I stumbled across an interview with Advaliant President, Jivan Manhas, on Bernard Griffiths’ blog. Obviously, with Advaliant being a part of MediaTrust, I have my biases. When you read this interview, what do you get from it?

Jivan’s thoughts on why Advaliant is different:

“We are taking advantage of various different social feature sets, semantic A.I. programming as well as a large amount of feedback from our affiliates and advertisers to build out a cutting edge, industry leading technology that will allow us to evolve into the premier online brand for performance marketing.  I realize that is a bold statement but unfortunately affiliate marketing is seen as the ugly step child of the marketing world by many companies and if we want to survive as an industry we all need to take our industry up a few notches and start attracting the big dollars from the Fortune 100 companies.” 

A bold statement, yes, but let’s face it, affiliate marketing has some shady characters. A lot of the reputation the space has been branded with is well-deserved. Advaliant, under Jivan’s leadership, is trying to rise above that, even when that means turning down easy money now with less desirable partners.

What are some of the criteria you look at as an advertiser or a publisher when choosing your affiliate network?