Affiliate Summit East 2022 Recap

What is Affiliate Summit East?

Affiliate Summit East is a marketing event that attracts thousands of different marketers across the globe. This includes content/editorial publishers, affiliate networks, digital marketing agencies, loyalty sites, coupon sites, and everything in between. The goal of this conference is for marketers to come together to share insights, build relationships and improve their business. Check out the Affiliate Summit Site to see their recent content and upcoming events.

Why Should You Attend Affiliate Summit East?

If you are looking to learn more about affiliate marketing, build relationships with publishers or advertisers, and have a good time doing it then you should definitely look at attending Affiliate Summit East. Affiliate Summit is one of the best ways to get face-to-face meetings with people who you otherwise may have a hard time scheduling a meeting with. With everyone in the industry in one place, Affiliate Summit is the perfect opportunity to pitch those people who may have not been answering your emails. In addition to that, you can learn a lot by attending educational seminars, networking events, and simply chatting with people while walking around.

How To Maximize Your Time at Affiliate Summit East? 

Time can fly by quickly at Affiliate Summit so you want to make sure you take advantage of every minute by showing up to the conference prepared. At Today’s Business, we contacted our affiliate partners weeks in advance to set up meetings in person. This gave us plenty of time to plan and be prepared for the meetings with relevant questions and pitches. We created notes documents, pitch decks, and gathered resources for each meeting well in advance so that we can capitalize on the 20-minute meetings that we had with top affiliates. This process also enabled us to follow through on actionable items after the event, continuing the relationships that we created and built.

What are the Best
Networking Opportunities at Affiliate Summit East 2022?

Outside of pre-conference outreach to schedule meetings, the best way to network at Affiliate Summit is by attending private events and sponsored happy hours. This year our Manager of Growth & Partnerships, Joe Sanfilippo, attended Martech Record’s Marketing, Content, and Commerce event. This was a ticketed event that offered fantastic insights from top media publishers, networks, agencies, technology partners, and investors in the affiliate industry.

Additionally, some of the large networks like AWIN will often host fairly large happy hour events. Most of these events are invite only so it’s important to find out who is hosting these events and try to find a way to connect with them to get invited. If you are a client or partner then your invite will often be extended in advance.

Outside of these events, you can certainly network at the Affiliate Summit’s meet market and at some of their meet-up events that take place throughout the day.

What did Today’s Business do at Affiliate Summit East 2022?

Today’s Business spent the majority of the time meeting with top content partners. As a digital agency that manages top-performing affiliate programs for brands such as FOCO, State & Liberty, and IGourmet (see all of Today’s Business affiliate programs). At ASE, we specifically targeted content publishers that write content that is ranking on Google and relevant to our brands. In most instances, we have an existing relationship with these partners but we might be meeting new team members or discussing new opportunities. Any time in between these meetings or calls, we performed timely follow-ups for these meetings and attended the meet market to look for any new opportunities we had not currently had in our prospecting deck or meeting calendar. Lastly, Today’s Business attended many sponsored happy hours and events after the conclusion of the conference. Many from the Summit will attend these events, and it is a more casual way to continue/build conversation and relationships with other marketers in the space.

Affiliate Summit East 2022 Meetings

Vox Media

About Vox Media – a leading modern media company – owns publications such as The Strategist, The Cut, The Verge, SB Nation, Polygon, Popsugar, and many more. If you attend an Affiliate Summit event, you definitely want to get in contact with Vox Media and set up a meeting, as the opportunities with them are endless for many agencies and marketers.

Dotdash Meredith

About Dotdash Meredith – one of the largest media conglomerates that owns brands in industries such as Health, Finance, Food & Drink, Home, Beauty, Travel, Tech, and Entertainment. Some of these include Very Well, Health, Investopedia, Eating Well, The Spruce Eats, Better Homes and Gardens, Byrdie, Brides, Shape, Travel and Leisure, Lifewire, Entertainment Weekly, People, and many more. Dotdash and Meredith previously merged, which is still in the process, opening even more opportunities up to work with them.

Penske Media

About Penske Media – PMC’s mission is to be the world’s premier publishing and media organization. They attract a monthly audience of over 310 million to brands such as Billboard, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, sheknows, She Media, and Spy. They stretch between almost every industry in the space, and have opportunities amongst their brands that reflect that.

Healthline

About Healthline – Healthline is the #1 health and wellness site on the internet, and as a media brand they also own other sites such as Medical News Today, Greatest, and Psych Central. If you are attending ASE, and need to meet with a brand that focuses on the health and wellness industry, Healthline should be the first meeting you are trying to set up.

Future PLC

About Future PLC – Future PLC is another media conglomerate that owns many large brands. Future stretches between many different industries, excluding mainly Food and Beverage related content. They have a heavy focus on entertainment and specialist media with brands such as PC Gamer, Tech Radar, Cinema Blend, Guitar World, etc. Other brands include Tom’s Guide, Marie Claire, Country Life, Homes and Gardens, and more.

Biggest Takeaways from Affiliate Summit East 2022

Our summary of Affiliate Summit East 2022 was that we are doing everything right according to the publishers and networks we met with. We have learned a lot about how the mass media publishers operate over the years and having one on one conversations in person helped us really understand what exactly is going on at each of them right now.

The general theme is that the big publications keep a lot of separation between their commerce/business development teams and their editorial teams. Having a relationship with commerce teams is great because they can help you get in front of the editorial team but, in some instances, the commerce teams don’t even receive a whole lot of feedback from their own editorial teams. At Today’s Business, we are utilizing unique approaches to connect with both of these parties and are focusing the majority of our efforts on connecting with writers and utilizing information that they have told us is important to them when making our pitches.

We also have noticed a massive increase in demand within the affiliate world. Due to the iOS14 update, brands have faced serious challenges trying to acquire new customers via Facebook ads. This has caused many brands to turn to affiliate marketing as a new channel for growth. With the increase in demand but limited supply of quality content, prices for inclusion in content publications have gone up across the board. Basically, it’s a good time to be an affiliate content publisher!