MarcPorcelli.com

Pepperjam and Commission Junction Feud Rings A Bell

Affiliate marketing is a highly competitive business; the key phrase here being “business.” So what happens when you have a larger business that is threatened by the growth of a smaller business? In my experience it generally equates to one business being threatened and turning to protective measures. Take for instance the feud that occurred between AzoogleAds and Commission Junction (CJ) in the later half of 2005.

That feud reminded me of what I read today in Pepperjam founder Kris Jones blog post when addressing the question relating to CJ “requiring existing Pepperjam clients who use Pepperjam affiliate program management services on Commission Junction to immediately terminate agreements with Pepperjam or get kicked off Commission Junction?”

I recall the AzoogleAds feud as I was working there at the time. There was a lot of back and forth, but the bottom line was that AzoogleAds was a threat to the business that CJ had dominated. CJ made a business decision which lead to the termination of the partnership with AzoogleAds. There appears to be a similar correlation with CJ’s recent business decision with Pepperjam.

In the long term, AzoogleAds benefited tremendously from the termination of the relationship. As someone in sales at the time with AzoogleAds, I knew I had to step it up, as did the rest of the company. AzoogleAds as a whole stepped up, bringing in more offers while the affiliate side grew with more top-notch publishers.

Often times the argument about ethics and morals is presented in the context of terminating or pressuring a partnership. At the end of the day businesses are formed to be profitable. If profitability is threatened or business partnerships evolve into competitive threats, relationships inevitably will change.

We emphasize that this business of online marketing revolves around relationships. These relationships though are never clear-cut. I can not attest to the intricacies of the relationship between Pepperjam and CJ, only that one can be sure there is a lot more to this story than we ever know. The same holds true for when I worked with AzoogleAds.

Perhaps Pepperjam with their recent release of their own affiliate network was a threat to CJ just as AzoogleAds revenue sharing offering at the time, M-port was to CJ. When these partnerships go south generally there are press releases form both organizations. The one that breaks off or applies pressure to the partnership emphasizes their reasons and the one that is on the receiving side inevitably emphasizes theirs.

Generally reasons publicly disclosed relating to friction in a partnership are those around quality and control. Whether quality and control issues occurred in this instance or not, all partnerships in the affiliate space have these issues! Perhaps a reason Pepperjam became a threat was when they released their own affiliate network by going direct with publishers and advertisers, some inevitably that were with CJ.

Regardless of the reasons, Pepperjam likely has no choice at this stage other than to push harder to work with advertisers and publishers to regain any lost revenues they inevitably will incur. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for the Pepperjam executive team would be to channel any anger and resentment into a motivational tool. Now is not the time to loose focus, but to hunker down and align the team around focused growth.

When it comes down to it, this is a business decision that appears to have been made to protect CJ’s business interests similar to the occurrence with AzoogleAds. Kris points out in his blog that he approached CJ executives who were attending the recent Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas about why CJ was taking the actions it had. The response Kris received was that they were sorry but, “it’s just business.” Regardless of the reasons this is the business we are in.