The Hitflip UK Blog

To learn more about the UK advertising market and to meet some key players before our expansion I went to AdTech and the Affiliate Get2Gether. I was especially looking for differences compared to the German market. I can compare Ad Tech (German) to the corresponding fair OMD (German) in Germany.

At OMD you will find more CEOs of the companies who actually advertise, rather than the big websites where those ads are published. At Ad Tech I had the impression that there were almost only intermediaries. By that I mean companies who offer advertisers their services. I also had the imporession that there were many companies “of the same kind” with hardly anything differentiating them from their competitors. There were at least 20+ companies who offer to manage your emailings for you. We don’t need one of those companies because we do that ourselves. I wonder whether UK online-companies tend to outsource more?

You can find all my pictures from this occasion on our Flickr-Account. Here’s a selection with some comments.

The Dixie Queen.

I think it is a great idea to “mark” everybody according to their “role”. Haven’t seen that in Germany yet.

There was heavy networking going on on two decks.

In Germany Affiliates gatherings are actually never this big. Usually there will be 50 to a max of 100 people but the meetings are more frequent and take place in many different cities. In Germany the online market is not concentrated in one city as in the UK (I’m talking about London! ;-)). There is a lot of action happening in Cologne, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt and a couple of other cities.

On the other hand the affiliate to “other” ratio is different. There are more affiliates compared to the “others” wanting to talk to the affiliates. Luckily I didn’t need to be on an “affiliate contact hunt” because talking to other merchants or networks was also very valuable to learn about the UK.

At German Affiliate Mettings there is usually no entrance fee and either sponsors who pay for one or all drinks or everyone pays their own bill.

Actually I found the Dixie Band very entertaining.

I also shot some movies while being on the boat to capture the vibes of the event.

In Germany we have seen quite a funny phenomenon happening where you would see many women and some internet celebs wearing a Hitflip Merchandising Bag. It really seems to be a fashion item in the German affiliate marketing scene. For me as a Hitflip founder it was so great to see that this fashion trend has alredy reached UK even though our website hasn’t even launched yet. Here’s some pics to prove what I’m saying:

If you see anybody else walking around with this trendy bag we’d be thankful for a short message.

Afterwords I found it a pity I coulnd’t make to the after boat tour meeting at the hotel because I had to catch my flight. I’m looking foreward to visiting UK / London again for further market research.

Here’s some other blogposts reporting on the event:

• Fraser
• Jessica Luthi
• Azam
• Patrick
• 5Star
• Paul Wright

Tags:

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Going to UK, Affiliate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.