Recently the CJ office has had quite a busy events calendar and we have more planned for the upcoming weeks.

Several member of our team took the train down to Plymouth on Friday 20th August for a lovely summer BBQ on the English coast for Existem’s Annual Affiliate BBQ. The event provided plenty of networking with a mix of people from the affiliate industry and proved to be a success for Existem through the amount of attendees who turned up and the money raised for charity. The event went well into the early hours and I’m sure the CJ members who went were glad it was the start of the weekend the next day, to nurse their heads.

Last week we sponsored the A4U Roadshow in Dublin and are sponsoring the Roadshow in Bristol tomorrow, where A4U will be teaming up with IAB. Dipa Shah (Account Director) and Sam Richards (Sales Director) are attending this and Sam Richards will be speaking at the IAB speaker panel.

On the A4U front, we have also just signed a sponsor for the A4U Expo in London on the 12th and 13th of October, which will be our 4th year running of sponsoring them. Dan Powel our Solutions and Operations Director will also be speaking twice at the event and Valueclick’s European CEO Carl White is hosting a panel on the future of online marketing. This will be an event not worth missing!

Some of our advertisers offer SmartFeeds on their CJ account, via our partner fusePump. Smart Feeds as the name suggests, allow product feed data to be manipulated to obtain data sub-sets.

This can be useful for a publisher as you can have total control over the type of data that is delivered within the feed. This is especially useful for advertisers who supply very large product feeds, and who only wish to obtain specific data which means feeds can be better manipulated and imported into your system’s database or website.

There are several filtering options, including categories, sub-categories fields, and the ability to restrict the data set, based on keywords or price ranges.

The below screenshots show you how to discover which advertiser make SmartFeeds available through the CJ network, and how you can configure and start making use of them.

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Commission Junction has had some new faces join our team over the past few months, and we would like to introduce you to them.

First of these is Miss Clare Hannaway:

Clare Hannaway joined the CJ team a few months ago and has already shown she’s in the right place, and not just for her being united with her ‘long lost metaphorical twin’ although you won’t be blamed for mistaking them from time to time.

• So where were you before you came to work in picturesque Putney?

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One of our sister companies is looking for a new business Development Manager/Executive to join their team. Search123 is a leading pay-per-click search engine and aggregator of the best paid listings in the market. They combine feeds from the top providers to generate high levels of revenue for its website publishers. Click here to check out their site.

They are looking for someone who is enthusiastic and passionate about the industry, with great networking, communication and interpersonal skills to take on this job. You would also need to have experience in a similar role.

For a full job description, go onto the LinkedIn page.

If you think this job is suitable for you (or someone you know) please email hr.uk@valueclick.com

“If you’re developing mobile websites, you need to bear in mind the diverse range of viewport dimensions you will be designing for.

Something that looks good on the iPhone may look different on an Android enabled phone and completely different again on a Nokia smartphone running Symbian S60.

At the very least, keep your mark-up W3C standards compliant and don’t rely on emulators – they are not yet sufficiently sophisticated to accurately reproduce what the phones are displaying. Ideally you’ll need to have the hardware to test out your cross-platform site.”

Overall Winners - Green Team

The one day a year the whole office waits for… Sports Day. This monumental occasion took place on Thursday and ended in a very jolly group of people populating Putney, and some slight headaches the next day.  The sports day consisted of Dodgeball matches and the (realistically named) ‘mini olympics’.

Our sister-site, PriceRunner, are offering an iPad for grabs for one of their Facebook fans and an iPhone 4G for the winner’s chosen friend, or vice versa if you prefer.
With iPads being hard to come by at the moment, this is an ideal opportunity to get one for free and give an iPhone 4G to one of your friends.
To be in with a chance of winning both these prizes for you and a friend all you have to do is ‘like’ the PriceRunner Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/PriceRunner). The winner of the competition will be announced on 1st September 2010 and can then choose a friend to receive the other prize as long as the friend also ‘liked’ the PriceRunner page.

So follow the link above to be in with a chance of getting your hands on these highly sought after prizes, thanks to the generous people at PriceRunner.

Click here to be re-directed to the PriceRunner Facebook Page.

Our sister company, PriceRunner is looking for a Marketing Manager to join the team. PriceRunner is a leading price comparison website – check it out here www.pricerunner.co.uk.

They are looking for a Marketing Manager with experience in multiple channels to look after all online marketing communications, manage acquisition and retention and develop marketing strategies.

If you know anyone or are interested in hearing more then please email hr.uk@valueclick.com

Recently there has been increasing commentary in the affiliate community about post impression (PI)/post view (PV) tracking.  As Commission Junction works across Europe, this business model is not new to us.  After careful consideration we’ve developed the technology and programme quality positioning to get the best out of what can be a useful publisher business model.

For starters (and the sake of clarity), it is against our network rules for publishers to drop click cookies without a user initiated action; in short, force clicks.  In many cases, forced clicks can cause a poor user experience.  In my opinion, it almost always leads to the overwriting of other affiliate’s cookies.  With that in mind, how is PI/PV different?

PI/PV, if done right, does not force a click cookie.  But a cookie is dropped on the impression.  The impression cookie can help reward action that might not be otherwise credited.  This could be of particular concern to content sites or other models at the top of the click stream funnel.

That might sound ok at face value, but what happens when the impression cookie runs into the click cookie from another publisher?  For CJ, its simple, the click cookie would win.  The impression cookie is there to make sure the merchant is taking advantage of all the gaps that normal click based transaction correlation might miss, not create duplication of payouts or overwritten click cookies.

Why would merchants want to do this?  As many PI/PV publishers buy on large portal sites and other tier one websites, the merchant gets access to spare inventory without having to pay tenancy or CPM rates; they only have to pay if a sale happens (and that sale happens in the absence of competing click cookies).  Also, in many cases the PI/PV publishers will accept a lower payout to run a campaign in this manner, although that depends on the agreed commercials for each party.

The debate around the value of PI/PV will not go away overnight and could become more controversial if approached inappropriately.   If done right, it provides advertisers with additional inventory at a new payment metric.  It also provides publishers with opportunity to monetise unsold inventory.

Finally, as a network we’ve developed the technology to do this fairly and with scale.  If you are interested in how it could work, please drop us a line.

Daniel Powel.
dpowel@cj.com

It is time for another guest blogger from the team so let me introduce Antonello, who is
Integration Solutions/Product Support Manager and has worked with CJ just over four years now…

Antonello is going to tell you about the world of Self-Serve product feeds.