In celebration Microsoft’s Azure update, it seems that some of the employees at Microsoft decided to celebrate in Norway, by doing a bit of a dirty dance routine. Not sure exactly what is so amazing about Microsoft Azure, but the dance routine had numerous drug reference, and the phrase “The words MICRO and SOFT don’t apply to my penis.”

Microsoft issued the following statement: “This week’s Norwegian Developer’s Conference included a skit that involved inappropriate and offensive elements and vulgar language. We apologize to our customers and our partners and are actively looking into the matter.”

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LashBack, a leader in brand and compliance protection for advertisers, has appointed Peter Wilson as its new President and Chief Executive Officer.  Wilson was previously the President and CEO of Cutting Edge Media and the U.S. Head of Media & Technology Investment Banking at KPMG Corporate Finance, and is active in both the Executive Council of Performance Marketing and the Performance Marketing Association. Brandon Phillips, LashBack’s founder, will remain with the company as Chairman of the Board.

“LashBack has built a great brand in online advertising as a leader in email compliance and reputation management. I am thrilled to lead the company as it enters the next phase of its growth. We will continue investing in our technology and expanding the scope of our must-have compliance and intelligence products for digital advertisers,” Wilson said.

Wilson focused heavily on compliance while at Cutting Edge Media, and brings more than twenty years of experience advising and leading technology businesses. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Franklin & Marshall College and an MBA from the Fox School of Business at Temple University. He is an active member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) and a former board member of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Philadelphia.

Brandon Phillips said, “I am excited to usher in the next chapter at LashBack with Peter at the helm.  He will help drive the next generation of LashBack products, and the adoption of these must-have products by the largest brands in online advertising.  LashBack will benefit tremendously from his extensive experience in the online marketing industry and his broad range of skills from strategy and finance to compliance, technology, and operations.  I have great confidence in Peter’s ability to lead LashBack to the fulfillment of its mission as the leader in online compliance and intelligence solutions.”

 About The Executive Council of Performance Marketing
The Executive Council of Performance Marketing is an exclusive, private group of over 100 C-Level executives from within the performance marketing industry.

 About the Performance Marketing Association
The Performance Marketing Association (PMA), headquartered in Camarillo, Calif., is a not-for-profit trade association founded in 2008 to connect, inform and advocate on behalf of performance marketing, a multi-billion-dollar marketing channel, which comprises more than 200,000 businesses and individuals.

 About LashBack
LashBack provides comprehensive brand protection and email compliance solutions to online advertisers, agencies, and email service providers. LashBack’s proprietary technology platform and unique data relationships deliver comprehensive solutions for regulatory compliance, enforcement of advertiser-specific contract requirements, and brand protection.

 All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

US based network, buy.at announces its rebrand to global parent company, Affiliate Window. This coincides with the US launch of its innovative and award-winning platform for advertisers and publishers. As the market leaders in UK, Affiliate Window plans to share its knowledge, experience and reach with the introduction of a comprehensive, unified solution for the US market.

The objective is clear; provide an intuitive platform for advertisers and publishers, complemented with dedicated support, innovative tools, reliable tracking and an understanding of the challenges faced in a maturing industry. The launch will see all parties benefit from an enhanced user experience with in-depth analysis and transparency available on all aspects of program performance.

Mark Walters, President of Digital Window Inc remarks; “The US market is advancing and the levels of sophistication of our advertiser and publisher partners require a platform capable of coping with those demands. New technology is supposed to make life easier, add value or deliver innovation and we hope our clients feel that the new platform delivers all three. Everything we do has these three elements in mind and ensures we are consistently reinventing what we know and what our partners need.”

Affiliate Window’s platform is the performance channel’s first interactive directory, consisting of detailed advertiser and publisher profiles to openly showcase their USPs and for advertisers to clearly detail all brand requirements and program terms and conditions. Recruiting publishers based on their relevance, niche speciality or outright performance is now possible, making affiliate relationships a genuine two way experience.

