NMA has reported on the IAB’s attempts to draw up a code of conduct for the affiliate marketing industry and I feel a certain sense of deja vu.

About 8 years ago the IAB tried to do the same for the email marketing industry and was roundly ignored by all parties except their own press office. An eventual code of conduct was put in place by the DMA’s email marketing council and is generally viewed as the minimum standard to follow. Given that the majority of large scale email marketeers are fundementaly direct marketers this seemed to make sense and the DMA operates in the interests of the players in the industry with representation from advertisers, list owners and broadcast facilities.

What strikes me about this move is it’s total lack of relevance to the industry. Hardly any affiliates are members of the IAB, a few networks and possibly a handful of merchants but overall it has little relevance to the players in this area.

The IAB is great at what it does, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t do affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is not an advertising channel, it is a sales channel and any successful affiliate manager will tell you that the clutch of banners that are provided for any program are a tiddly part of the equation.

So, have the IAB beaten the affiliate industry to it in setting a code of conduct? Not really. Most networks have their own codes. Commission junction published and promoted their own standards of network quality recently and Tradedoubler ran a similar excercise last year purely for PPC affiliates, and has been promising a similar move with incentive sites also.

The problem with the codes of conduct is that they rarely have any teeth. In affiliate marketing all parties can bare teeth at each other. Affiliates can pull programmes and move to competitors at the flick of a button, merchants can drop affiliates at will and networks can drop and be dropped. With a large degree of transparency over poor conduct provided in places like the A4UForum the industry pretty much regulates itself quite happily at the moment. Sure there are a few rogues, but there are already contracts and terms in place to oust these people if the will is there.

Sorry IAB, but I think this one is going to fall on deaf ears.