West coast, East coast

I tried finding a definition for performance-based marketing in Wikipedia earlier tonight. Doesn’t exist. Wikipedia’s knowledge on the subject seems pretty representative of the Web 2.0 space in general, nobody seems to get it (I’ll let pronet off the hook for seemingly being able to straddle the fence.)

I got introduced to the category three years ago. I liken the intro to a scene in Constantine where the heroine is forcibly held under water to the point of drowning before crossing over to another plane (happens to be Hell, but that’s incidental.)

Being a professional web developer of something like 10 years (seven at the time) I would have said I knew affiliate programs, SEM, data mining, list building and targeted email marketing pretty well. But performance-based marketing as a category operates on a different plane, and established players do things with traffic I didn’t know was possible – like being able to push hundreds of thousands of demographically / psychographically relevant consumers to a product in a day. It doesn’t seem natural.

The [performance-based marketing] industry is well established. It’s very profitable. And it’s extremely misunderstand. The organizations we typically think of as black hatters are often publicly-traded machines with fortune 500 clients wrapping around the corner to get in.

I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind on customer acquisition tactics, but just think how much the Web 2.0 space could gain by absorbing a fraction of the knowledge amassed by the performance marketing industry.

Since I never learned how to write an open letter in grade school, I’ll plead my case here for a blended conference. Rather than have ad:tech NYC and web2con on opposite coasts at the same time, mash ‘em up. If someone put a conference together keying off of the experience of both black hat vets and Web 2.0 startup kids, everyone in the room would get so smart their heads would explode.

In the meantime, I’m getting ready for SXSW. If any black hatters performance marketers are going, let me know, I’m buying drinks.