Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards

one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing
efforts.
The Flipkart affiliate program is a great way for you to earn commissions by placing
product banners or links on your website to refer users to the Flipkart.com website. You
can earn up to 15% every time a user clicks on the banner/link and makes a purchase on
our site.
The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'),
the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the
payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has
grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including
affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because
affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine
optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC - Pay Per Click), e-mail
marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand,
affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or
services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of
marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of
marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on
financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal
relationships to drive sales.
Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail,
and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing
carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-
retailers' marketing strategies.
Ambush marketing
Ambush marketing is a marketing strategy wherein the advertisers associate themselves
with, and therefore capitalize on, a particular event without paying any sponsorship fee The
word "ambush" as used in the expression ambush marketing, means "an attack from a hidden
position" and is derived from the old French verb embuschier, having the meaning "to place
in a wood."
One of the most distinguishing features of ambush marketing is how unexepected it tends to
be. For example, money is needed to host and broadcast sporting events, and companies enter
into official sponsorships to help provide funding. While smaller companies cannot afford to
contribute this level of funding, they still use creative tactics to get the crowd's attention. The
more attention they garner, the better.
Bigger companies also engage in ambush marketing tactics to undermine official event
sponsors. For example, consider Kodak's campaign during the 1984 Olympic Games. Though
Fuji was the official sponsor of the games, Kodak ran an aggressive television ad campaign
that created the perception that they were the official sponsors. As a result of this, a number
of laws were passed to prevent this kind of marketing during broadcasts of popular sports
events. (See also Buzz Marketing)
These days ambushes tend to be rather creative and daring, teetering on the brink of
legalityalthough there are plenty of ways to stay within the law. If youve attended an
extreme sporting event in the last decade, theres a good chance you saw the Red Bull car, or
perhaps several Red Bull employees standing beside coolers, handing out free samples to
passers-by.

Impacts of Ambush marketing
Increasing cost of sponsorships: The increasing cost of sponsorships has also increased
sponsor's emphasis on return on investment. If sponsored events do not give exclusivity, the
sponsor's interest on sponsorship property will be lost and the damage will extend to the
whole sponsorship market. Yet when that exclusivity is lost, the value of sponsorship is also
lost. When a company engages in ambush marketing the exclusivity intended to be conferred
through sponsorship to a sponsor is lost. Hence, the value of sponsorship is also lost. As it is
an undeniable fact that corporate sponsorship is one of the biggest money-spinning sources of
revenue for the event organizers, the loss in sponsorship value will affect the financial
strength of an event organizer.
Transgression on the intellectual property rights: Even when the ambush marketers are
not making any direct references to the protected intellectual property rights, they in effect
transgress those intellectual property rights by attempting to capitalize on such hard earned
goodwill from an event. Direct and indirect references to the event symbol or the event itself
are just different means for achieving illegal transgression on the rights of event organizers.
Moreover, sponsors cannot get the return they anticipated.
Limitation to freedom of expression: Specific regulations (and/or laws) demanded by
sponsors to guarantee their exclusive rights limit the freedom of expression of visitors to
events (e.g. those who have been given free goods by the ambush marketer). It is still
undecided whether the commercial rights of sports organisers and sponsors trump the
universal human rights issues involved.

