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While it makes sense in hindsight, at the time, circa August 2009, we found ourselves completely blown away by the size and scope of the incentive marketing space. For us, incentive marketing had always been associated...
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End of A Promotional Marketing Era
Public companies have many rules regulating how they conduct business, for many that means not just reporting revenue but also disclosing transactions of a certain nature. At the beginning of this week, one of the few publicly traded...
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Free Diapers and the Growing Barrier to Entry
If you had asked us in 2004 if email submit offers would still exist in 2009, we would have bet money against it. Fortunately, we didn't bet money because we would have lost. For reasons outlined in our overview of the incentivized...
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Free Diapers and the Future of Incentivized Marketing
It turns out that you can learn a lot from an offer for free diapers. For us, that journey into free diaper land helped cement a belief surrounding the email submit space - that not only is there continued consolidation but that the...
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The Incentive Landscape
If you have ever gone to a sporting event, you have had a first hand experience with incentivized marketing. At some part of the park, there is almost inevitably some credit card company handing out branded items of...
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Coupon Users Are Plagued by Expiration Dates and Invalidity
A survey commissioned by Coupon Craze and conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that though online shoppers are well-educated and relatively wealthy, many are prevented from taking advantage of savings offered through coupons because of expiration dates and other reasons for invalidity.
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World of Free - Lay of the Land
Admittedly, we still don't understand what the "1 Simple Rule" being touted by many flogvertisers actually is. Every time we see the line, "1 Rule to Weightloss: Obey" or its related iterations, all we think of is Andre the Giant...
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History Repeated? - Part 2
In the world of performance-based advertising, the price per action correlates directly with quality. The higher the quality, the greater the payout. Let's look at two examples, one from the lead generation world and one from the...
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History Repeated? - Part 1
Among almost all forms of performance-based online advertising, not many have enjoyed the fame and notoriety that incentivized marketing has. Its initial rise to prominence took place in a similar setting - a media...
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Incentive Promotion: Crossing the Chasm - Part 2
In the past we've written, probably more than any other publication, about various forms of incentivized marketing. It's an amazing business that has had more comebacks than John Elway, and despite the lickin', keeps on...
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Incentive Promotion: Crossing the Chasm
The rise of the fake blogs ("flogs") and what has subsequently been called flogvertising has its many supporters, e.g,. those making a killing and the FTC bean counters, as well as its fair share of detractors, e.g., burned...
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Quiz Show The Return - Part 1
Almost two years ago, an exploration of coffee led us to a unique lead generation site, although at the time, its revenue model and link to the lead generation world looked much less clear than they do today. The site...
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Offers to the Gallon
While outrageously high from a historic perspective and tragic in many cases, foreclosures impact a relatively small percentage of the total population. High gas prices on the other hand, you can't escape. Even if...
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Old is New Again
Every so often, new information changes our perspective. Every so often, some new bit of data comes along that causes us to take pause and reconcile what we thought we knew about an area with what we now...
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Gift Card Sales Will See 25% Increase
According to estimates made by Archstone Consulting, the 2007 holiday season will see $35.0 billion in gift card sales, a 25% increase from last year’s $27.8 billion figure.
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What's New in Incentivized Marketing
For many reasons - another record year expected in online advertising, Google first hitting $600 per share, Bidu passing $300, multiple multi-billion dollar acquisitions, record-levels of investment, a blog being valued at $100 million...
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Pushing the Envelope
It wasn't long ago that Valueclick announced it had received an inquiry from the FTC over its end user acquisition practices, something that didn't hurt the company's stock until they barely missed their second quarter...
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Captured: The Next Incentive Promotion
Every so often we like to highlight certain aspects of direct marketing. We've done this with various forms of lead generation, pure CPC arbitrage, and most recently with the incentive promotion space. The focus today...
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Valueclick and the Future of Incentive Promotion
A little more than two months ago, Valueclick announced an inquiry into their lead generation practices by the FTC. As required by securities law, the company filed a Form 8-K acknowledging the receipt of a letter of...
