The research reveals that 78 per cent of brands have not only increased spend in this area since 2005, but also intend to up their investment over the next two years. Nearly a quarter of these said spend in the channel had doubled since 2005, while a further one in 12 had increased spend by 200 per cent.
Sector-wise, 68 per cent of financial services marketers have invested more in affiliate marketing in the past two years, with half of these more than doubling their spend. Seventy-five per cent of gaming companies increased their spend, along with 71 per cent of travel firms, 64 per cent of telecoms companies and 62 per cent of retailers.
"As broadcast advertising has started to decline, performance marketing has emerged as the silver bullet of the marketing industry," said Kevin Cornils, CEO of independent affiliate network buy.at, which sponsored the survey. "Affiliate marketing is still in a high-growth phase. This represents a huge opportunity for both affiliates and marketers."
Sales directly attributed to affiliate marketing are also rising: two-thirds of respondents said the number of sales generated by affiliate marketing had increased over the past two years. Forty per cent also said they had more people employed to manage this side of their marketing activity compared with 2005, and half of those surveyed expected this team to grow over the next two years.
Last month, Tri-Direct Sales took affiliate marketing a step further with the soft launch of its "digital insert". This sees the firm taking the role of an affiliate network but displaying adverts in email newsletters, rather than banners on websites.
Aimed at email newsletter providers, the inserts consist of a 'pod' containing four 120 x 120 pixel images inserted into the body of an email. The clickable images are linked back to the advertiser's site.
According to Tri-Direct Sales, the move allows email newsletters or marketing campaigns to include third-party promotions without contravening consumers' opt-out requests. Tri-Direct Sales managing director Steve Reid said: "The advantage of this product is the greater targeting possible, and the synthetic environment which could allow the construction of much richer landing pages."
The first four digital inserts were sold in a pay-per-acquisition model, and went out in September to 3.5 million recipients.It included ads from men's clothing firm Hewitt & May, Key Golf and Super Bingo.
Mark Patron, chief executive officer at email marketing specialist Redeye, said: "This will certainly work in the newsletter market, although the differentiation between this and normal newsletter sponsorship is yet to be seen in operation.
"If this succeeds in transferring insert budget to email, that would be a real coup - email is the main crossover point between direct marketing and digital, so it's not so unlikely."
- See The digital age, p48.
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