Frederic Martin's List: Digital Marketing

• Affiliate marketing is an online marketing/advertising/sales channel in which advertisers (online merchants that sell products or services) pay publishers (independent parties that promote the products or services of an advertiser via the internet… sometimes called “Affiliates”) only for results.
• There are many different ways in which publishers promote products and services. Here are a few examples:
    • Social Media
    • Coupon Sites
    • Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertisers
    • Loyalty Sites
    • Mall Sites
    • Blogs and Niche Sites
    • Loyalty sites
• An Affiliate Marketing program is likely to be successful if these key conditions can be met:
   1. Successful, experienced program management is available internally or via outsourcing
   2. The product portfolio presents a combination of volume and price that will justify the expense of an affiliate program
   3. The product can be purchased via a trackable means. Tracking technology is evolving rapidly and includes support for text links, banner ads, and telephone calls (a recent mainstream development), among others
• “Affiliate marketing should be a main component of the online marketing strategy for any online business selling goods or services. With a fixed cost it has the least risk and can generally allow you more room to spend on other channels.”
• Affiliate marketing is a relationship based marketing channel with a steep learning curve and a variety of options for implementation. Solutions range from full-service Outsourced Program Management (firms that do this are called OPMs) to completely in-house hosted and managed solutions.
• online merchants that fail to exploit this marketing channel run the risk of losing business to competitors that build strong affiliate program.
• With thoughtful selection of an Affiliate Marketing solution merchants have a low risk means to protect their existing online sales, and extend their market reach dramatically.

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• Food brands will be hot in 2009 as families hunker down in the kitchen to prepare meals at home and avoid the high cost of dining out
• The Obama brand could continue to be hot in 2009
• "Must have" brands such as Apple will also continue to be leaders
• It's the brands in the middle that will feel the squeeze more so than price-conscious brands such as Target or "must have" brands such as Apple
• Amazon and TiVo, as a result of their partnership in 2009 that makes it possible for consumers to buy products they may see on TV through their TiVo remote.
• The ones that stop thinking like brands and start thinking like publishers. Two examples of brands that are on the right track are American Express and Asus
• Investment and commercial banks left standing will turn to the internet to engage consumers in conversations about trust.
• The biggest shakeups will be on the brands where traditional media just can't cut it anymore. For example, brands with young audiences will see that they can't rely on TV as much anymore because more of their audience is online and on mobile devices.
• If they haven't figured out how to leverage digital by this point, they're going to see diminishing returns on media spends a lot sooner than they might have in previous years. This will lead to shakeups if executive management doesn't see a clear path to defined roles for digital media.

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