The Affiliate Leaders Summit in Lisbon may be over, but here’s some of the key takeaways from the conference.
The Affiliate Leaders Summit 2026 is over, and here’s the key themes, takeaways, and talking points that the editorial team heard on the ground at the conference. For a more detailed picture of how things went down, check out the live blog.
It’s undoubtedly a challenging time for affiliates, but where better to discuss this than the Affiliate Leaders Summit?
There were some emerging themes we noticed this year – the first was SEO and diversifying marketing strategies. Affiliates are increasingly being forced to diversify to avoid depending on SEO practices alone, which was illustrated perfectly by recent developments in Brazil.
The news from Brazil, while not entirely unexpected, has been disturbing for igaming affiliates. Those who have not diversified their portfolios are now, presumably, panicking as the rug has been pulled from underneath them.
Will Barfield, head of FanReach at Better Collective, addressed this while on stage: “We’re trying to make sure we’re always ahead and taking the assets that we’ve worked so hard on building and generating those players, and reaping the reward from them.”
He said: “The first-party data is what we’re collecting in our tag, the zero-party data is what’s put on the site that’s not identified. That allows us to process with any platform in whatever form, programmatic, social media, that has come through.”
In a separate session, Pierre Cadena, chief operating officer at Catena Media said: “We can’t rely purely on the US, we can’t rely purely on SEO. We can’t rely purely on the verticals that are making us money today.”
Although there will be other markets, which will be important, affiliation should be a global business, Cadena pointed out. Affiliates need to think about strategies outside of purely organic.
“You can’t build a business on an algorithm, right? Especially one that you don’t own. There’s a tremendous amount of new verticals coming out, whether those are mystery boxes, prediction markets, card riffing, and what have you,” Cadena.
“I’ve been in the industry long enough to know that there’s always going to be the next best thing.”
The attribution problem
Attribution was another key focal point of this year’s summit. Attribution from affiliates is not an exact science, and is not always fixed or calculated in a universally recognised way.
This creates friction and confusion across the industry and to some extent, has affected the operator-affiliate relationship.
Attribution is a key theme, and there’s a “big mistake”, says Clemence Dujardin, group chief executive of MyAffiliates. “Cookies are not attribution. We need to step back and understand that cookies were never the attribution themselves. We need to better understand attribution, but that’s not cookies, it can come for other technologies.”
The problem affiliates are finding is the last-click attribution model is no longer viable for measurement in the modern affiliate era, and the industry needs a complete overhaul to keep up with evolving technologies.
Barfield continued: “The challenge in the industry is that the last-click model doesn’t work for most models. If you’re looking for a more future-proof method, CPC, intent based – the last click doesn’t work. You need something more transparent, and with full visibility and tracking.”
Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer for this. The question affiliates face now is: ‘how do we work together to make this better?’
The fix might include affiliates giving up a significant amount of their own data, but it’s not, in its current form, a two-way street.
The only thing now is to see if the industry can come up with a workable solution.
