Written by Chris Hauth in Insight, Opinion on 21 February 2012

The digital market place is fascinating and the rapid growth and development within the industry never cease to amaze. In my role as Strategy Director, my new team and I spend a lot of time looking to the future, here are the key trends  I see shaping the marketplace over the next 12 months.

1. The true emergence of mobile

Mobile marketing has been growing slowly over the past five years, it’s only now we’re starting to witness the channel driving significant commercial value for non-operator businesses. Between 3.5% and 5% of all sales in the European online market are already generated purely via a mobile handset, and that excludes tablet devices. We have already witnessed massive growth in the number of orders generated in this space in the first 6 weeks of the year and we see 2012 as the turning point, especially considering the current chasm between actual time spent on mobile devices and real mobile advertising spend (See Mark Walsh‘s in Online Media Daily: ). In 2012 we predict that there will be significant shifts of advertising budget from online to mobile, and that a coherent m-commerce strategy will be essential for any e-commerce player by the end of 2012. Dependent on the country in the EU we will see between 10-15% of all eCommerce sales coming from a true mobile device (excl. tablets) read more »

Written by Gary Bicker in Opinion on 16 February 2012

The future of the high street isn’t a debate that is set to run out of steam any time soon. From deliberations in Westminster about whether ecommerce is the saviour of bricks and mortar stores through to the financial results of some of the best-loved names on the high street being analysed or the implementation of Mary Portas’s recommendations, all eyes are on the retail sector.

Whilst most bricks and mortar sales have decreased, a lot of companies have seen their online sales rise. And with research from the Local Data Company showing that 48,000 shops in the UK are standing empty, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the high street has had it’s time. But hang on there; perhaps don’t jump to that conclusion quite so quickly. If you stop and look around there is actually a lot of creative thinking happening in retail that could bring back some much needed zing to the physical shopping experience. read more »

Written by Gary Bicker in Events on 13 February 2012

Yesterday, voting opened for the Performance Marketing Awards ‘Publisher’s Choice of Network’. The award is voted for annually by the community at affiliates4U.com by affiliates who deal with all aspects of an affiliate network on a day to day basis.

Here at affilinet, our efforts to provide publishers with a first rate network have been previously recognised, and as such we’ve been highly commended within this category for the last two years running. This last year has been a very interesting one for us and we’ve been working hard to continually improve our offering for publishers, which we hope will earn your vote for the top spot in 2012.

affilinet’s publisher focused activity has been supported by large investments in several key areas. A big part of our strategy was to bring in a wide variety of advertisers for our publishers. Resultantly, we have witnessed a significant growth of our network, both in terms of advertisers and the number of active publishers (those earning a commission).  Optimisation of our network technologies has also been riding high on our agenda this year with our mission being to help optimise our customer’s affiliate activities using our consolidated European platform. In conjunction with our improved network offering, publisher earnings have increased impressively by almost 50%. read more »