November 2011 saw the launch of TheHub, Affiliate Window’s dedicated publisher portal. This provides access to advertisers’ promotional offers; seasonal competitions; updates regarding affiliate tax law and an industry calendar, ensuring publishers have access to all the relevant information in a single location.

“The launch of the Affiliate Window interface in the US represents a significant step change in performance marketing,” says Peter Loveday, Chief Technical Officer for Affiliate Window. “In designing our platform around a social core and providing unparalleled levels of transparency and openness for all our partners, this solution redefines relationship building within the industry and sends a clear message on how we see the market developing.”

Key brands already working with Affiliate Window in the US include Ticketmaster, British Airways, Skype, and TicketsNow. With the network’s service-led approach, global reach, and proven track record in mature markets, Affiliate Window is confident it can bring something exciting and new to the US.

Comscore, the digital audience company that tells you where everyone is going, and what most agencies use to determine media buys has come out with an ultimatum: Stop saying Facebook ads do not work.  According to them, they have real proof that Facebook ads really do work, and that people need to stop bashing the company.

“We are gaining critical new insights that show Facebook earned media is having a statistically significant positive lift on people’s purchase of a brand,” comScore said on its official blog.

But are they right? This comes only a few days after a Reuters poll that says the vast majority of users have never bought anything because of Facebook. The release from Reuters said:

Four out of five Facebook Inc users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows, the latest sign that much more needs to be done to turn its 900 million customer base into advertising dollars.

However, Comscore says in response to this survey

 Their accuracy in recalling their own behavior over an extended period of time can be especially unreliable. People might be able to accurately tell you how many times they have eaten at a restaurant in the past week, but they would probably do a poor job estimating that number over the past three months.

In similar news it turns out that Social Media users are more likely to admit however, that they are smoking  pot.  This could have something to do with them not remembering why exactly they bought the furry lamp from Sears two days earlier.

Personally, until Facebook stops sending me ads for a seminar for “Dads who Loves Jesus,” I’m going to continue to question the effectiveness of their ability to target.

Great ads for Facebook at LeapLap

Japanese Mega-Marketing company Rakuten has decided that they want to get into the Pinterest game. In order to show how much they really love Pinterest, they have lead a $100M cash-infusion into the company,  meaning that according to them, the company is worth a little over $1.5B.

Yes, you heard it, a company that is heavily into the affiliate marketing world, owning companies like Linkshare, has decided that Pinterest is the waive the future. Mind you, no one besides spammers have really figured how to make money from pinterest right now, and Pinterest’s one venture with affiliate marketing via Skimlinks turned into a PR nightmare.

Did I also mention that despite an enormous growth pattern since its launch, that Pinterest has basically stalled in traffic? I’m not sure how their little under 20M users are worth, $1.5 Billion?

According to Matt Cutts, “We’ve done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we’ve been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we’re turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money.”

What does this mean? It means if you are using footer links to promote certain keywords, hoping for more SEO value, it’s not going to work. It’s not only going to not work, but it could actually hurt you.  On that note, Matt Cutts wrote on Google+

Earlier this year, Google revealed that we sent out over 700,000 messages to site owners in January and February 2012 via our free webmaster console at http://google.com/webmasters . I wanted to clarify a misconception about those messages. A lot of people assumed that most or all of the 700K messages were related to “unnatural link warnings” that some site owners received.

The reason for sending the 700,000 messages via Webmaster Tools was actually because we started sending out warnings about blackhat techniques. The vast, vast majority of manual actions we take are on pages that are engaging in egregious blackhat SEO techniques, such as automatically created gibberish or cloaking.

In fact, of the messages that we sent out to site owners, only around 3% were for unnatural or artificial links. So just to be clear, of the 700,000 messages we sent out in January and February, well above 600,000 were for obvious blackhat spam, and under 25,000 of the messages were for unnatural links.

I have to admit, I really enjoyed PotPieGirls comment’s regarding this

I then imagined a webmaster who was frantically working to get all his/her “bad” links removed getting an email that said what Ryan’s tweet said.

