18th April saw the latest IAB Affiliate Council meeting – the first of which I have attended.

I wrote quite a few notes but I’ll try and condense these into something more readable. Firstly I wanted to talk about my objectives for attending; after the last meeting just over a month ago an article appeared in NMA which stated:

“The IAB Affiliate Network Council (ANC) will draw up an affiliate code of conduct before the summer”

There were a few blog posts about this and being involved in the Affiliate Marketing Community I decided to give the IAB a call and see what it was all about, which later led to my invite to attend.

In attendance were:

David Hall (Chairman)
Steve Brown (Buy.at)
Bruce Clayton (Existem-AM)
Matt & Helen (DGM)
Pete (Affilinet)
Julia (Affiliate Window)
Dan & Jack (IAB)
Nic / Dan (Ad.com)
Steven & ? (Pigsback)
Affiliate Manager from Zed Media

There were some apologies from a few other networks (CJ/TD) and from Keith Budden as the only affiliate who seemed interested in attending.

The agenda for the meeting was as follows:

1) Update on guide book
2) Affiliate Reaction to Council
3) Council PR
4) Code of conduct – discussion on issues
5) AOB

I’ll tackle these one by one; firstly, the Affiliate Guide. This is something being developed by a number of networks and agencies and will be available for IAB members. I won’t go too much into the contents but it’s basically 750 words over 13 chapters ranging from “What is Affiliate Marketing” to “How do I present Affiliate Marketing to the board”. Aimed at Merchants it could well be something very useful but this obviously depends on how well it is distributed.

The next points were in relation to the Affiliate Reaction (i.e. the blog posts) and the Council PR.

I was asked by David on why I felt that there had been a negative reaction and stated how I felt that a lot of the problems seem to stem from the article in the NMA which didn’t give a clear insight into who the “Code of conduct” was aimed towards. A few things came out of this:

1) The council is open for anyone to attend but their board room does have limited space so anyone that wants to go should speak to Dan Redfearn to confirm their attendance.
2) Networks and agencies attending were encouraged to bring both Affiliates and Merchants along to future meetings.
3) The objective of the board should be defined as: “Putting affiliate marketing at the heart of online marketing strategies”
4) The IAB would lead an initiative to communicate more effectively to the affiliate community – this will be though a podcast with Fraser, Blogs and the A4UForum.
5) All future agendas and minutes will be posted on a new section of the IAB site available for anyone to view

It was a good outcome and if I can make the next meeting I hope that we will see more affiliates and merchants in attendance and helping to drive the council objectives forward.

The last point to make was on the code of conduct that was mentioned in the NMA article. Essentially the code of conduct is aimed at networks – not affiliates or merchants – something that was not made clear in the article.

Some of the suggestions (by David Hall) were:

1) Payment to affiliates
2) Checking affiliates authenticity
3) Tracking
4) Spyware
5) Service levels

There was a lot of debate over how high or low the threshold of entry should be for this and what potential penalties would be for anyone that breaches the code. Ultimately there was no agreement but it looks thought he threshold could be extremely low – my personal opinion on this is that the code could be something that can be used to encourage some of the networks to change their ways and fix some of the wrongs caused by them in Affiliate Marketing, but I think I was the only person there that felt this way.

I still have a number of reservations on if the code of conduct will have any affect on forcing change from networks but it was good to see that a group of people are getting together regularly and hoping to help develop the industry as a whole, encouraging new merchants to come on board and improving the overall perception that some “outsiders” have.

The next meeting is on the 30th May – if you want to go along you should email Dan (dan at iabuk dot net).

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