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Who is Lammo?
Posted by Lammo in 
I received an email from buy.at on Friday Evening (why networks still send stuff out when they know all the affiliates are in the pub is beyond me.. unless of course they want to “bury” some news…) Anyway, back to the email…
It would appear that as of Friday this week, the Hoff-meister himself, David Hasselhoff will no longer be the face of Pipex. Whoop-de-do. End of story. Move on. No?
Well, no it appears that isn’t the end of the story. Here is the email in full:
Dear John,
Please be aware that from Friday 12th October 2007, The Hoff will no longer be associated with Pipex.
From this date, there will no longer be any reference to The Hoff on the www.pipex.co.uk site or in its creative and the previous authorisation we gave you to use Hoff images will cease. All affiliates MUST have removed any hard coded creative with references to The Hoff by EOP on Friday 12th October. Creative will be dynamically updated.
Any affiliates found to be using The Hoff in their Pipex promotions after this date will leave themselves open to legal action.
If you have any questions regarding this, please let us know.
Thanks
Rich
Richard Way Quantum
Rosalyn Fenwick
Personal contact details removed
Now apart from the fact that there appear to be three people putting their name to this email, and the fact it was sent at Stupid o’clock on a Friday, there is one thing that sets this email apart from your bog standard “This has changed – Please update your sites” email…
Any affiliates found to be using The Hoff in their Pipex promotions after this date will leave themselves open to legal action
Really? So if I have a stray image of the Hoff on some obscure site somewhere, Pipex are going to send the boys round? What about if Google had an old cache of my site which is showing the Hoff’s pristine grin selling broadband and telephone packages – Will Pipex be threatening Google with legal action?
Or what if, heaven forbid… an Affiliate decided to take a fortnight’s holiday this week and next? Put simply, they’re going to be sat on a beach somewhere blissfully unaware of the fact that David Hasselhoff could be getting them in trouble, and will no doubt return from their hols to find they’ve been kicked off the program, and potentially being taken to court.
Sending an email out after 5pm on a Friday is no different to sending it out at 9am on a Monday morning – giving affiliates 4 days notice to remove all traces of the Hoff from their sites is totally unreasonable in my opinion. And to threaten affiliates with legal action if they don’t comply is way too heavy handed – Affiliates are meant to be partners, equals in the relationship. there’s no need to treat them as idiots/criminals/scum of the earth/fraudsters.
If you take the sentence about legal action out of the equation, it’s a perfectly reasonable request (albeit with insufficient notice). Most affiliates would happily comply, and those that don’t can be chased/threatened/harassed on a case-by-case basis. There’s no need to threaten everybody!
Of course, this only makes one iota of difference to you if you’re actually promoting Pipex – which I’m not. As much as I would like to, Pipex haven’t got around to approving my application yet, so three weeks after applying to the program I still can’t put any links up, but I do get the emails telling me to take them down, or else!
It’s just as well their broadband isn’t as slow as their affiliate approval rate… Oh, and the image of the Hoff at the top of the post is staying beyond 12th October. So sue me.
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Well, I thought buy.at were out of order sending this email out at 6pm on a Friday, effectively giving affiliates 4 days notice.
However, DGM have taken the biscuit by sending the same email out THIS AFTERNOON, giving a grand total of 34 hours notice before affiliates are “open to legal action”
There’s a reason I don’t work with DGM much – it’s escapades like this!
Hi John,
I appreciate your frustration but unfortunately we are at the whim of clients and we have to adhere to what they say. We can, and do, advise clients that they must provide both us and affiliates with adequate notice but sometimes they do not always listen.
In this instance, the changes taking place have implications across all marketing channels and I believe that is why we were given short notice on this.
I do hope that this is not held against us as a network, as much of this is outside of our control. We have been working hard to turn around affiliate thinking about us and we would welcome the opportunity to work with you to resolve some of your issues.
Matt
Unreal. Yet another example of ‘affiliates come last’ in the food chain.
Without affiliates there would be no f**king food chain!
Apolgies but I appear to be on the sharp end of another case of
‘merchant-moving-goalposts/Network-shoulder-shrugging’ reversed commission…again.
Hi Matt,
I hear what you’re saying, and appreciate that there is clearly a third party (agency?) dictating things here which is why the same email was sent out through buy.at and DGM.
What I don’t understand is why it took DGM 5 days longer than buy.at to pass the message on? And why DGM think it is acceptable (from a PR purpose if not ethically) to send out a message that gives just 34 hours notice of potential legal action without so much as an explanation?
Matt,
This is one of the typical examples of what is wrong with affiliate marketing, where networks BOW to the whim of the client & treat the affiliate as a second class citizen. It also makes the networks seem lily-livered. In this instance Buy.at & DGM. What with period of notice & allowing the aggressive wording to pass through. Who is the agency involved & what other programs do they represent?
Moose aka Paul aka Victor Meldrew aka Pain in the Backside aka Qui Gon Jinn
In a similar vein: why do affiliate networks send their weekly newsletters at the end of the business day? I’ve just had one about a new merchant who I’d like to promote and have applied to join their programme. But it’ll be some time tomorrow (at the earliest) before I get approved which means something else will have come up by then and this new merchant will be at the back of the queue for my attention.
Hi John/Paul/Anthony,
The reason that we announced this a few days after buy.at was due to an error in communication at the agencies end which meant that we didn’t find out until late Tuesday. We then communicated this to all affiliates as soon as we were able. We impressed upon the agency the need for increased notice for changes of this type and also for parity between the two networks. It certainly wasn’t laziness or us sitting on the information, please rest assured about that.
John I realise it is not acceptable to give so little notice but due to us receiving the message late we were left with little choice. I do feel the criticism regarding the tone of the communication is warranted and I will ensure that we are more human with our communication in future.
Mr Leaving The Day Job,
When would be the best time for us to send you communication? I have an eternal struggle with what to send out and when. Obviously we have a responsibility to communicate important campaign information to affiliates but I do not want to feel that we are spamming people. I know how much information we need to send out and if you multiply that across 10 networks then an affiliate is going to have a very full inbox and we risk important information not getting through.
If anyone has any ideas on how we could get round this please give me some ideas!!
Thanks,
Matt