It has been a month since I started trying to get my head around this online affiliate marketing business (seeing as even though I’ve spent the better part of my working career avoiding advertising even though it’s what I originally studied – now through no doing of my own I’m suddenly knee deep in what is essentially a state of the art advertising business, and really getting into it :), so admittedly I probably have no idea of what I’m talking about in what I’m about to post, but…
My distant colleague, Jim Kukral wants a new name for affiliate marketing.
I thought about this a bit on the way home this evening and came up with ‘Distributed Marketing’ – which I think is very accurate, but unfortunately it’s about as sexy as a two day old wet fish, an ugly one. So that idea evolved into ‘Auxiliary Marketing’ I like that its kinda geeky as well as kind of retro in an almost animé kind of semiology.
From there my mind strayed into thinking about Doc Searl’s post ‘Wake up Neo’ delivering his open system markets doctrine from the perspective of suposed net-nuetrality issues. He talks about the paradigms that treat of customers/users and their data as commodities to be hosted – and fiercely guarded – in silos, about businesses basically modeling themselves on silos.
The ‘leaked’ Yahoo! memo – the peanut butter manifesto – by Yahoo! V.P. Brad Garlinghouse also talks about silos.
It’s actually quite interesting watching the whole silo race, I mean the way everyone seems to be attempting building bigger vaster silos encapsulating others’ silos. Affiliate marketing, and especially affiliate marketing management could also be seen as building silos, if seen as purely outsourcing of some of the marketing and promotions functions of organizations. But it can also be a bit like being a plumber servicing both the silos, grain and – god forbid – peanut butter as well at the same time.
PS: By the way, I finally got round to putting up an About page for this blog, … About this (Anti) Blog.
PPS: Peanut butter can be pretty nasty stuff.