Affiliate and influencer marketing have practically become joined at the hip in recent years. Consider recent influencer marketing platform acquisitions and partnerships, like the following:
This makes sense. The influencers need to connect with the brand advertisers, who are generally anchored with the affiliate program platforms. The platforms provide a marketplace, technical tracking, and payouts. But most importantly? Accountability.
We’ve all heard the horror stories of an advertiser having zilch in the way of return on some paid placement with a podcaster or other creator. This isn’t to say paid placements are unreasonable: creators don’t have the same scale with their time-consuming inventory and the advertiser may well repurpose the content they create.
Thus, hybrid deals are common and strike a balance between branding and direct response, leaning toward the latter because an expectation of performance remains. So influencer marketing is kind of a twin to traditional affiliate.
But in the wake of the Honey “scandal,” a threat now looms on the horizon. The claim that influencers lose their commissions to out-of-compliance browser extensions is false. Browser extensions appear to be in compliance with platform requirements and tracking data consistently shows low overlap (around 3% by most accounts). When there is overlap, the commission usually isn’t awarded to a browser extension, assuming the advertiser even allows them.
But how can such an emotive issue involving so many people be explained and resolved? The various lawsuits will continue to draw negative attention and spread untrue information. The fear of cookie overwriting may drive influencers away from regular affiliate programs.
So, what’s the solution? Platforms need to:
1) Identify all the common user and browser extension behaviors
2) Clearly explain how their platform regards, tracks, and credits each behavior, with variances by merchant program
3) Make this information available by API
Offering different, non-conflicting pathways (which I believe all the major platforms support) might be especially attractive to publishers who can be assigned to – say – the top, middle, or bottom of the funnel. This will likely be well received by the different players in each funnel and, because the overlap is slight, NOT add significant commission costs. If this is not done, we may see an unwelcome shift toward influencer-only networks, i.e., a new generation after the ones above that largely were acquired.
At Affiliate Summit West last week, several conversations left me discouraged that effective steps will be taken. I am concerned about what may happen if they are not. Influencer and affiliate should be joined together, not sundered apart.
.png?upscale=true&width=700&upscale=true&name=Heading%20(2).png)
