buy.at Speakeasy 2009 Thoughts.

Better late than never, the end of last week turned out to be a very busy affair, therefore i’ve only just had time to jot down my thoughts!

Firstly, due to other scheduled meetings throughout the day, I made it to the Delfina for the Speakeasy just in time for the Affiliate Panel. I thought the venue was a good choice, well lit and a comfortable size to fit the day’s attendees in.

Events began with speeches from Michael Steckler, Lord Digby Jones and an IAB update from Kieron Matthews. It was then that I watched the Affiliate Panel, headed up by Warrick Lambert. Panelists included Matt Bailey, Alicia Navarro, Pete Wakim and Chris Morling. An interesting debate proceeded with the issue of the ‘Last Click Model’ returning time after time for discussion. It seems as though the general conclusion was that affiliates who are losing out need to be more innovative in their approach to keep customers on their sites.

I then attended the ‘Hit’, ‘Miss’ or ‘Maybe’ Tech session. An interesting way to approach this, as each attendee was handed a Hit, Miss and a Maybe card which they used to vote after a description / run-through of the Page Peel, Coull Tv and Ticketmaster API. Whilst the Page Peel isn’t really new technology to most of us, the Coull Tv integration looked like a useful development and i’m sure will start rolling out amongst the affiliate community.

The one thing that has really stuck out for me in the light of new technologies coming from the networks is that yes, you can now easily build a big site with thousands / millions of products from datafeeds. However, with all the content that is being made available it is continually duplicate content appearing on more and more affiliate sites. Obviously this isn’t great for SEO and either means you have to manually edit thousands of pages to make them unique or if you are lucky enough to have a website that has strong credibility on Google or a large userbase, you won’t be making big gains from adding these feeds?

Following the sessions we then ate some great food courtesy of buy.at - the food was awesome and well received! - and then undertook an evening of networking. It was a great platform for networking and I managed to speak to many people was great catching up with others too. I was told the DJ was actually a Platform-a employee, music was good although a little too loud which meant most people stayed outside the room to chat!