Affiliate Summit West (ASW) 2018 Recap

ASW was just a couple of weeks ago, and our team is still reeling from all the meetings we’ve had during the exhibition. Affiliate Summit usually attracts thousands of affiliates, media buyers, service providers, advertisers and influencers from all over the world, but I have to say that this year the show generally and the meet market specifically exceeded our expectations – the hall was packed and we had plenty of substantial meetings with partners and prospects.

In this quick recap I’ll share the insights our team gathered from noticing differences in the attending audience and conversations during the show – don’t let the titles confuse you, the insights are more nuanced than they may seem, and I implore you to take the extra couple of minutes to read them through.

Crypto and Financial Offers Are On The Rise

I know we won’t be surprising anyone if we pointed out how we’ve noticed there are suddenly a bunch of crypto offers running around – it’s definitely a trend inside and outside of our industry, but the companies that are now in the crypto game or that are now running financial offers (like payday loans) surprised us, since we didn’t think they would step into that vertical.

When we inquired some of our friends and long term partners in the show what’s behind this trend, they all had one clear answer, that to us non US residents came as a surprise – it’s Trump.

Some said they see that other companies feel more comfortable taking risks with Trump’s policies being more lenient towards business and some pointed that the general growth in the financial sector during Trump’s administration provided them with more opportunities than expected.

Since we heard Trump come up so many times in discussions we had on the subject, we have reason to believe there’s some basis to it. While it is completely possible that all the people we talked to are avid Trump supporters (thought we did see a few guys wearing “Make Incent Great Again” hats which were kind of funny), it still feels like there’s something to it. Does that mean Trump is good for the performance marketing business? He just might be.

Influencer Marketing Effectiveness Grows

While influencer marketing has been a part of the performance marketing industry for quite a few years, this is the first year where we felt that its starting to be figured out – we heard of advertisers running successful CPI campaigns with influencers directly, we talked with different platforms that connect between advertisers and influencers and even with a couple of very interesting incentivized monetization solutions for advertisers.

If you asked industry veterans what they thought about influencer marketing and how much they are willing to spend in budgets towards it, we believe that up until recently most of them would have replied that it looks good, but on paper, the results aren’t amazing and that it isn’t scale-able, but at ASW, we mostly heard of budgets increasing, and that with some attention scale can be achieved while maintaining quality.

Also, it seems, based on content that our team members consume online on YouTube and Twitch, that more and more content creators are learning how to curate their content in a way that supports influencer campaigns but doesn’t deteriorate the content of their quality or deems them “sell-outs” by their viewer base, and that viewers are becoming more and more tolerant towards these campaigns since they help generate the content that they can’t get enough of.

Beyond that, Vegas was overwhelming as usual, and the team had a blast. Partners (future and current), we hope you enjoyed visiting our table and booth, and congratulations to three winners who now own a brand new Sky Viper Stunt Drone after winning our raffle!

See you next year!