A4U Expo

Today is my first day back in the office after attending the fantastic A4U Expo in London last week. What a great event!

From my perspective, it was great to just get a couple of days out of the office, surrounded by a group of people who are so passionate about affiliate marketing and to see what an industry it has become.

There was so much to take in, but the main points I took from it all were:

(1) The phrase "content is king" has never been more true. New features such as Affiliate Window's "Shop Window" product, and the Content Generator from Paid on Results are making it even easier for merchants to provide up-to-date content for affiliates to use. Product Feeds are clearly a basic "must-have" - this has probably been the case for some time, but I guess the event just really hammered this home, and getting a decent product feed is top of my list for the Books Direct programme!

(2) Social Networks are going to be huge from a marketing perspective - once we all figure out exactly how to get the most out of them! What was clear though, was that to really make it work, you need to carefully consider the medium and create something that suits. Given that Books Direct works on a club mechanic, and that we already have a vast range of member reviews and other UGC, it seems like we're in a great position to be able to take advantage of the social networking phenomenon. I'll certainly be giving some careful thought to capitalise on this next year...!

(3) The last click debate continues...At both the Expo and at AdTech, I saw that the use of universal tracking tags seems to be becoming more prevalent, with many merchants starting to take a more holistic view of how online sales are generated. This is definitely something that we'll be looking into more next year to help us better understand ROI from various campaigns and to attribute media spend appropriately. It's clear that various media owners will then want to take this to the next level, where commissions are apportioned accordingly. I think this is a good idea in practice, but someone is going to come up with a straight-forward and robust way of doing this for merchants to really embrace it.


I met some fantastic people, and just wanted to say thanks for everyone who took the time to chat about what they're doing, and how we could work together. I especially wanted to thank Gary, Fiona and Tara at Equator for introducing us to some great people, and to Clarke Duncan who spoke so enthusiastically about affiliate marketing that I came away thinking how glad I am to work in this industry and how much I enjoy my job! :)