July 13, 2006
Anti-LMI Petition Delivered
If you're new here, please subscribe to my RSS feed. And follow me on twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Last Friday, I paid a personal visit to the CJ office in Marlborough, MA to deliver the printed version of the petition.
The petition is still up and active and will remain so as long as a mandatory change to JavaScript links is a possibility. Signatures do continue to be added, and I will deliver addenda periodically.
Again, thanks to all of you who took the time to sign and even add a meaningful comment. And thanks to many of you who spread the word successfully through blogs and message boards. It is amazing to me how so many rallied behind this. It greatly exceeded my expectations.
Since the message in the petition is from more than just me, I want to post the letter I sent with it. It has surely reached the folks in California by now (I wanted them to get their copy first), so here it is.
Date: July 7, 2006
Topic: Petition Against the CJ Link Management Initiative
To: Tom Vadnais, general manager, Commission Junction
cc: Lisa Riolo, senior vice president, business development,
Dave Duckwitz, senior vice president, operations,
Dave Osman, vice president, advertiser development,
Kerri Pollard, vice president, client performance
Dear Tom,
I respectfully submit to you the attached signatures and feedback about the Commission Junction Link Management Initiative gathered via the petition on my website, http://www.jangro.com/cj-petition.php. It contains 373 signatures collected in the span of about five weeks. While you can read all of the comments on my website, this printed document contains the name and email address of each person.
As I’ve written to you previously, I am strongly opposed to a mandatory change to JavaScript-based links. As a former Be Free and CJ product manager, a current CJ Performer, one of your more technical publishers, and a VCLK shareholder, I felt compelled to do something more than simply speak to my account manager.
I know that a mandatory change to JavaScript links will significantly impact the ability of your publishers to promote Commission Junction advertisers. Nobody asked for my feedback or that of the hundreds of people on the list, but I thought that it was important for you to have that.
The LMI is a technical matter, but it is not simply a change that your publishers can just “suck up and adapt to”. There are many methods and techniques used by many of your publishers, including top performers, that become very difficult or impossible to implement without basic html links. I’ve seen some of the workarounds so far and will continue to consider every possible technical solution that will allow me to succeed under the LMI changes. But I remain convinced that the LMI cannot effectively replace the old methods.
You surely have your business reasons for going this road, but I implore you to listen to the feedback and seek alternative solutions.
You have postponed the original plans to make JavaScript links mandatory for some relationships as of June 23, 2006. I hope that you are therefore taking the opportunity to gather more feedback from your clients and will ultimately reconsider these actions. In the attached document is honest feedback from 373 clients, some of them your largest publishers. I’ve also received feedback that many of your advertisers are opposed to the initiative as well.
However contrary this may seem, my actions are in support of Commission Junction’s business and I continue to be one of your strongest advocates.
As always, I welcome a phone call from anybody at CJ to discuss this or any product initiatives.
Kind Regards,
[signature]
Scott Jangro
[email address and phone number omitted]
Spoken like a true professional. I’m glad that you took the time to take up this petition.
Best,
Jeremy
Nicely written Scott! Let’s hope they hear the feedback.
-John
What type of feedback have you received from CJ, Scott?
It's time for CJ to re-set the default back to HTML. It's just a ridiculous waste of time to have to go through the extra steps to obtain an HTML link. Why are they putting us through this when they've acknowledged there will be no mandatory changes this year.
Very little feedback, Sheryl, and none from Tom Vadnais on this (or a previous contact).
I agree. I can't believe thay haven't changed the default especially with all the browser incompatibilities that are reported out there.
[...] 1. The Link Management Initiative was actually discussed on the call, raised during the Q&A session. That alone says a lot as to how much visibility this move got in the industry, even in the financial sector. It says even more that Jim had a good response at the ready… Let me speak to link management, this is in reference to commission junction. What we have started to do is try and get our publishers to move their tags over to their JavaScript, because we believe that over time that it is going to be demanded more and more on the advertiser side. We are not mandating it, however, and it could take a considerable amount of time to do such a migration. [...]
[...] More recently, Performics has announced a planned infrastructure change that will make newly generated affiliate links available for use immediately. Previously, you had to wait a while (an hour or two?) for the links to become active as they propogate to the servers. No more of that. Good move. Now that’s a Link Management Initiative I can understand. [...]
[...] Both Haiko and Brian Littleton were kind enough to nominate me for the “Best Service to the Industry” award for my vocal stance on the Commission Junction Link Management Initiative, including a petition that I delivered to the management team at commission junction as well as several posts to shine light on the problems with such a change. [...]
[...] Community Spirit I applaud the recent outspokenness of blogger Scott Jangro for not tolerating bad behavior in the affiliate marketing space that attempts to belittle and degrade those with differing opinions. Jangro stood up before against CJ’s LMI initiative and helped make a difference. [...]