Jeremiah Owyang, a “senior web strategist” at Forrester has just published a “A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008“.

Never mind the presumptuousness of publishing a list like this less than a week into the new year, what startled me was it’s total misunderstanding of affiliate marketing.

Sponsorship and /Cross branding/Affiliate
This is a method of promoting your brand with the right audience in which the property is rewarded for integrating your brand.

Affiliate marketing is NOT a branding tool. While merchants may enjoy the massive reach that affiliates give their brand without paying for the privilege, it is a channel for generating sales and leads.

A look at just about any affiliate account will back this up, with focussed text links and product feed tools far outweighing banners in their effectiveness for driving sales. Many affiliates only pick these banners up as a way of adding credibility to their sites, and to reinforce the sales messages there.

If an affiliate programme relies entirely on branding tools to drive traffic, it is going to be very disappointed indeed compared to merchants who provide creative designed to convert sales - product feeds, content units, product videos and so on.

When ’senior analysts’ at companies like Forrester are advising their clients that affiliate marketing is a brand tool, we’ve a long way to go.

They are not the only ones though. With companies like Tradedoubler touting their ad network, and the Affiliate Marketing Council emerging at the IAB - an almost purely brand focussed organisation, the message seems to be getting more blurred, not clearer for prospective new merchants.

In search of a better definition I went the route of the lazy journalist and on to Wikipedia’s definition of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Nothing there I’d disagree with, but even here the misunderstanding of the channel is highlighted again.

Affiliate marketing — using one site to drive traffic to another — is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers….Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies

Overlooked by advertisers, and by their consultants I’d say, so Jeremiah, when you decide to revise your list, maybe at the end of 2008, try checking your definitions first.