They say the lightning never strikes twice. Sometimes they’re wrong. On January 29th, 2009 I was fortunate enough to win my second Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Manager of the Year  from Affiliate Summit.

The first time I won the award was as the affiliate manager for Onlineshoes.com. It was essentially my rookie year, thankfully I had a lot of guidance from the community at ABestWeb. The program I had taken over received a lot of focus for the massive cleanup underwent initially to parasites from a channel that had been on autopilot for the four years prior. After the cleanup we achieved (pdf) 110% growth year over year, rare for a clean program.

With Jones Soda the experience was very different. Not simply because the products and audiences of both companies were different but because their cultures were so different. While a great place to work, Onlineshoes is a prototypical corporate online retailer. Jones Soda, while also a large corporation, had built a strong brand around a very grassroots counter culture following.

Having carte blanche is a consultant’s dream. Jones Soda gave me that kind of freedom. I got to do some very creative campaigns with ICanHasCheezburger.com and the Graffiti application on Facebook. Plus where else do you get to promote Barrack Obama and Ron Paul soda?

No matter how creative the campaigns in the corporate world the numbers trump. The ICHC campaign was so successful that Jones Soda placed lolcats offline in retailers like Target during the Fall of ’08. We also posted (pdf) 42% growth year over year which in 2008 as the economy was dovetailing isn’t bad at all.