Fascinating news this morning that Digital Window, parent company of Affiliate Window, have bought buy.at from AOL. Clearly buy.at was floundering under AOL and the Americans seemed very keen to get rid of their rumoured £67 million purchase. I never really understood how an affiliate network fitted in to the Platform A proposition and since AOL decided to do away with that, the writing was on the wall for buy.at.
However the purchase by AWin does raise a few questions. Mainly what is in it for AWin?
They already claim to have the best technology, and have been the leading network in terms of innovation for the last 2 or 3 years. I struggle to think that AWin would be taking on the buy.at tracking, and many of the innovations seen have from buy.at that are mentioned in the article above are simply replicas of AWin products.
In terms of staff, the majority of the senior staff who helped buy.at get to where they have are all gone. The likes of Steve Brown, Mal Cowley and Kevin Cornils were the people that established buy.at but AOL let them all leave. Many more of the good employees there have either taken, or are taking the lucrative redundancy package offered by AOL. True, there are still some good account managers there but surely it would be cheaper to prise them away by offering them a few grand more than it is to buy the company.
So if it’s not technology and it’s not people that AWin are acquiring, then what is it? Buy.at have a decent client list but a lot of those clients are dual network with AWin. It would seem, and would be no surprise, that AWin have been aggressively targeting buy.at clients and have managed a fair bit of success. Whereas buy.at used to have a pretty impressive exclusive client list, this isn’t really the case any more.
I’m sure that the guys at AWin and Springer/Publicis have done their maths and I’m also sure that they’ve got a pretty good deal. They must feel that they can make back the money they’ve spent pretty quickly and that acquisition is a cheaper alternative than spending the next 18 months trying to prise more and more buy.at clients away, or that it’s worth spending this money to prevent anyone else getting hold of them.
My second concern is around the impact on the market. By merging, this creates a behemoth of a network within the UK and if you throw Zanox into the mix, across Europe. I hope that having such dominance will not stifle the innovation and improvements to the industry that have been seen so far. Having this amount of power can go one of two ways generally; it can cause complacency or it can lead to the company in question really pushing on. Hopefully in this case the latter will occur.
I sincerely hope that this is a success and I wait with anticipation to see what happens. The one thing that it does show is the tremendous work that has been done at Affiliate Window by Kevin Brown, Mark Walters, Adam Ross, Pete Loveday, Kevin Edwards, Mat Downs and the rest of the guys. When I came down to London and began to work in this industry 4 years ago AWin were, with all due respect, not one of the major players in terms of networks. A proactive management approach, coupled with a sensible yet ambitious strategy and the recruitment of a good team of people has enabled this. It goes to show that concentrating on what you’re good at and working hard can lead to incredible results.
