Top Tips: Compliance versus Advocacy - what are your affiliates saying about your brand

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To what extent should publishers have control over how they promote advertisers? Until a couple of years ago no one in the publisher world felt the need to ask themselves this question. It was happily accepted that publishers would promote advertisers with whatever the latter handed down to them: usually banners, offers or ready-to-use copy that could be lifted from a newsletter or feed and pasted directly onto a publisher’s site.

Now the relationship between advertisers and publishers has greatly changed. Typical publisher programmes are likely to include many publishers that are bigger brands than the advertisers they promote, and with this new status they can call the shots. Large publishers expect advertisers to compete for space in their marketing plans, rather than the other way round.

Does this tilt in the balance of power necessarily erode the amount of control advertisers can expect to exert over how their publishers present them online? If it is accepted that many customers prefer to shop via publisher’s site to visiting the advertiser directly, then rather than seeing publishers as middlemen elbowing their way into the customer’s purchase path, advertisers need to look at what it is the publisher is providing that the customer is not direct.

In this way, publishers can be considered advocates for your brand to an audience that you yourself may not be able to reach or engage with. One of the ‘hidden values’ of publisher marketing is that the branding and advertising publishers provide in support of a sale is effectively free: you as an advertiser only pay when they make a sale. Whilst advertisers have traditionally used banners for branding through the display channel, publishers understand that this method is a pretty ineffective way of converting to a sale, which is a problem if you are only paid when a sale is made. Precisely because banners do not convert to sales – and perhaps are not really designed to – for publishers branding is chiefly about content rather than banners. So who should control this content?

Advocacy

As has become clear through a number of recent social media fails, one of the hardest things for brands to get right is tone of voice. However, the trust and authority that publishers have achieved with their users is based on getting precisely this aspect right. This is what makes them so valuable to advertisers.

MoneySavingExpert.com is a perfect example: a site that insists on writing their own copy and has the muscle to dictate these terms to advertisers. The site is editorially-driven and deals are selected on their strength rather than the commercials for Money Saving Expert.

But what about a smaller site, a fashion blog for example, that has a large readership and is passionate about its subject matter? Would a fashion advertiser be comfortable with this publisher posting a negative review of its product or service, or hosting its readers’ comments to this effect? Do the risks of drifting ‘off message’ outweigh the benefit in terms of sales, or the opportunities of leveraging the authority the site commands amongst its readers? Some advertisers clearly think so.

Compliance

Advertisers usually address compliance through a process of auditing their publishers, a process that is becoming both more common and demanding for those undertaking it. Rather than looking across publishers’ sites to ensure they are using on-message copy – as if expecting publisher sites to mirror the messaging provided on the advertiser’s site – would it not be better to ask how good a fit the publisher’s site was for the brand? The essential question in a publisher audit should be: am I happy to have this publisher introduce a potential customer to my brand? This is simple to answer, reduces the workload on those conducting the audit, and leaves room for creativity and innovation in the way that publishers choose to address their users in promoting your brand.

However, there can sometimes be compliance aspects that are outside the control of both the advertiser and the publisher: the finance sector being an obvious example. But other advertisers are increasingly putting compliance considerations front-of-mind thanks to the recent extension of the Advertising Standards Authority’s digital remit.

At the same time as compliance requirements are becoming more demanding, so many publisher relationships are developing into affinity partnerships. These considerations demonstrate the challenge for advertisers to strike a balance between compliance and advocacy on their publisher programmes.

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