Held in conjunction with the Affiliate Summit West tradeshow/conference, the Pinnacle Awards (the public relations industry has its own Pinnacle Awards which tends to dominate the SERPs…), recognize the best and brightest in the affiliate industry.

Here are this year’s winners:

• Affiliate of the Year – Mike Allen
• Affiliate Manager of the Year – Angel Djambazov
• Exceptional Merchant – CelebrateExpress.com
• Affiliate Marketing Advocate – Melanie Seery
• Best Blogger – Scott Jangro
• Affiliate Marketing Legend – Kellie Stevens

Nominations are being taken and close today (November 30th, 2009).

As Affiliate Summit co-founder, Shawn Collins, has pointed out, these are nominations, not votes, so there’s no necessity to rotate proxies a couple of hundred times and vote yourself in. You might do better to schmooze the Affiliate Summit advisory board who will review and vote on the recipients. Having said that, if you’ve flamed, insulted and challenged some of them to a fight, you’re not likely to win either.

Having said that, I won’t repeat the criteria for the 6 categories, and instead give my personal choices for the nominees.

Blogger of the year: It’s a close fight between Justin Barr’s AffBuzz (though it’s technically a blog/RSS aggregator vs a true blog) and Barman’s PPC.bz. Both are sites I visit almost every day to follow developments in the industry.

PPC.bz has distinguished itself this year by breaking the news that reputed con man Dennis Yu has perpetuated himself as being a reformed “scammy offer” promoter to going white hat, then being shown as using his local business promotion service as a front for adult/dating websites.

The man fronting PPC.bz “Barman” has said he’ll shed his anonymity and go on stage to claim the award if he wins. Then again, he might pull a Lady Gaga and throw a garbage bag over himself and claim the award through arm slits in the bag.

Some other interesting posts on PPC.bz –

• How Zac Johnson scores prizes for his giveaways,
• How to score with affiliate managers at conferences

And from the Barman himself, why you should vote his blog for various awards.

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Affiliate Manager of the Year: The winners in this category tend to be in-house affiliate managers or outsourced program managers for Pay-Per-Sale affiliate programs. Going outside of this traditional model of affiliate marketing, I’ve seen CPA networks explode over the last couple of years and boutique-style private CPA networks, founded and managed by former top affiliates, stand head-and-shoulders over larger networks.

Three network owners who’ve gone to the extent of giving me specific tips on building my campaigns to the next level: Convert2Media’s Ruck, EagleWebAsset’s Ryan Eagle, and TriFoxMedia’s Josh Todd. All 3 have gone beyond what I’ve got from 90% of the other networks out there.

If I had to make a choice, I’d have to pick TriFoxMedia’s Josh, as he’s walked me through customizing and integrating 2 different pieces of software for a new type of campaign I was putting together.

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Affiliate of the Year: Again, the past winners tended to be coupon affiliates, or shopping portal-type sites. It’ll be interesting to see a CPA affiliate win this award. There’re a number who come to mind, like Charles “Dr Ngo” Ngo, Brandon “Major BTA” Adcock, Gauher Chaudhry, Amish Shah…

This is kind of tough to pick one winner at the moment, so I’ll probably decide when I’m filling out the nomination.

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Affiliate Marketing Advocate: It was great to see Melanie Seery win this for her efforts with AffiliateVoice earlier this year. Perhaps Brad Waller or Lisa Picarille this time round?

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Exceptional Merchant, Affiliate Marketing Legend: I think someone who’s watches the industry more closely than me will be in a better position to give recommendations on these.

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Going forward, perhaps we’ll see an affiliate network category in the awards in the future.

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Scott Jango has compiled a list of winners over 3 years since the Pinnacle Awards inauguration.

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If you haven’t got your tickets for the Affiliate Summit yet, you might like to check out some tips in my earlier post on getting the most out of the event, especially if you’re still sitting on the fence. (And get a 10% off discount code too).

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Remember, Pinnacle Awards nominations end TODAY.