The Affiliate Summit Boston and Affiliate Marketing

My boss suggested that I go to the Affiliate Summit Boston the other week, as he was out of town traveling. The primary function of my current job is to optimize our ad networks and provide strong reporting on them. My goal of going to the Affiliate Summit was to possibly learn something, and potentially find new partner networks to work with and to fill ad inventory. I was excited to go, so I threw on something decent looking and went down to the WTC/Seaport area in Boston.

I had called ahead to the Affiliate Summit to check to see if we had already purchased tickets, and if otherwise tickets were availible. It seemed that we hadn’t already purchased tickets, so I intended to buy an Expo pass. I am firmly against excessively overpriced events, but I’ll rant/blog about that more in another post.

I show up and registration is a mess. They have seemingly three places to register. There’s the “Self Checking”, “Self Registration” and a long line of booths with various registration functions person to person. I checked Twitter and was pleasantly shocked to find that many friends were attending that day including @mathurrell, @chrisbrogan and @pistachio. So far, so good.

However I get in line at the “Self Registration” line and I’m told promptly that the tickets are sold out. However I’m given hope and snubbed in the same sentence by being told to “wait for a determination”. So I wait. And I wait. And I wait. The registration people can’t even seem to make the printers work and are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Don’t get me wrong, I understand registration can be a mess, confusion and hectic. Yet this was worse than most.

People behind the desk keep asking if they can help me, then telling me that its sold out. I ask who we are waiting on for this “determination”. Is it a Fire Marshall regarding fire code? Union workers? Management? God? They don’t know. They just know that someone will tell them and that there is no one to ask. I think all in all I wait 45 minutes. I twitter a few times about how poorly organized this is.

I’m a bit shocked and feel even more snubbed in that I’m know by at least a dozen people here who are attending, speaking or whatever and getting completely ignored. Maybe I make too big of a deal of myself. If I’d have shown up to Podcamp without a registration, I feel pretty certain that Sooz would have let me in (it was ’sold out’ too). I know we did that for a few people at ROFLCon that were friends of the speakers, etc. If social media people are there I’m frankly shocked if I’m treated poorly at an event. Needless to say, this was the first event in over a year that I’d entered in Boston and hadn’t been treated well, or had someone know me.

I end up getting in, after paying the $300 Expo registration fee. I notice a “security” flaw in their Expo/Full pass system in that the Expo-Only passes are exactly the same, but just happen to say Expo at the top. The Full passes don’t have any text there and the paper is shorter. Basically to turn your $300 Expo pass into a full pass all you need is scissors. I don’t do this, but take note of the lack of thought put into this.

The security guys at the door are overly tweaky. Must be Union or something. There are two at every door and they always want to see both sides of your pass when going through. Whatever, but it just seems like a little bit much security for the event.

Then we get to the floor. Let me make this clear, 95% of the booths and companies there make lawyers and used car salesmen look honest and upright citizens. Affiliate marketing for the most part is full of people that basically just want free advertising on your website. They don’t care about CTR, they don’t care about your eCPM, they don’t care about what your users want. They have all sorts of made up marketing terms to describe what they are doing. Take “CP” and add a random letter to the end to make a new 3 letter descriptor. CPP, CPB, CPV, whatever. All they want is people to put crap on their sites and for 10 suckers out there to buy something from them. The Expo floor was crawling with these types.

They are all pushing insane amounts of booth swag. Some of it is just ODD. One company gives out condoms, shot glasses, and asprin. Some companies have minibars at their booths. One has a blackjack table. I’m fine with that and play my hand of blackjack, swap business cards, and have a drink. Nothing comes off as authentic. All of these people are fake. None of them believe in their companies, products or team.

The few that do come off as decent are from brands I know already and have understated booths with little to no swag. These happen to be Google and Amazon among others. The Amazon guy was actually super helpful and gave me a few good ideas and the Google guy passed along some neat things too. Commision Junction (even though we use their service and give them literally million of impressions a month) was a bit awkward and rude toward me, but maybe they were just overwhelmed.

I handed out a lot of cards to the least slimy people on the floor and made a few semi-decent connections. Many of them that I handed my card out of pity have been overly aggressive in contacting me. I don’t personally like that, as its simply not my style. I don’t like people that seem desperate and inauthentic all at once. I’d have responded well to a person-written email to me, but two form emails and then getting hounded on the phone isn’t my style. Sorry, nothxkbai.

I should comment also on the $8 hotdogs and $3 bottles of water that were being sold, but those seem to be the standard, “Poorly planned event that is screwed by the convention center” fare. I’m not opposed to paying a bit for a conference/event, but at least don’t screw me on the food. The Plone Conference in Naples was like $700USD and had fully catered (excellent) food for a week. For the $300 they could have at least sat out free bottles of water. Hell, Podcamp Boston had free drinks and it was $50.

I will say that I did find 3-4 decent looking programs that we are considering using now, so the thing wasn’t a total wash. None of these have turned out to be rockstars yet however. I think I did learn a bit, in that affiliate marketing isn’t worth it at all. Bloggers, if you’re thinking of doing ads just stick with Google Adsense instead. It will pay you more.

The blogger lounge was great and I did happen to see some people that I knew there. It was pretty much the best organized thing of the conference. There was a flatscreen with a Wii, seats, beer and chill people. Better and more authentic conversations were happening there and I learned more in that room then I did on the floor.

I’m not sure who in the world would have been really strongly benefitted from the people pushing stuff at the Affiliate Summit. Perhaps people that simply don’t care about their readerbase. Perhaps people that don’t know how to get decent CPM advertising going. Who knows. It wasn’t me.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.