignore it.

When we click on the banner we land on a website of charity: water — a “non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.” It’s a great cause, and I am fully supportive of what they do. But I have a problem with that little 125×125 banner.

The approach used while creating the banner isn’t new. Talking of a campaign against abortion in his Effective Advertising: Understanding When, How, and Why Advertising Works (2004) Gerard J. Tellis wrote that images which “arose strong feelings of horror and guilt among viewers” were used in it “to win immediate converts to the cause”  (p. 150).

But is such approach effective? It depends on what your end goal is.

Describing the emotional component of such tactic in his The Marketing Power of Emotion (2003) John O’Shaughnessy wrote:

Negative emotions like guilt and shame exercise greater hold that positive emotions like pride because they tend to impose themselves on the mind as they are less optional emotions that (say) joy. (p. 101)

Then he also added an important observation:

…the emotion of guilt can serve as a substitute for action as an indirect way of satisfying perceived obligations to take action without actually doing so [underlining mine].

This is problem #1 with that banner — its creators certainly don’t want the emotion itself to “serve as a substitute” of the action (be it creating awareness of the problem among others, donating to the cause, etc).

Problem #2, in my opinion, is that the wording as it is now sounds like a death sentence. While it is still likely produce the desired action, it conveys a meaning of hopelessness, on the one hand; and on the other hand, when I click it, decide to participate, and even do something, a bitter aftertaste doesn’t go away.

This same organization has a 300×250 pixels banner, which looks somewhat better (having a clear call to action on it):

But the message could still use improvement. Changing the wording into “Help prevent 4,500 child deaths every day” would have been more effective, in my opinion.

What do you think (and feel)?

A few days ago a Toronto-based affiliate marketer, Lorne Fade, has published an ad spending infograph based on Nielsen AdRelevance data. Among other things the infograph reflected the distribution of the top advertisers (by impressions and spend) on Facebook:

A day earlier IKEA published a video on how they are using Facebook by kidnapping the platform’s “most popular function” — that of tagging photos — and getting people to spread the word about IKEA’s products via “via profile pages, the newsfeed, and links”. Why would people tag products, thereby spreading the word? Because whoever tagged a product on a showroom picture first, won it! More about simple, yet ingenious marketing move, in the video itself:

Within just one week, this video has been watched by over 37,000 viewers, while at the time of this post Gordon Gustavsson of IKEA has only 724 friends on Facebook. The friends of friends and other marketers are obviously watching.

Note that you will not find IKEA on the above-quoted list of the top Facebook spenders. Does this mean that their advertising on Facebook is less effective? Of course, not! The above example shows that thinking outside the box can at times be much more effective than pouring millions of dollars into your advertising.

In the past I have heard someone emphasize that to think “outside the box” you gotta first understand what’s in the box. IKEA took an already available idea/tool, and applied a truly outside-the-box thinking to transform it into a tool for viral marketing. Way to go, IKEA!

Earlier this morning my friend and famous online marketer, Bryan Eisenberg, tweeted that Razorfish has released its 2009 Digital Brand Experience Report. I closely follow everything that Bryan says and posts (on Twitter, Facebook, or his blogs), and sure enough, this was another gem.

Browsing through this report I have found it absolutely fascinating! Richly illustrated (those illustrations are simply masterpieces, in my opinion), it brings up some extremely interesting stats. Here are just some of the facts that company owners, CEOs, CMOs (and CFOs!) must know about:

• Digital brand experiences are not your customary “awareness” or “conversion” plays but rather: customer-creation plays (i.e. “digital brand experiences create customers”).
• Depending on how companies treat the digital space, it can either build a brand or break it. “65% of consumers report having had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand” and “of that group, a nearly unanimous 97% say that their digital experience influenced whether or not they eventually” made their purchase from that brand.
• The new kind of branding/advertising is “branded experiences (or actions)” such as branded games, interaction with the consumer via social media, etc.
• Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are quite probably “the outlet malls of tomorrow”. 44% of respondents follow brands on Twitter (and 37% “friend” brands on Facebook and MySpace) to have “access to exclusive deals”.
• Consumers spend 34% of their total media time online and 35% watching television.
• Customer engagement is now being largely defined in terms of social media interaction with brands.

The full 65-pages report in PDF may be found here. The above is just a sneak peak of what’s in it. I strongly recommend everyone involved in any kind of commerce to review it.

Ben Edelman, a Harvard Business School assistant professor, well-known in the affiliate marketing circles for exposing parasitic affiliate behavior, click fraud and affiliate commission fraud, has posted an online advertising Bill of Rights proposition. He proposes 5 rights to help safeguard advertisers “from increasingly powerful ad networks”, from “wasting advertisers’ budgets, slowing transition to online formats, and reducing payments to online publishers”.

These are:

1. An advertiser’s right to know where its ads are shown.
2. An advertiser’s right to meaningful, itemized billing.
3. An advertiser’s right to use its data as it sees fit.
4. An advertiser’s right to enjoy the fruits of its advertising campaigns.
5. An advertiser’s right to resolve disputes fairly and transparently.

All of the above have direct relation to the area of affiliate marketing, and you may review Ben’s thoughts behind each of these rights here: Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers. I, in my turn, second Ben’s proposition.

Ben Edelman, a Harvard Business School assistant professor, well-known in the affiliate marketing circles for exposing parasitic affiliate behavior, click fraud and affiliate commission fraud, has posted an online advertising Bill of Rights proposition. He proposes 5 rights to help safeguard advertisers “from increasingly powerful ad networks”, from “wasting advertisers’ budgets, slowing transition to online formats, and reducing payments to online publishers”.

These are:

1. An advertiser’s right to know where its ads are shown.
2. An advertiser’s right to meaningful, itemized billing.
3. An advertiser’s right to use its data as it sees fit.
4. An advertiser’s right to enjoy the fruits of its advertising campaigns.
5. An advertiser’s right to resolve disputes fairly and transparently.

All of the above have direct relation to the area of affiliate marketing, and you may review Ben’s thoughts behind each of these rights here: Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers. I, in my turn, second Ben’s proposition.