#5: Affiliate carte blanche
"Get me 10,000 new customers by the end of the quarter. No, I don't care how," is an oft-repeated mantra, especially for direct response advertisers. What many advertisers don't understand is that this is riskier than tap dancing on a land mine.
With carte blanche to do whatever it takes to generate customers, an affiliate can and often will use all sorts of unsavory tactics, including creating its own affiliate program comprising all sorts of sketchy folks who will also use any and all means at their disposal. Those means are often along the lines of spam, phishing scams, bogus co-registration, spyware and all sorts of other nasty (and likely fraudulent) things.
Ever see a piece of spam come into your inbox from an otherwise respectable brand and wonder why the marketer would resort to spam? This is precisely how that happens. Someone on the marketing team needs to reel in an affiliate.
In the recent past, an affiliate of one of our clients was tasked with generating a certain number of registrants for the client. When they found they couldn't live up to their commitment, they moved from respectable marketing tactics toward shady ones. When the registrants they referred immediately opted out from my client's offering upon receiving email confirmation, it was a huge red flag that something had gone awry. In this case, the affiliate had simply -- and shadily -- force-subscribed people in its own database to the client's offer. Thankfully, we had guidelines in place such that the client could immediately sever all ties with the affiliate without penalty.
Such guidelines are a necessity if advertisers are going to do business in the affiliate marketplace or in the realm of CPA advertising. Otherwise, the brand is at risk of both legal exposure and being associated with shady marketing tactics.
