Given
that Holiday Decorations began being put up before
Thanksgiving, it’s no surprise that keeping one’s mind on
work isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially with
the holidays only weeks away. It’s like keeping focused
after Ad Tech with Thanksgiving generally right around the
corner. For some reason though, this year isn’t as similar
as years past. Personally, I have every reason to be
thinking about things other than work, and I’m not trying to
kiss up to the boss when I say this, but I’m stuck on work.
It seems that most of those people I speak to are in
the same situation. It’s getting close to crunch time for
getting together the holiday gifts, but many people, myself
obviously included, haven’t come close to finishing let
alone starting. While, it may sound like I’m talking about
friends, this applies especially to corporate gifts.
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I envy
those companies with established client services departments
where gift planning occurs in October and their
accountabilities boil down to picking out good cards and
sending the gifts on time. I know I wouldn’t mind being on
the receiving end of their efforts. Having seen what some
companies give away at tradeshows, I can only imagine what
they send their clients for the holidays. But how exactly
does a company decide not only what to send but to whom to
send it? In a CPM world, it makes sense that the publisher
would want to send a nice gift to its largest advertisers.
In a CPA world though, is it the other way around with the
advertiser sending the gifts as a way to thank the risk
taking nature of the publishers?
The notion of what gifts to send and to whom
they go shouldn’t be an ordeal. It’s not a tough concept,
but as surely as teenagers will rebel from their parents,
those of us in the performance marketing space will most
likely mess up the gift giving. Getting a gift is certainly
nice, but for some of the more cynical people, getting a
gift is simply a burden. Take publishers for example; they
want the ability to run ads when and where they please. It’s
like a work from home affiliate marketer having to entertain
a model; rather than being exciting, they’d almost be
happier without the extra complication.
Outside of our work lives, we give gifts to
friends and families - to the relationships that matter.
Towards the outskirts of the friends and family tree, things
get dicey, but the hierarchy for recipients is pretty easily
established for the core. In our work, we have relationships
that matter, so the gift giving logic should be the same as
it is for our social network. Of course, it isn’t. If it
were, there’d be no article. Picture yourself as an ad
network being paid on CPA. You could almost expect gifts
from your advertisers because you do the work in getting
them their volume, but they still write the checks so they
most likely expect a gift. Then there are the publishers.
You write them checks, but what’s the likelihood of them
giving you a gift? Their gift is still running your offers,
and you better believe they expect you to give them
something. Perhaps you do mutual gifts – tit for tat; that’s
certainly a prominent theme in our space.
In many ways, it would make things infinitely
easier were there no gift giving. It’s hard enough to know
the proper etiquette at a dining table, and those rules have
been around for hundreds of years. Here we are in an
industry that is less than a decade old with our not so
small niche really having been around for five years or
less. What chances do we really have of getting things
right? As though this weren’t tough enough, in comes another
curveball with the price level of the gift. Certainly, it’s
not appropriate to give the same gift to everybody, but then
how do you determine your tiers? We should be good at tiered
structures as we operate under them almost daily, but trying
to determine tiers when it comes to spending money on things
simply goes counter to what we do.
Luckily for us, relationships matter but actions
really do speak louder than words. Pay a publisher Net 15
instead of Net 45, offer $.20 more per zip, and give
consistent stats and they will most likely forgive not
having received a good gift. With an advertiser, deliver
consistent, quality volume, and chances are you’ll end up
getting a gift. If they happen to pay the most, have given
you an exclusive, and comprise several percentage points of
your revenue, chances are you’ll forgive their not sending
you anything. In the end, like our lives as consumers, we
should focus on the meaning of the holiday season and not
the gifts. Then again I probably say this as I’m behind on
my gift giving. If I forget you, please remember that I’ll
get you more leads in 2005.
