Affiliate Marketing: Much Ado about Context

As I related in previous weeks, humans love narrative. We search for it continually when weeding through information or learning, and when it is missing we fill it in. This is a powerful and important realization for marketers, web-based or otherwise, because it reminds us of the need to ensure that our website, banner ad, or pre-roll for example are telling the story we want them to.

Affiliate marketing provides new opportunities to continue our stories with new publishers, potentially reaching new markets. Affiliate marketing is essentially a process by which Company A pays Business B to market for them on Business B’s site. The hitch with affiliate marketing is that Company A only pays Business B when a customer clicks through the ads on Business B’s site and actually completes a purchase. Think of it as “risk-free” advertising for Company A. This is a very simplified explanation of affiliate marketing (and embedded below is a quick 2 minute tutorial), but the process can actually become quite complex, with complicated networks of affiliates intertwining and optimizing the entire process with SEO and other traditional internet marketing tools.

But is affiliate marketing really “risk-free”? Once again narrative and filling in the gaps comes onto the scene. Through the development of affiliate networks multiple Company A’s make marketing deals with the same Business B, and so now when a user opens up Business B’s site they may see ads for competing products. A very simplified example of the risk involved in this scenario is such: If you work hard in all your messaging to tell a story about low cost, specifically how your product is the best value for the lowest price, you can see how quickly that comes undone if it is placed next to a competing product that is shown as comparable quality but cheaper. Though your story may work outside of the context of the affiliates website, within the context of other ads viewed immediately beside or directly after a flaw in the narrative will lead consumers to fill in their own conclusions.

Not entirely affiliate marketing related, but widening the examples and tools we have to work with (and interesting to consder in terms of the power of context), is the video below demonstrating the Kuleshov Effect. Lev Kuleshov was a film maker and researcher working in the early 1920′s. He shot a series of short film pieces as part of an experiment to demonstrate the power of context in film making. Essentially, he took a shot of a man’s expressionless face and placed it after a series of other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a child’s toy, a woman reclining in a couch) and showed the match ups to participants, The participants resoundingly noted different emotions on the man’s face even though it was the same expressionless face every time. The results demonstrate that we make sense of things by putting them in context with other things.