Types of ambush marketing
Direct forms of ambush marketing encompass means for a non-sponsor to directly connect
themselves to an event. Predatory marketing involves fraudulent claims by a non-sponsor that
it is the official sponsor of an event, without having any ties or official authorization from an
event's organizers to serve as or identify it as an official sponsor. Such predatory ambushes
also involve making direct references to trademarks in an effort to imply an official
association with the eventconfusing consumers into believing the non-sponsor is an official
sponsor. An official sponsor may also ambush "by degree"performing a larger amount of
promotional activities at an event than what was originally authorized by the event's
organizers (such as distributing shirts, but only having a deal for advertising on signage),
especially if the efforts compete directly with sponsors performing similar activities with
authorization from the organizers. These activities dilute the exposure of official sponsors
and their respective campaigns.
A company may also perform direct ambush marketing by riding coattailsassociating
themselves with an event by factually marketing their role in connection to it. For example, a
company which produces sporting equipment may advertise that they are the supplier for a
specific athlete or team. A similar acknowledgment of a non-sponsor's involvement with the
participants in an event by, for example, a television commentator, can also be considered an
incidental form of coattail marketing.
Indirect ambush marketing often involves the use of imagery and themes in advertising that
evoke a mental association with an event, but without making specific references to the event
itself or its trademarks. In essence, the non-sponsor markets itself using content that evokes
the same values which the event itself and materials from official sponsors express, and as a
result, appeal to those who are aware of the event. Similarly, a non-sponsor may use
"distractive" techniques to divert consumers' attention away from the actual event and its
official sponsors using similarly indirect means; for instance, a non-sponsor may "ride off"
the draw of a major event by saturating the area at or around its venue with a competing
marketing presence. Such "saturation marketing" may either be indirectly related to the event,
or be incidental and make no references at all. In some cases, a company may sponsor or
create a similar "parallel property", designed to compete directly with a major property also
by evoking similar thematic
Contextual advertising
A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns
advertisements to the webpage based on those keywords. The advertisements may be
displayed on the webpage or as pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a website
pertaining to sports and that website uses contextual advertising, the user may see
advertisements for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers.
Contextual advertising is also used by search engines to display advertisements on their
search results pages based on the keywords in the user's query.
Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in
direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. For example, if you are
visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that an ad pops up offering a
special price on a flight to Italy, thats contextual advertising. Contextual advertising is also
called In-Text advertising or In-Context technology.
Apart from that when a visitor doesn't click on the ad in a go through time (a minimum time a
user must click on the ad) the ad is automatically changed to next relevant ad showing the
option below of going back to the previous ad.
Impact
Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites. Because the
advertisements are more targeted, they are more likely to be clicked, thus generating revenue
for the owner of the website (and the server of the advertisement). A large part of Google's
earnings is from its share of the contextual advertisements served on the millions of
WebPages running the Ad Sense program.
Contextual advertising has attracted some controversy through the use of techniques such as
third-party hyper linking, where a third-party installs software onto a user's computer that
interacts with the web browser. Keywords on a webpage are displayed as hyperlinks that lead
to advertisers.
This sort of advertising also applies to the airline industry, with more airlines offering
advertisers the opportunity to advertise on their print-at-home boarding passes, itineraries and
confirmation emails. The company driving this trend is Ink, who works with many airlines to
help them generate additional revenues.

Green marketing
Green marketing is the marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally
preferable to others. Thus green marketing incorporates a broad range of activities,
including product modification, changes to the production process, sustainable packaging, as
well as modifying advertising.
The green marketing mix
A model green marketing mix contains four "P's":
Product: A producer should offer ecological products which not only must not
contaminate the environment but should protect it and even liquidate existing
environmental damages.
Price: Prices for such products may be a little higher than conventional alternatives. But
target groups like for example LOHAS are willing to pay extra for green products.
Place: A distribution logistics is of crucial importance; main focus is on ecological
packaging. Marketing local and seasonal products e.g. vegetables from regional farms is
more easy to be marketed green than products imported.
Promotion: A communication with the market should put stress on environmental
aspects, for example that the company possesses a CP certificate or is ISO 14000
certified. This may be publicized to improve a firms image. Furthermore, the fact that a
company spends expenditures on environmental protection should be advertised. Third,
sponsoring the natural environment is also very important. And last but not least,
ecological products will probably require special sales promotions.
[citation needed]

Additional social marketing "P's" that are used in this process are:
Publics: Effective Social Marketing knows its audience, and can appeal to multiple
groups of people. "Public" is the external and internal groups involved in the program.
External publics include the target audience, secondary audiences, policymakers, and
gatekeepers, while the internal publics are those who are involved in some way with
either approval or implementation of the program.
Partnership: Most social change issues, including "green" initiatives, are too complex
for one person or group to handle. Associating with other groups and initiatives to team
up strengthens the chance of efficacy.
Policy: Social marketing programs can do well in motivating individual behavior change,
but that is difficult to sustain unless the environment they're in supports that change for
the long run. Often, policy change is needed, and media advocacy programs can be an
effective complement to a social marketing program.
Purse Strings: How much will this strategic effort cost? Who is funding the effort?
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The level of greeningstrategic, quasi-strategic, or tacticaldictates what activities
should be undertaken by a company. Strategic greening in one area may or may not be
leveraged effectively in others. A firm could make substantial changes in production
processes but opt not to leverage them by positioning itself as an environmental leader.
So although strategic greening is not necessarily strategically integrated into all
marketing activities, it is nevertheless strategic in the product area.