I often hear people in our industry opining why our industry doesn’t get more senior cut-through. Be honest, how often have you heard statements like “we need to educate people about why they need to invest more in the affiliate channel”? It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment, but if that’s how you feel, let’s see your ten-point plan for how we do it and your timeframes for rolling it out.
Look, I’m not having a dig if you’re sheepishly remembering a time you did something similar at PI LIVE. I’ve said worse across the years.
Besides it’s easier to throw out these sentiments from the safety of a stage at an event with the hope that everyone will rush from their seats and evangelise your words to a waiting crowd. But, let’s be honest, saying this stuff has never worked. This industry cannot keep recycling the same tropes in the desperate hope the non-affiliate world will start to think we’re the centre of their orbit. There’s no evidence Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but it still makes for a damn good quote.
Tongue lashing
Ok, you may have caught me in the grumpy fug of a Monday morning writing this, but I’ve been mulling over a few thoughts having had a stern talking to last week from someone who’s frustrated with the lackadaisical attitude of the wider affiliate industry. They’re exasperated that we’re not making more effort to bang down legislators’ doors or make ourselves heard at the top table. They struggle to understand why we’re not more alert to the retail media juggernaut. In a candid moment, they said we’re not a serious industry as we don’t want to pay for things that matter.
That final thought stings because it resonates so acutely with me. I’ve spent the last 18 months, cap in hand to the industry, trying to fund a new trade body. And I’ve had my fair share of people saying “but what do we actually get for our membership money”. They want a commoditised shopping list of benefits rather than feeling it’s intrinsically the right thing to do.
We’re all guilty of it. What would you say is one of the main (if not the main) age-old selling point of our industry? It’s that we’re performance-based. We can measure everything. We focus on return on investment. We’re efficient.
And that all reads well on a spreadsheet, but when was the last time you had to pitch about affiliate marketing to an accountant? When you remember a great advertising campaign, do you think about the product and the ad or are you, calculator in hand, trying to tot up what it cost? You never hear anyone in our industry getting misty-eyed with awe about a 10% discount code or higher cashback rate.
It’s almost like we know the price of everything but the value of nothing. That’s harsh I know, but our industry is so cost-controlled that our case studies tend to lead on figures rather than stories. Nuts and bolts, not hearts and minds.
Affiliate marketing has a golden opportunity to show and tell this year, but that will cost money to deliver. Next month, the APMA starts data collection for last year’s affiliate marketing numbers. This is an important piece of work; without which we cannot quantify the scale of our impact. The price is pretty meagre when you assess what full-scale research costs to deliver, but we’re still shy of the £8,000 project target.
Writing our own story
Research is important because it gives the industry heft. At January’s APMA member meeting, we gave a brief update on legislative changes we have the power to influence in 2025. This year we want to be in the right room with the right people and it’s important we come fully prepared.
Before we do that, however, we need to hand-craft the message to leave a lasting impression. We may only have one shot and it needs to be fully on point. It’s fully achievable because when you start to bring all the elements together you realise what a strong narrative we have.
This quarter, the APMA will start its lobbying efforts in earnest. We will be attempting to speak to the Government and regulators. So, what’s top of this Government’s priority list? It won’t shock you to learn that economic growth runs indelibly through every initiative. We can help there, in 2023 our channel outpaced digital growth by 50%. With an anaemic economy struggling for any green shoots, ours put on double-digit numbers.
They also want evidence of British success stories; industries they want to cultivate and support.
Per capita, we’re a larger affiliate market than the US and some of the channel’s most interesting business models now being exported overseas, like tech partnerships, originated here. Other boons are the lack of geographic boundaries to affiliate marketing, making it an eminently mobile industry supporting regional growth in the UK. We’re also an incubator for British start-ups and entrepreneurs, and with the expansion of small business products, offer SMEs another way of growing.
The Government has indicated that red-tape and barriers to business could be eased to help deliver growth.
If you’ve spent the past five years searching for a Brexit dividend, what about the potential to relax cookie and privacy consent criteria and, in doing so, remove one of the channel’s largest existential threats? We’ve spent the period since ushering in GDPR building a narrative of affiliate marketing data minimisation, making a case for affiliate’s attribution cookie. Now is the time to amplify that message.
With the ICO’s recent exemption for cashback and reward cookies in their purest forms, we also have a precedent to support our positioning.
Let’s tick another box. Affiliate marketing represents consumer empowerment; business models created to help people make better decisions and save money. It’s also ubiquitous, with one in ten pounds spent online flowing through an affiliate link (that research comes in handy), and according to Shopify, more than half of UK consumers relying on affiliate content to drive purchase decisions.
Bringing these threads together will be the role of APMA in 2025.
Regulators will tell you they prefer to deal with trade bodies rather than individual companies for obvious reasons; a single point of contact, an organisation which has done the heavy lifting to create the shortcuts and finessed messaging they need to make quicker and more informed decisions.
Lobbying and research will be cornerstone projects for the APMA in 2025. Beyond that, we will launch new best practice initiatives, particularly around payment processes and, separately, subnetworks. An audit of downloadable software is due for release in the coming weeks.
This doesn’t come for free and it’s not always easily measurable. Preaching to a choir of performance marketers why membership of a trade body doesn’t necessarily have an ROI attached will maybe be my biggest challenge this year.
