London Affiliate Conference 2014 a Monster Event (Video)

The London Affiliate Conference 2014 attracted hundreds of people in Day 1 with this year’s event having outgrown itself from previous years.  It was forced to move to London’s biggest conference venue, Earl’s Court.

One of the attendees took a cue from last month’s NYC shock stunt marketing the film “Devil’s Due” in which a remote controlled baby was left in its carriage to terrorize unsuspecting pedestrians with Hell raising screams and even vomit.

MadAboutSlots.co.uk and Probability joined forces to unleash a giant dinosaur onto the LAC crowd.

As for the learning experience during Day 1 of this uber popular event, Keynote speaker Marcus Tandler explained to the crowd that affiliate management is not what it used to be, even from one year ago.

“Google is driving innovation," he told the crowd. 

But when it comes to affiliates:  “affiliates are f*&%cked” and he confirmed that Google does not like this segment of the population.

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Tandler expanded further as reported by gaming industry site CalvinAyre.com:

Traditional affiliates typically send traffic straight off to another site from which they are collecting commission, something that doesn’t add value to the user experience.  Tandler advised that affiliates should find something that makes it useful and worthwhile for traffic that come to their site, if they want to stay on the good side of Google.

Tandler also emphasized that affiliate marketing is not as simple as it was before- “affiliates need to stop being affiliates, they need to start being a brand”, he said.  Optimizing for keywords is a thing of the past and now its all about optimizing for the “persona”.

As for taking advantage of the lucrative US market, specifically the state of New Jersey, which legalized real money online gambling late this past year, Jeremy Enke of Poker Affiliate Listings told CalvinAyre.com’s Rebecca Ligero, that affiliates do have an option even without a specific business model in place.

“Make no mistake about it,” he said.  “If you have New Jersey traffic right now it’s very very valuable.  Although there is not an affiliate model in the traditional sense that we know of, there is {sic} media buys.  And the big gaming companies are spending money like crazy (in New Jersey).”

The London Affiliate Conference continues through the weekend.

- Gilbert Horowitz, Gambling911.com