So that’s the story.

Affiliate marketing is obviously part of the story but people like reading what’s new; and the Foursquare part of it is new.

Let’s just hope our perceived value and press relating to that increases as we continue to drive absolute returns for advertisers & brands.

If we take pizza for example, I’ve seen an affiliate redirect traffic from one pizza brand to another as well as one collating data off the back of “brand ranking”.

The ethics of that can be discussed amongst AM people until we’re blue in the face, but an outsider may just see these things as tactically low and a poor reflection on the industry.

If we want people to writing sexy about the industry, then perhaps we need to start making sure the bad apples are out of the barrel first?

What Domino’s has done over the past year is increase sales through a very clever and integrated online strategy – using both social and affiliate amongst other channels.

The reason the media and also Domino’s themselves have put such an emphasis on the social side of it, and even called affiliate social too, is that it is so front of mind.

As someone who covers social and not affiliate, i think more should be said about the part affiliate marketing has to play in social. Domino’s is a great case study in how both can be leveraged to deliver real results for brands.

Seen a lot of anti-Affiliate comments in statements coming out of Agency outlets the past wee while, even “some of our own” are going on about how Affiliate Marketing has a bad reputation, so may be a bigger agenda going on, but it would seems many are interested in playing up the small minority of “bad apples” in Affiliate Marketing, gosh the Agencies would have a hell of a time if Affiliates got together and pointed out the over spending and kick back taking Agencies, that do deals on behalf of clients not based on what’s best for the client but simply what’s easiest and most profitable for them.. Admittedly that’s just a tiny minority of Agencies but would all Agencies like it if that’s what Affiliates talked about and tried to gain press about their bad apples, I doubt it.

So good work pointing out the Affiliate aspect, question is will people stand up at conferences and point out that social media probably didn’t play as big a role as the people who dearly want it to be doing would have you believe, just need to look at the Dell example they all talk about, look at the figures and have a little chuckle when you compare it to what they do as a company and what has been shown in other channels

p.s. I love Twitter and Facebook and they going to make more people rich as they go along but let’s not abandon everything we know to be working just yet

I thought it particularly interesting that Will didn’t make a single mention of the word “Affiliate” himself in the article. Was he worried he was going to alienate other large publishers, or was the revenue model hidden well enough behind ShopStyle for the affiliate connection to remain implicit?