Matt Bailey

Independent performance marketing consultant. Formerly Head of Performance at i-level.

Can you control your brand when using affiliates?

Brand control through affiliate marketing: is it an oxymoron? Maybe. A bone of contention with affiliates? Probably. A real concern for brands? Definitely.

In this post I will look at how to ensure that you retain brand control when working with affiliates...

Why does affiliate marketing still suffer from a bad reputation?

I have spent the past two years working in what was Europe's largest independent digital marketing agency. An agency that won countless awards, conducted some ground breaking online display work, was the first large agency to embrace social media and managed huge search budgets for it's clients.

The agency was innovative and forward thinking, we even had someone who held the job title Head of the Future.

However they just didn't get affiliate marketing. In my two years as Head of Affiliate a great deal of my time there was spent justifying the fact that affiliates should be included within plans for the client. The widespread feeling was that the affiliate marketplace was a murky area and sat very much towards the darker end of the marketing spectrum. It was a necessary evil in some cases but somewhat of a dark art which was to be neither understood or fully embraced.