One of our team members, Kevin Paine, and I flew out from Los Angeles yesterday to attend LeadsCon, a conference about online lead generation. The conference was organized by Jay Weintraub, former employee at Oversee.net and current writer for Digital Moses. Jay also keeps a blog at JayWeintraub.com.

The conference was squeezed into the Palms Casino’s small ballroom. The content was very good and the speaker lineup was impressive, particularly for a first time conference. Jay clearly has a lot of juice in this space. One of the speakers announced that there were about 550 attendees. Except for the keynote “fireside chat” with Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets and Ed Ojdana, Former CEO, Experian Interactive, each presentation was a panel. After the presentations, the exhibit area was open downstairs for about two hours.

Here were the titles of the Thursday panels:

  • M&A, Exits, and Investment Landscape
  • Lead Buyers’ Perspective
  • Lessons from the Mortgage Market
  • Proper Role of Affiliate Marketing in Lead Generation
  • Understanding Lead Exchanges
  • Incentivized Marketing - More Harm than Good?
  • Compliance and The Legal Landscape

The overall emphasis was that the landscape is changing - venture capital is interested in the space; lead buyers are more tuned into the quality of leads than they used to be; companies have been fined by the FTC for noncompliance; important privacy issues have not been resolved; the future of lead exchanges is unclear. There was a general consensus that the future looks bright for everyone involved, despite the fact that there is no obvious category to replace mortgage.

Former (and, rumor has it, possibly future) ReveNews blogger Jeff Molander, was on the affiliate marketing panel. The moderator, Noel Collins of Leads360, noted that there is a “stigma associated with affiliate marketing.” This prompted one of the CPA Networks in the audience (AdValiant, I think) to ask audience members to contribute reasons for this idea. One gentleman complained in a quaking voice that he had paid an unnamed network over a million dollars for “very, very, very low lead quality.” This prompted Jeff to point out that it’s negligent to spend so much money on a campaign without understanding what you are paying for and then to blame affiliates. In this respect, time is on the side of the lead buyer because they can learn the value of leads and pay accordingly.

It seemed to me that many people in the room did not understand what affiliate marketing was or the important differences between CPA Networks (AdValiant, Hydra, CPA Empire) and Traditional Networks (Commission Junction, LinkShare, Performics) - transparency, the network acting as an affiliate, traffic aggregation methods, etc. More background information would have helped.

Affiliate marketing does have negative associations - sometimes rightly so sometimes wrongly so. Affiliates have always made an easy scapegoat for companies that caught caught doing things they shouldn’t have been doing. (Think of drive by software installs.) But if you look at a company like WebClients, which made a compliance payout to the FTC, it was for incentivized sites they owned, i.e. not affiliates.

Similar to a buzz at Affiliate Summit in February, there was much chatter along the lines of “If we don’t police ourselves, then we’ll get policed.” The difference is that here it is about FTC legal issues and actual fines as opposed to the idea of spammy sites that look ugly. The key question is what a merchant wants to do for traffic. These is an important decision.

So I took away some great notes and ideas from the conference. Congratulations to Jay Weintraub! I look forward to the next one.

Read more:
LeadsCon Recap

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