AKMG journeyed to ad:tech London this week to attend our first ad:tech outside of the United States and experience UK affiliate marketing. It was an experience from day one which started with 30 minutes of sleep the entire night on the way to London and ended with Kim White, AKMG President, and me running to our gate at Heathrow. It was our own version of National Lampoon’s European Vacation!

It was an interesting experience to immerse ourselves in the culture for a few days to see how the average consumer is bombarded with advertising. There is much more advertising there than in the United States. They cover entire taxi’s with advertisements that are every color of the rainbow, digital advertisements line the walls of the underground stations, even the bottom of the seat covers that flip down in the taxi’s have ads on them. You can’t walk more than a few steps in London without seeing some sort of ad. It makes sense that advertisers need to have an integrated approach to their marketing plan to include outdoor, print, TV and online. Affiliate marketing campaigns across the pond are in luck to have such offline support to the campaigns being run online.

The show itself was a mix of US and European networks so we saw a lot of familiar faces. But many of the UK networks were extensions of existing US networks. The offline advertising is abundant but it seems like affiliate marketing is still in its infancy. This was evident at the show because it was mainly networks and we were told that the show was half as large as last year. But it was a great experience nonetheless.

If there are any UK advertisers that do affiliate marketing, please get in touch as we’d like to test the waters!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Advertisers, Tara's Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.