I recently caught up with Matthew Wood Managing Director of Existem Ltd and founder of the leading affiliate conference a4uexpo and the popular affiliate forum affiliates4u, with a4uexpo 2010 looming large Matthew agreed to answer a few questions. So without further ado…

Hi Matthew, Can you give me a bit of the background of A4uexpo, how did the initial concept come to fruition?

Within the industry affiliates have a desire to meet people who really ‘get’ affiliate marketing. After all, it’s not something you want to bore and chat to your mates about down the pub!

We started with local Get2Gethers around the UK, much like the ones we have recently held in Dublin, Bristol and in Manchester this week.  The popularity of our events in London were frankly bewildering with our last bar style event at the Pitcher & Piano attracting nearly 600 people.

Was the time right though to launch a fully blown conference? We had some hard thinking to do.

What was the biggest challenge getting A4uexpo off the ground?

The risk. Let’s face it we were a very small team in Bristol; affiliates by nature  – certainly not event or conference managers and to invest £250,000 in a conference at ExCeL was mind-blowing.

I sat down with key players in the market to gauge appetite and most importantly support.

Back in 2007 Affiliate Marketing was going through a big transition, its reputation growing but brands were still unclear about its actual ROI.

With significant support from affiliate networks we were able to push forward and it was a bumpy yet exciting ride.

The most important thing however was that the whole industry backed the event networks, bloggers, agencies and so forth and saw it as a way of getting everyone together at the same time in the same place and to really put our channel in the limelight.

Four London Expo’s and two in Europe, any plans to go intercontinental?

Affiliate Marketing whilst established in the UK, USA and major mainland European markets such as Germany is still embryonic in nature elsewhere.  However that said we are hoping to launch some a4uexpo ‘lite’ events in 2011 in emerging markets. Keep an eye on our twitter account @a4uexpo for details.

If you were only able to go to one session at this year’s a4uexpo which one would it be?

I think it would have to be the a4uexpo Grilling Session – Day 1 @ 17.15 in Room 2-4. A session which involves the Publisher Directors of some UK Networks, Duncan Popham I’m sure will be providing some controversial questions towards them. I’m expecting the questions to cover Affiliate Payments, De-duplication, Closed Groups and Confidentiality, but we’ve left these questions in the capable hands of Duncan!

That’s just one. It’s an incredibly difficult task to schedule 50 sessions and to ensure we cover the latest trends and topics often before they hit the minds of those in the industry. I urge people to take a good look and if there is not something for you let me know!

Which one person in the affiliate marketing industry do you most admire?

That’s incredibly hard. The beauty of Affiliate Marketing is that it can be used to supplement your lifestyle alongside a day job or enable entrepreneurs to create tangible businesses.

It’s fair to say people have come and gone, so anyone who has innovated to stay in the game gets my admiration.

What is the biggest change you have seen since you started in the affiliate industry?

I’ve been around long enough to see many types of business model leap to the top of the earnings chart. However the biggest change I guess is the overall acknowledgement of Affiliate Marketing as a professional and genuine online marketing channel. That said it frustrates me that leading publications still don’t give us the credit we deserve.

Where do you see affiliate marketing in say 5 or 10 years time?

It’s going to change to Performance Marketing and will be closely aligned with other marketing channels in an integrated fashion. There will be far greater segmentation of publisher business models, many traditional affiliates will fade away and be replaced with top level high tier publishers, performance marketing enabled mobile applications and high value add web applications. Everything will be open sourced with closer collaboration and a keener eye on the actual ROI. That’s next year though! – It’s just impossible to go further ahead!

Finally is there any particular funny anecdote or incident from a previous a4uexpo you would like to share with my readers?

Too many to mention! Though I’m sure I’ve seen some videos of James Little from Affiliate future and Mark White from UK Web Media dancing on youtube.

Thank you very much Matthew for taking time out of your busy schedule, see you in October.

Oh here are the video’s Matt mentions:

a4uexpo 2010 Europe’s largest Performance Marketing Conference with over 1,000 delegates, 48 conference sessions will be held in London on the 12th and 13th October 2010.

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