Today I will be covering the CJU Award winners and my favorite 4 sessions. I will also share some new products and services that are coming from CJ and other companies, as well as links to some of the other good blogs about CJU so you can hear the news from different angles.

COMMISSION JUNCTION HORIZON AWARDS
Some other bloggers have covered the awards, so I will just quote from and link to one. Lisa from the RevenueToday blog has a good 2 part overview of the event and she took much better notes than I did, so go read what she had to say. From her blog, here is the list of award winners. Congrats to all.

In the People category: the winner for advertiser was Real Networks.
The winner for publisher was CouponCabin.com.

In the category of Greatness: the advertiser winner was LowerMyBills.com. T
he winner on the publisher side was Ravenwood Marketing.

In the Innovation category the winner was publisher Jeremy Palmer for his site QuitYourDayJob.com. And in the first-ever Global Vision category the award went to eBay

The Goyami Blog did a fun post. The CJU Schwag Awards.

CJU SESSION COVERAGE
I’ll try to do a quick summary of key points from my favorite 3 sessions: The Dating Game - Affiliate Style, Deep Linking and Beyond – Best Practices for Data Feed Optimization and last but not least The Low Down on Downloads.

The Dating Game - Affiliate Style was an absolute HOOT and a big hit with the audience who needed some good laughs to provide shots of oxygen to their brains after the previous night of partying. It was THE Dating Game. The music, the format – everything except Chuck Woolery! CJ really did some great scripting. Can’t remember exactly who said what to who, so let me just give you a taste of what it was ‘kinda’ like. Female affiliate, looking for a hot connection interviews 3 potential merchants. She says - “Bachelor #1 why should I pick you for a partner?” He says “My program is BIG, I mean really, REALLY big. (Stretches hands wide.) Trust me, I can satisfy your every need!” She says: “Bachelor #3, you said earlier, your program was really good and sure to please. Tell me all the juicy details about your most exciting affiliate tool.” R-rated response follows. Bachelor (affiliate program manager #2) was a woman. They talked about how they could meet each others needs and some of the sexual innuendos caused Bachelor #1 to declare he really wanted to do some 3 way cross promotion with them both. Hysterically funny!

Deep Linking and Beyond – Best Practices for Data Feed Optimization
This was a really good session, designed more for merchants. CJ stressed the need for clean feeds with all the subcategories and really went into about every aspect of feeds that I constantly hear affiliates complaining about. Some merchants just don’t get how important good feeds are and CJ really tried to drive some points home to the merchants that attended. Part of the push to invest time and energy into optimizing feeds now is to prepare for some exciting new innovations CJ has in the works. New web services for datafeeds are slated for early 06 that will allow more affiliates to utilize feeds in dynamic and creative new ways, even if they aren’t programmers. Vinny Lingham has some good commentary about the datafeed session as well as other sessions over on his blog. Go check it out.

The Low Down on Downloads This panel featured Todd Crawford, Vice President, Sales, Commission Junction - Erika Tegman, Publisher Account Director, Commission Junction - Mike Weller, CEO, Top Moxie - Terance Kinsky, Director, Network Quality, Commission Junction - Wayne Porter, Senior Director of Greynets Research, FaceTime Communications. I was pleasantly surprised by this session. I guess I expected some sugar coating, denial and defensive posturing. Maybe too many forum conspiracy theories were dancing in my head. Todd did a great job of moderating and it was a really open, frank discussion of the issues that surround download apps and potential overwriting of affiliate links. I learned a lot about the process Network Quality must go through and why. I got to air my concerns about my belief that download apps CJ allows in the network, help spread the proliferation of ad blockers and anti-spyware apps that target CJ links and cookies. I didn’t get a chance to give my big long sermon about how although I appreciate the COC and any efforts made to protect honest affiliate’s revenue - forcing them to be the ones to take the extra protective step of appending the afsrc=1 to protect their hard earnded commission is unjust. Save that one for another day.

The Evolving Landscape of Search-based Media Just one other that I want to make a quick reference to. This one featured Gary Stein, Senior Analyst, Jupiter Research - Daniel Boberg, Director Strategic Alliances, Yahoo! Search Marketing - David Jakubowski, General Manager, MSN Search Strategy - James Beriker, General Manager, ValueClick Search - Tom Gerace, President and CEO, Gather, Inc. I liked this session because it helped me think outside the traditional search box and got more into new ad models revolving around contextual marketing, blogs, social networks and pay-per-call. Gather will be officially launching in October. May want to keep an eye on their model.

Well I’m about blogged out. Need to go get some work done. If you have any comments or questions come discuss it at the forum. Forum Reply