united-games-marketing-logoI first learned about United Games Marketing’s plans to limit affiliate numbers back in late June.

The affiliates will be capped and the goal is to have players enjoying the game with Freemium play.

With UGM affiliates out there marketing heavily on fear of loss, the question was when were affiliate signups actually going to be cut off?

An email update sent out by UGM a few hours ago confirms that after October 10th, United Games Marketing affiliate signups will be closed.

Since launch United Games Marketing haven’t provided a specific launch date for their app. The general consensus among UGM affiliates is that it’s coming sometime in the fall (Autumn).

We’re almost halfway through the US fall season, the NFL football season started a few weeks ago and still there’s no sign off the UGM app.

Unfortunately UGM’s email does not provide any information about the app’s pending launch date.

It does however state ‘A LOT of updates and announcements‘ will be made ‘in the next couple of weeks‘.

Hopefully one of those announcements pertains to the app’s name. At the time of publication UGM’s app is still nameless.

Also detailed in the email are the unique compliance challenges UGM face with their enthusiastic affiliate-base.

Despite the app not having a name or official launch date, UGM affiliates have been putting up flyers at professional stadiums.

We appreciate and encourage creativity in attracting new players to our game.

However, what you probably do not realize is that professional stadiums are owned by corporations and those corporations also own the parking lot!

Companies must pay in order to solicit or advertise inside of that parking lot so if you are papering cars in professional stadiums, that activity is illegal unless you contact the stadium and pay to have the right to advertise there.

Please help us maintain the integrity of the brand and this company by adhering to this policy.

Also under fire are UGM affiliate marketing materials that feature unlicensed use of professional athlete’s images.

We can’t stress this enough! You are NOT allowed to use images of professional athletes.

You do not have the rights to use those images and it is illegal to use these.

If you are using them, or have used them in the past STOP and take them down immediately!

Professional players are owned by their respective leagues and player associations.

Advertisers and corporations pay a lot of money to use their image. You cannot simply pull an image from the internet and use it for your promotion.

In an effort to curb affiliate compliance, from October 11th UGM are banning all affiliate published content that mentions the MLM opportunity.

Affiliates are also banned from using their own marketing material to promote the yet to be released app.

If you are going to use material to promote the game, it has to be corporate created.

You can take our corporate created material and post it on a website, social media, etc, but You CANNOT create a separate landing page specifically for the game.

NO websites should be created that are specifically for game promotion.

Sounds overly restrictive to me and suggests UGM don’t have much confidence in their affiliate-base.

So long as UGM affiliates aren’t doing silly things like spamming stadium carparks and using unlicensed images, why can’t affiliates develop their own creative marketing campaigns?

Being a UGM affiliate sounds more like dropping flyers into mailboxes as opposed to engaging in true entrepreneurial affiliate marketing.

 

Update 2nd September 2018 – In July 2018 United Games Marketing was acquired by Investview.