OMG, Affiliates and Compliance!

First off I can understand why merchants, especially those in the financial sector, are concerned about compliance. Ideally we’d have everything on our sites 100% accurate, but you know things (like sites you run) get forgotten, content left behind, other things take precedence or heaven forbid we sneaked off for a few days off. Sometimes the network screws up too and doesn’t know where the banners are served from - and the result is one pretty fobbed off affiliate!

In September Virgin Money via OMG emailed us clearly showing that a banner, on one now just about had it website, was not compliant. Yet, the banner was being hosted on OMG’s server! After a few emails back and forth it was finally agreed that yes the banner was on OMG’s servers and needed replacing. We replaced it with another of their hosted banners!

We were then informed that we’d be removed from the program as we’d not been compliant despite having changed the creative to the new banner on their server (and the error being OMG’s!). The result of this was one quite annoyed affiliate! Short of going to Norwich it was impossible for us to change the banner!!!

Thankfully the “misunderstanding” all sorted out and all was well… until today!

Now I’ve been in/out of the office over the last week or so and have only today started to respond to network emails and lo and behold I find that OMG “have just completed an audit of all affiliates currently showing as live on the Virgin credit card campaign, as such we are unable to find any Virgin links on your website/s Could you therefore please advise me as to whether you are indeed promoting the Virgin credit card at present and if so as to where I can find it on your site/s?”.

Unfortunately I’d not got round to emailing them the links, so we’ve been removed (yet again) from the program. You could say, quite fairly, it’s our fault for losing the links (although is 7 days really enough time to reply - do affiliates not have holidays of over 1 week?)

However, what I don’t quite understand here is this…

If OMG could find our site with the wrong banner on in September and then they could find the site to remove it from the program after we’d changed the banner - why can’t they find it again in October? The link has not changed… and they obviously know the sites where banners are being shown otherwise they can’t email affiliates pointing out their noncompliance showing OMG banners!

Anyway from now on I will rest easier as all the Virgin Credit Card links have been removed - so no more compliance issues to worry about. I appreciate networks have to do “their job” but picking up on affiliates for noncompliance for showing a banner that the network is serving but then removing them from the programme because they can’t find the same link a week or two later is just wasting time!

My time is better spent switching links to other networks!