I have no doubt their first thought would be, “Holy Sh*t!! Please don’t link to me!!!!“

This is how things have become in the wonderful land of Google. If Google wasn’t so powerful and virtually the main doorway to the internet, I don’t think we’d all care so much…but Google IS mighty powerful and Google IS the main doorway to the internet (in a BIG way).

It’s sad. It’s actually kinda scary. Makes me really worry about folks like us out there trying their best to make all this work.

I wonder how many silly photos of Matt I can put up before he manually de-lists PMI?

With all the networks having problems, going bankrupt, not paying their debts and generally being total epic scumbags, it’s good to see some network step up to the plate to help affiliates. Adknowledge, the mega-online marketing company with divisions in social, mobile, display and of course, affiliate CPA marketing, has announced a program where they will help affiliates affected by the industry downturn.

The program will offer up to a 30% bonus to all affiliates based on any additional traffic they sent to Adknowledge for two months. For those affiliates who are owed money from other networks, this is perhaps one of the best ways to make additional cash.

 “We hate to see the affiliates left holding the bag,” said Adknowledge CEO Ben Legg.  “Too many ad networks have gone bankrupt, leaving affiliates with no payments and no answers.  As one of the most stableand longest standing network, Adknowledge felt it could help by picking up the tab and offering that extra layer of security that affiliates are looking for at this time.”

Through the Affiliate Relief Program, Adknowledge will provide affiliates with up to a 30% bonus based on incremental Adknowledge revenue earned over and above that affiliate’s Adknowledge revenue from the preceding calendar month.  Adknowledge cites a recent flurry of calls from affiliates running on other networks who are concerned about even more networks going under as the impetus for this program, and sincerely hopes that its willingness to pay these unpaid affiliates helps restore some stability to the industry as a whole.

It’s definitely interesting to see Adknowledge’s take on the industry, as they have been very vocal about what they think about all the downturns in the industry. As one of the older, more reliable players, are they finally starting to throw their weight around?

To learn more about the Affiliate Relief Program click here.

XL Marketing, a leading digital and direct marketing company, today announced an investment by private equity firm GCP Capital Partners, formerly known as Greenhill Capital Partners, as well as a debt facility agented by Madison Capital Funding.  The $70 million capital raise will be used to fuel XL Marketing’s continued growth through organic business activities, as well as strategic acquisitions.

“We are thrilled to bring on such stellar partners to help us take the company to the next level,” said David A Steinberg, XL Marketing CEO.  “As we continue to execute on our growth plans in the US, UK and other International markets, it was essential to secure the right kind of capital, with the right partners. We now have the balance sheet, strategic partners and assets and capabilities to compete and win in every market where we play.”

“The shift to digital and XL’s unique client offerings makes this the ideal time for innovative companies to create value.  We believe XL Marketing is uniquely positioned to help its clients capture the full potential of their online marketing efforts,” said Robert Niehaus, Chairman and Founder of GCP Capital Partners, who will also be joining the Company’s board of directors.

Over the past four years, XL Marketing has established itself as a leader in the industry sectors in which it focuses – Financial Services, Education, Insurance and Health & Wellness.  This new capital will enable the Company to enhance its offerings that serve these industries.

“David and his team have built XL Marketing into a high growth digital marketing company poised for the next stage in expansion,” said John Sculley, XL Marketing Vice Chairman, former CEO of Apple Computer and Pepsi.

XL Marketing is headquartered in New York City and has offices in Washington DC, Tampa FL, San Francisco, CA, and London and Bristol in the UK.  It employs more than 200 people.

Petsky Prunier advised XL Marketing on this transaction.

About XL Marketing
XL Marketing is a leading digital and direct marketing company that has built a massive consumer marketing platform to generate high quality customers for leading brands.  The platform encompasses all interactive channels — Email, Search, Social Media and Call Center – and an innovative data-driven methodology, underpinned by proprietary technology.  The company focuses on several sectors including Financial Services, Education, Insurance and Health & Wellness. The company is a recognized leader in the US and UK markets for its ability to generate new customers and qualified leads at scale and within ROI targets. XL Marketing employs more than 200 people in five locations. For more information, please visit www.xlmarketing.com.