Affiliate Marketing Industry Growing Fast Despite Economic Downturn
The advertising industry is often the first industry that sees its revenue shrink in time of economic downturn.
As companies solidify their base, look for cost cutting measures, they almost always reduce marketing budgets significantly in order to deal with less consumer spending. Interactive advertising in general has put a cog in this type of thinking, as more and more companies realize there are opportunities online even in a downturn.
Riding that wave of positivity is affiliate & performance based marketing. This industry has seen enormous growth year after year, even as some economists talk all the time about gloom and doom. That’s because the affiliate performance based marketing model has numerous advantages that are only yet being understood by brands.
Affiliate and performance marketing has been around since the start of the Internet. In fact, many people credit Amazon’s and EBAY’s affiliate referral program and being a key component in its success. Yet, for whatever reason, many fortune 500 companies and brand names haven’t embraced the model until very recently.
Chris Trayhorn, the publisher of Performance Revenue, the magazine for Performance and Affiliate Industry explained that “performance marketing has grown up and matured dramatically in the last couple of years…We are now seeing large networks providing full agency services and investing huge amounts in tracking and personalization technologies.”
According to Trayhorn, “Major brands and mainstream advertisers have been slow to adopt performance marketing, mostly because of outdated ideas of the risks involved and because many CMOs simply don't know much about it.” He explains that in this market, where many Chief Marketing Officers only have 18 months to succeed, it is the perfect time for them to use affiliate and performance marketing to hit their numbers.
Experience Advertising, the top-ranked affiliate management company, that manages two dozen affiliate programs, is one such company that is seeing immense growth this year. Evan Weber, the CEO of the company, explains that part of the success has to do with the rapid expansion of both social media and blogging.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati