If you answered “no,” why not? 

First off, affiliates get to attend for free. So, grab a cheap plane ticket – or if you’re close enough, drive to the event – and get your friends together and pile into a hotel room. Then spend the next few days learning how to improve your business.

Second, look at the list of speakers! Keynotes from our very own CEO, Peter Bordes as well as Kris Jones from Pepperjam. Additionally there will be people from Ebay, Vertive, Clickbooth and Yahoo. Not enough you say? How about industry legends like Jeremy Schoemaker, Hamlet Batista, Heather Paulson and our own Jivan Manhas? There is definitely no shortage of talent at this event.

Third, you can’t forget the social aspects of a conference. These are usually the best opportunities to shake hands, have a drink and spend a little more time talking with potential partners. Affiliate Convention will have ample opprtunity for these types of interactions including a golf tournament, a pre-party hosted by the likes of Shoemoney and WickedFire, an “Affiliate Bash” hosted by Webmaster Radio and a closing day-two party.

Finally, we’ll be there covering the event for our blog and Relevantly Speaking. If you are a regular reader here, you know we’re always searching for interviews with the best and the brightest in the online marketing industry to share their wisdom. If you’d like to be a guest on Relevantly Speaking and you’ll be in Denver, please email me at sparentATmediatrustDOTcom.

UPDATE 6/11/09: Read our press release on Econsultancy.

Each year one of our staff is reconized and honored by their peers at MediaTrust. The 2008 award (albeit five months overdue) goes to Geofferson Marcy for setting an example to all for living our core MT beliefs and business culture. Geoff has made great contributions to the MediaTrust family members, our business partners and the industry. He’s demonstrated great leadership and sets an example to us all in team work, integrity, ethics, coaching, collaboration and proactivity. His contributions have made a meaningful impact in building and improving our company and industry. Thank you for you insight, ethics, dedication, passion and inspiration. You are a mentor to us all!

Your Family Members,

MediaTrust

Affilicon Israel is just a couple short weeks away. If you’ve been watching Relevantly Speaking, you’ve surely seen Itay Paz’s (of Affilicon) videos about the state of affiliate marketing from around the world. You’re probably also aware that I’ll be there shooting interviews and blogging from the event. What you may not know is what else MediaTrust is up to at Affilicon.

MediaTrust is not only a platinum sponsor for the event, but we’re also moderating three panels as well. Check them out:

International Affiliate Programs – Monday 6/1 12:45 – 2:00 PM 

Online marketing has no boundaries. If you are successful with your local, domestic affiliate programs, it is time to start acting globally. In today’s competitive market finding the right niche and product is key to your success. This panel includes top industry experts who are willing to share their experience as vendors, affiliates, networks and super affiliate. Don’t miss it!

Moderator: Jivan Manhas, Head of Sales, MediaTrust
Speakers: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Sales & Business Development, Clickbank
Felix Leshno, Affiliate & Entrepreneur, Net Monster
Bill Yucatonis, Director of Affiliate Marketing, Everest Gaming
Ran Aroussi, CEO, Clickim College

Social Media Strategies

During the last 12 months social media became a key player in online marketing. Some would say that president Obama won the election through his involvement with Social Media. The panel will discuss the latest developments in this space.

Moderator: Jivan Manhas, Head of Sales, MediaTrust
Speakers: Sam Goldfarb, Founder & General Manager of Tradimax
Miriam Schwab, CEO of illuminea marketing & media
Oren Todoros, CEO & Co-Founder of HYPick.com

Why You Need to Be Good Friends with Your Affiliate Manager

Affiliate managers are your representative at the network. While being responsible for setting your commission structure and your special bonuses and promotions, the affiliate managers have access to the network’s resources and they can help you utilize them. The affiliate managers sit on the entire affiliate database and they clearly know what works and what does not. Join this session to learn what really matters and why you need to be good friends with your affiliate manager.

Moderator: Glenn Pagan, SVP Network Sales MediaTrust
Speakers: Shay Shevach, Affiliate Director, Rummy Royal

***

If you’re attending Affilicon, make sure you send me an email at sparentATmediatrustDOTcom. I’d love to get together and interview you for Relevantly Speaking. We’ll also be there shooting video for Affilicon, so who knows – you may end up on their homepage!

MediaTrust CEO, Peter Bordes, Featured in BusinessWeek Article: CEOs Who Use Twitter

I’ve been with MediaTrust for just over two years. I was hired to outline and execute all facets of MediaTrust’s emerging and social media activity. This occured at a time when Twitter and Facebook were still niche services and companies were still trying to wrap their heads around the concepts of podcasting and online video. In short, two years ago was an eternity for social media.

Why am I telling you this?

Peter Bordes is the reason I have my job. He had the vision two years ago to see what social media could become. He knew that this was exploding into something that would change the way that business is done. Peter has always believed in transparancy, open dialogue and two-way communication and he knew that in order for MediaTrust to stay competitive and be a leader in our industry, the company would need to dedicate resources to building our social media presence. 

Over the last two years, we’ve launched a successful blog about the industry of online, and specifically, performance marketing. We’ve produced over 60 episodes of our video program, Relevantly Speaking, and we’ve adopted and encouraged Twitter and Facebook usage throughout our entire company.

These milestones were made possible by the vision of our CEO, Peter Bordes. It is incredibly validating for me that a publication like BusinessWeek recognized and highlighted the vision of Peter and other CEOs like him. You can read Peter’s portion of the profile HERE. You’ll notice he’s in good company alongside people like Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, Zappos.com’s Tony Hsieh, Alltop’s Guy Kawasaki, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore and Forrester Research’s George Colony.

Congratulations to Peter for being recognized, but most of all for his vision. We can’t wait to see what he dreams up next.

Today I’m pleased to announce the first baby steps in a project that we’re calling MediaTrust University.

Every month we have conversations with dozens of affiliates about what they want in a network partner. Sure, they all ask for helpful tools, great offers and a stellar affiliate manager. But, more than anything, we hear about the need for education.

Whether you’re a super-affiliate or someone just starting out, we’re hearing the call from those that want to learn tip and tricks to run their business in a more efficient and profitable way. MediaTrust University (MTU) will try and fill that void.

You’ll notice a new icon at the top of the blog labeled “MT University.” If you click it, our blog will sort, in reverse chronological order, all the articles that have an educational or “how-to” component to them. No matter what type of affiliate you are, there are many flavors including SEO and SEM, best practices in sourcing data and ways to optimize your website for better conversions. These articles are written by leaders in the space that work the trenches every day so you know the information is sound.

Over time, you’ll see this repository continue to grow and we’ll be adding more topics as feedback warrants. In the meantime, if there is a topic you’d like more information on, please email me and let me know – sparentATmediatrustDOTcom. I’ll do my best to find an expert and post and article.

MediaTrust CEO, Peter Bordes, has joined the Affilicon’s Advisory Board. Below is Peter’s quote that appeared in the press release:

“The need for well planned and executed affiliate marketing conferences in the non US international market was not fulfilled until recently. Affilicon has read the map, identified the top emerging affiliate marketing markets and demonstrated dedication, professionalism and ability to cover this need,” says Peter Bordes.”I am pleased to join the advisory board and work with Affilicon to expand our industry and help build the international and emerging markets. Our industry is growing rapidly and expanding into new emerging markets. Affilicon is helping lead the way. I look forward to see how it is evolved and spend time at the conferences speaking with advertising and affiliate partners.” adds Mr. Bordes.

I’ve been working with Itay Paz, Founder of Affilicon, for the last few months and he’s really doing some interesting things. If you’re a regular viewer of Relevantly Speaking, you’ve no doubt seen his field reports from around the world about the various opportunities for affiliate marketing in different countries. The concept of Affilicon takes that curiosity and knowledge a step further.

Congrats to Peter on his addition to the advisory board of this very exciting organization.

We are pleased to announce that our unified corporate website is going live today! Advaliant.com traffic will now redirect to MediaTrust.com, the Advaliant platform’s parent company. The purpose of this update is to simplify our brand and our communications.

Your business on Advaliant will not be impacted in any way. It’s business as usual, simply a new place to login. As we go through this change, please be aware of the following:

1. Traffic will redirect from Advaliant.com to MediaTrust.com
2. Please bookmark: www.mediatrust.com as your new login for the Advaliant platform
3. Your Advaliant login (user name and password) will remain the same
4. All referral IDs will remain in place and working
5. All future emails from your affiliate manager or the company will come from mediatrust.com not advaliant.com, so please make a note of it in your email preferences
6. We will continue to receive all emails sent to advaliant.com

It’s a very exciting time for MediaTrust and the Advaliant Platform. We’d like to thank each of you for your continued support! Feel free to reach out to your Affiliate Manager with any questions.

