“Publishers Spoke. ‘We’ Listened.” Hmmmmmmmmm. I’ve heard that Somewhere Before.
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
OK. Let me start by saying that I’m a fan of Performics. I’ve enjoyed working with Performics over the years and I’ve had the honor of speaking at numerous conferences with Chris Henger (Performics’ VP of Affiliate Marketing) who I consider an industry leader and friend.
Let me also say that I think that Performics has been more aggressive acquiring new advertisers over the last 6-12 months than any other major affiliate network. In fact, I think for the most part they’ve stayed low on the radar screen and have been watching merchant after merchant hop from Linkshare to Commission Junction and from Commission Junction to Linkshare and visa versa. At the same time, Performics has methodically and carefully grown the loyalty of their advertiser base.
Kudos to Performics for being smart and offering a full-service model that is quite impressive, while not getting involved in the CJ / Linkshare game of advertiser hopscotch.
The point of this post, however, isn’t so much to celebrate Performics…it’s to call out the Chief Blogger over at the Performics Blog - Larry Adams - for attempting to generate some buzz by using one of the slogans from the recent launch of Pepperjam Network.
As many of the readers of this blog know, Pepperjam recently launched Pepperjam Network.
Based on all accounts, including hundreds of reviews and unprecedented industry support, the launch of Pepperjam Network has shaken up the affiliate marketing industry.
Since launching Pepperjam Network one thing has become clear.
The major networks have taken notice.
Stay tuned.
In this case, I was notified by a Pepperjam Network affiliate and later by members of the Pepperjam Team that Performics put out a blog post with the title, “Publishers Spoke. We Listened.” The post was picked up by a couple of industry blogs, including Revenews.com. My guess is that the publishers they are referring to are Performics Publishers and the “We” refers to Performics. BTW - the blog post was about how Performics is starting to open up publisher contact info to advertisers, along with some other advances to the Performics UI.
Great. I’m super happy for Performics taking some initiative to open up lines of communication for affiliates and affiliate managers. Really, I’m pumped. This is long overdue and is not something that is done by Linkshare or Commission Junction.
My bone with Performics is the “Publishers Spoke. We Listened” slogan. This is confusingly similar to one of Pepperjam Network’s primary advertising campaigns: “Affiliates Have Spoken. Pepperjam Listened.”
We’ve generated hundreds of thousands of impressions as part of a banner campaign we’ve been running since January with that specific campaign.
Several of us were wearing t-shirts at Affiliate Summit last week with that very slogan.
Sounds petty - right?
Not really.
But I will admit, I am trying to have a bit of fun here since Performics opened the door. I mean Pepperjam is a little ole company here in Pennsylvania and Performics is a multi-hundred million dollar company in the process of being acquired by Google.
When I called out Performics for selecting the blog post title I got a tongue and cheek response from Larry Adams:
“I was at the Summit, although I can’t say that I remember any of your t-shirts; Vegas can be a distracting place. I’m not saying I never saw it but let’s just say that neither of us are going to get a trademark on the “[You] spoke, [we] listened” motto”
Here is a summary of the dialogue between Larry Adams from Performics and myself at the Revenews Blog and the Performics Blog.
In short, Larry sort of, kind of admits that he was simply making a play on our slogan. We both say nice things about each other and then he takes a stab at me on his blog that I took the liberty to respond back with a stab. No question - I won that pissing match and I think we both have had a bit of fun in the process.
It’s be fun watching these huge companies take notice of Pepperjam Network.
Join the Affiliate Revolution - www.pepperjamnetwork.com.
More to come.
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