Top Affiliate Challenge Review Part 2

August 30th, 2008 Posted in Top Affiliate Challenge

Now I realize I haven’t made a post for over a month, and I did commit myself to posting on a consistent basis. I’m going back to my original schedule to post a couple of times a week. This past month was just spent getting setup in my completely new environment here in India. I’ll talk more about this later, but as promised, Part 2 of my Top Affiliate Challenge Review.

I don’t know how the viewers saw the events since I was actually in the show, but I’ll try best to give you guys the inside scoop on some major happenings.

Team XY7 Surrenders

Many of you saw in an early episode where John Chow was forced to choose a person to go home even though they came in second. This was a “surprise” delivered by Thor Schrock. Well, John and his team didn’t take it so lightly. They were furious.

Furious enough to just quit the whole show as a team. When they all tried to walk off the set, Thor came back and said no one would get kicked off. This didn’t make things any better. According to John Chow, this was the turning point for him. He would now use any devious tactics to get his way on the show, and ended up pissing off the producers. You know the rest.

Big Jason Henderson

This guy is quite a character. I don’t know how he was portrayed on the show, but there were all sorts of drama coming from him. Before the show, it seemed he was best of buds with Jonathan Van Clute, but in the end, he alienated everyone. Here’s a couple of incidents that you may not have known.

When he was kicked off, he started to make all sorts of rumors on his Twitter account which he is always connected to since he has a small Dell laptop attached to his arms at all times. He’d reveal inside information about the show, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst was when he was spreading false rumors that he was sleeping with the host, Monica Durazo. You can imagine how that stirred the pot

The worst incidence which really shows the way he is was when we were leaving the 4th of July fireworks at the baseball stadium. Everyone loaded the huge party bus with plenty of time to spare, but oddly, Big Jason Henderson was no where to be found even though I saw him only an hour earlier outside. We waited 30 minutes before we decided to ditch him and go back home.

Thor was already pissed off since he wanted to include the 4th of July footage in the next episode which now would be impossible, and pretty much everyone in the bus was ready to punch him as well. So we headed home and then all the sudden we get a call from Big Jason telling us to come back to get him. Since the way back was blocked by police, we had to wait next to the freeway and have him walk across the bridge.

We saw him walk accross with our huge bus in plain sight at night. He ended up pretending to not see us. This is when things went crazy. I remember Wes seemed like he was about to break Big Jason in two.

Big Jason finally started walking to the bus and when he was about to enter, he was BLASTED by several people. The animosity in the bus was about as high as you could get without getting physical.

After this incident, pretty much everyone avoided Big Jason. I have no hard feelings against him, but he really doesn’t know how to handle people. It’s amazing how he is able to get endorsements from such high profile people. It’s a testament to the power of persistance I suppose.

John’s Golden Boy

Part of John’s plan was to choose one contestant as his golden boy to take all the way to the end. Even though John’s team didn’t generate any revenue on most days, he knew that he’d be at the finals anyway since the gurus couldn’t get kicked off. As you know, that didn’t really work out.

Anyway, he managed to convince the rest of his team that it was ok to commit reality show suicide to ultimately help his chosen one, Collin Lahay, emerge in the end victorious. Now the question is, how would he manage to win it in the end?

The Uber Master Plan

As the show progressed down to the last 6 or so contestants, things were getting a lot more serious. John Chow was determined to undermine the show as much as possible. There was also a lot of hate from the affiliate blogosphere about the show since the show didn’t do a good job of testing affiliate skills. These two elements combined to create an interesting twist.

Collin Lahay, the golden boy, was friends with Paul Bourque, the Uber Affiliate. This relationship turned to be quite beneficial to John’s master plan. They decided to use Paul’s campaigns to give Collin the necessary boost to keep in the running.

For example, the first individual challenge had Collin come in 1st by a large margin. John and Collin used their gift cards to pay Uber Affiliate $500 for the costs of the campaign while Uber Affiliate gave them over $1200 in revenue. So why would Uber Affiliate be willing to lose $700?

To mock the entire show. As you know, Uber Affiliate wasn’t too fond of the show. By helping John and Collin win, he would receive the ring and claim himself as the Top Affiliate and use this as a way to build his blog readership.

I have to admit it was a pretty good plan from Paul’s perspective, but it fell through when I was able to barely knock Collin out in a later episode.

The Pepperjam Duo

You might have noticed that Team Pepperjam pretty much stayed as a team throughout the show. Ken McArthur was declared the winning coach and the first two places went to Pepperjam members. What you might have not noticed was how closely Jonathan Van Clute and I worked together.

Our biggest threat was John Chow stealing the show, and we were also worried about someone like Big Jason sneaking by us. We weren’t going to let this happen so Jonathan and I worked closely together at critical points to get at least one of us to the end.

We helped each other during the individual challenges, and Jonathan Van Clute graciously taught me important tips to help me generate signifcant new revenue during the show. It ended up working extremely well as we were able to knock Collin Lahay out and then Big Jason, but it was a lot closer than you think.

When it came down to the last 6 with 3 teams, one team was going to be eliminated, so Collin and John really needed to pull out something huge. Collin managed to make a chunk of change by himself but he needed more money, so they contacted Uber Affiliate again for the extra kick, but it came a little too late. It turned out Uber Affiliate was out on a date and couldn’t switch over a campaign in time.

Final Thoughts

Thor definitely got what I think he wanted. Drama. I’m not sure that’s the best way to approach an affiliate marketing competition, but who knows. I would have preferred a competition closer to what you see on World’s Strongest Man competitions on ESPN with individual challenges and point ratings.

The editing at times was a bit poor, but you can’t expect much was such an aggressive time table. The film crew did an amazing job with the circumstances, but Thor really needs to rethink this 24 hour delay idea.

I personally really enjoyed the experience and met some amazing people. I also learned some awesome things that will significantly change my life. I want to thank Thor for putting the effort into building this out. I know every show will just get better as he takes in feedback from others.

Now I need to get back to work! Expect more posts about what I’m doing in the near future. I promise to do better than 1 post per month!