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iLegal - The FTC’s ValueClick Investigation and What it Means to You
Back in May in this column you read about the FTC’s current approach towards the incentivized advertising space. At that time, we discussed that large publicly traded companies could be involved. Well it’s old news in the industry...
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The Beginning of the End for Incentive Marketing
After ValueClick disclosed an inquiry into their lead generation practices by the FTC announcement stemming from the company's incentive marketing campaigns, it was only a matter of time before changes would start to make...
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Incentive Promotion / Valueclick
During last week's exuberance over the sales of 24/7 Real Media and aQuantive, one of the survivors in the online advertising space disclosed that the FTC has begun a formal inquiry into their lead generation practices.
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iLegal - The FTC, Incentivized Offers and the “Dot.com Disclosures”
There is quite a bit of concern in the online advertising industry right now around the subject of incentivized offers. Several large companies, including some that are publicly traded, generate large portions of their revenues in the...
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iLegal - “Incentivized” Offers and the FTC - Things Are Heating Up
The subject of "free" offers is something I’ve discussed previously in the iLegal column, and circumstances have once again pointed me in this direction. As I’ve stated before, one of the FTC’s current hot buttons is investigating...
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Better Practices for Incentive Marketers
After thinking that the incentive space might have slowed down, last week's analysis showed that if anything the opposite has occurred. Despite the competition on display, ongoing challenges with email marketing, and...
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Incentive Promotion Acting Badly?
At the Confidential, we loathe to criticize incentive marketing in general. In some ways, we feel a strange duty to protect and promote our own, not to mention that many of our sponsors have, and continue to, make their living...
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The Current State of Incentive Marketing...Sort of
We at the Confidential have covered the incentive marketing space for almost three years. A lot has changed during that time. Had you taken a poll in 2004 asking those in the interactive space if they thought incentive...
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Free Ringtones - The Real Incentive Promotion 2.0
Those that know me have probably seen that I have an odd passion for the economics of online offers, that is, trying to understand and explain why certain offers do well and what it takes for an offer to succeed - not just any offer...
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MetaReward. Dropping the Rewards.
In Internet Advertising 2006 - The Year That Will Be, I said, “Incentive marketing will change. Users love free iPods, and the aggregate of remnant inventory will still be incredibly large, but the day of the email / zip offer will...
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Incentive Promotion 2.0
Don’t let today’s “Effectiveness in Lead Generation” or hundred million plus dollar price tags of companies in the lead generation space fool you into thinking last year’s topic of conversation no longer shines brightly.
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Digital Thoughts - A Tale of Two Pixels
The incentive promotion space drives an inordinate amount of users into registration paths. The absolute breadth of the promotions and the speed to market with new incentive promotions has no peers in mainstream advertising. Everybody creating and...
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Maturation of the Incentive Space
The affiliate incentives space is changing fast. The industry has already gone through its introduction stage, on to the tail end of its growth, and beginnings of maturity stage-- all in a matter of a few years. The concept started as...
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Starbizzle and The Affiliate Space?
Consider that ubiquitous black liquid that you rely on every morning as your sole source of energy. Not oil… COFFEE.
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Digital Thoughts - The Next Big Thing
Were I to have access to more time, energy, and/or a statistician, I could point out the instances in my articles dedicated to the incentive promotion space. Without those, I can only speculate, but I feel confident in suggesting that they are numerous. I
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Claim your FREE* X!
Everyone in this industry has seen the last 2 years of online marketing following a trend of gathering leads by offering “free” goods.
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Incentive Marketing: A delicate balance
By now it has become commonplace for online marketers to tie incentives to their direct marketing efforts. It's obvious that rewards in the form of gifts, sweepstakes, points, and other creative iterations are a highly effective marketing tool.
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Online Surveys and the Reg Path: A Successful New Media for Lead Generation
The email marketing world has had to grapple with the dramatic changes in the past 12 months, with clients, legislators and consumers all reacting strongly to the impact of spam.
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