The federal Trade Commission is going to be looking at setting guidelines and standards for best practices for the online marketing industry and consumers. The FTC is suggesting that bloggers and social media marketers who use false statements about products they promote will be held liable. If the proposed guidelines come into effect, affiliate publishers and marketers will need to use the same sort of strategies and care that traditional publishers and infomercial producers do.

This is part of the FTC’s advertising-practices divisions effort to “update guidelines that are 30 years old.”

The FTC commissioners will be voting on the new proposed guidelines later in the summer. This is part of the new regulation-minded administration in Washington that wants to set better standards, definitions and best practices in the online marketing industry.The administration will be formalizing many areas of our business’s framework from paying taxes to outlawing unethical business practices.

The online marketing industry is still very young and has been allowed to have too much undefined grey area for marketers and consumers. This effort will cause some initial pain and awkwardness for some of our online marketing community, but in the long run our industry will greatly benefit. This will create a more solid foundation and greater credibility for growth – especially in the the performance marketing segment of our markets.

We will be launching a compliance resource center in our platform for our advertising and affiliate publisher partners. The center will be updated with all the new policies and procedures plus other hosted compliance solutions. We are looking forward to our industry’s next evolution in becoming a more mature and vibrant business. Stay tuned and also make sure to reach out to us if you need any help understanding the many moving parts of compliance and our markets.

(Photo by Shawn Collins) 

Last week at ad:tech, MediaTrust hosted a panel called: Performance Marketing–Getting the Most from Your Marketing Dollar in a Tough Economy.

The panel included: Steve Schaffer (Vertive), Jarvis Mak (Havas Digital), Peter Bordes (MediaTrust) and Kelly Powers (Zazzle)

It was moderated by Neil Strother of Forrester Research.

There was a good sized crowd gathered and they seemed to really want to get down to the nuts and bolts of how to make performance marketing work in a practical setting. Below are some quotes (paraphrased) from panelists and attendees:

“Affiliate programs will scale better if they are paid equally to other customer acquisition channels.” - Steve Schaffer, Vertive

“Brand awareness is not enough to drive your sales.” - Kelly Powers, Zazzle

My favorite question was asked from the audience by Stephen Smyth. He asked “Is there a metric you can put on brand safety?”

Wow. That got me thinking – how can you effectively track numbers and trends on your brand’s safety? Does anyone have a formula or theory on how this could be done? Seem’s like a business waiting to happen. Can you imagine what Fortune 500 companies would pay for that knowledge?

I digress. 

If you were at the panel, you witnessed an engaging discussion about why companies should consider performance marketing. We also got some perspective from companies actively engaged in the space including Intuit – who said they have increased their spend year over year, but have relied on fewer trusted networks – and Zazzle – who said that execs sometimes see affiliate marketing as something that is frowned upon.

That’s what I took away from the panel. If you attended, tell me what your take was…

Next week, MediaTrust heads to San Francisco for ad:tech. We’re always trying to shake things up and differentiate ourselves when we head to events, so this year, instead of a booth, we’ve put together a panel about performance marketing:

Performance Marketing–Getting the Most from Your Marketing Dollar in a Tough Economy 

How can marketers get the most from their budgets in a difficult economic climate? We’ll explore how to attain more from a smaller budget via performance marketing with practical, tactical solutions. We’ll look at the pros and cons of allocating dollars to performance marketing and we’ll discuss what technological innovations are coming to the performance marketing space that will maximize budgets and minimize challenges.

MODERATOR:

Neil Strother – Analyst, Forrester Research

PANELISTS:

Steve Schaffer – Founder and CEO, Vertive

Jarvis Mak – Senior VP, Global Research and Insights Director, Havas Digital

Peter Bordes – CEO, MediaTrust

Kelly Powers – Senior Manager, Customer Acquisition, Zazzle

The panel is Wednesday, April 22 – 1:30 PM  - 2:30 PM – Room 3009. We hope to see you there!

In addition to our panel, we’d like for you to make a point to see us. We’re looking to talk to advertisers who are currently working with us, and those who aren’t, to give us their thoughts, opinions, and feedback on using network applications for their performance marketing programs. Daniel Cheriyan, Product Manager for the advertiser experience of the Advaliant Platform, will be attending some of the sessions and walking the exhibit hall, so please feel free to meet up, say hi and give us your thoughts. You can reach Daniel via email: dcheriyanATmediatrustDOTcom.