Let’s be honest. There are a lot of industry events that promise “insight” and then deliver the same safe conversations, the same predictable panels, and the same people saying things you could have guessed from the session title.

Meanwhile, affiliate managers are dealing with very real pressure. Bigger targets. More scrutiny. Tighter budgets. More channels bleeding into one another. More internal questions about what the channel is actually driving. And more noise around AI, creators, loyalty, incrementality, and performance partnerships without always much clarity on what to actually do with any of it.

That is exactly why we built the Affilifest 2026 agenda the way we did.

This is not content for the sake of content. It is built around the stuff affiliate teams are actually wrestling with right now. How to grow an affiliate programme without just doing more of the same. How to improve publisher brand relationships. How to make better decisions around partnership marketing. How to get affiliate taken seriously internally. How to navigate ecommerce affiliate trends without chasing every shiny new thing. And how to spot real opportunities for affiliate program growth before everyone else piles in.

If you want the full picture, you can view the agenda now.

And if you’re a brand, you can register for Affilifest 2026 free until May 8th.

Why the 2026 agenda feels different

The affiliate industry does not need more generic conversations.

It needs sharper ones.

The kind that reflect what the channel has become. Affiliate is no longer sitting neatly in one box. It overlaps with influencer, referrals, creator partnerships, brand to brand partnerships, retail media, loyalty, content commerce, CSS, card linked offers, paid partnerships and broader performance partnerships. That is part of what makes it exciting. It is also what makes it more complex to run well.

So the Affilifest 2026 agenda reflects that reality.

You will not just find surface level “top tips” sessions. You will find debates, roundtables, huddles, spotlights, working sessions and stage content built around the pressure points that matter most to brands, publishers and partner teams right now.

That means sessions on:

• affiliate marketing strategy
• partnership marketing
• performance partnerships
• affiliate program growth
• ecommerce affiliate trends
• publisher brand relationships
• retail affiliate insights
• affiliate manager tips
• measurement and incrementality
• creators and performance
• internal influence and stakeholder buy in
• AI and discovery
• channel credibility and trust

That mix matters because the best affiliate teams are not just looking for tactics anymore. They are trying to build smarter programmes, influence bigger decisions, diversify partnerships, and prove real value.

The biggest questions shaping affiliate right now

A strong agenda should not just fill slots. It should answer the questions people are actually asking. The Affilifest 2026 programme is built around some of the biggest ones in the market.

1. How do you grow an affiliate programme without just doing more of the same?

This is the big one.

A lot of brands are still relying too heavily on the same partner types, the same mechanics, and the same budget logic. It can work for a while. Then growth plateaus, margin gets squeezed, leadership starts asking harder questions, and the room for experimentation shrinks.

That is why the Affilifest agenda puts so much focus on affiliate program growth in a more honest way. Not just “scale your programme” as a vague ambition, but proper conversations around where growth is actually coming from, which partnerships are driving value, and what should probably be challenged.

There are sessions designed to look at whether certain channels still deserve a place in the plan, where loyalty really adds value, how creators fit into performance, and how brands can evolve their partner mix without making their programmes messier and harder to defend.

That is the kind of thinking affiliate managers need more of.

2. What do ecommerce affiliate trends actually mean in practice?

Everyone loves talking about trends. Fewer people are good at separating genuine shifts from LinkedIn noise.

The 2026 agenda does that much better.

There is a strong focus on the trends that are genuinely changing how affiliate works, especially around AI, discovery, creator commerce, measurement, cross channel overlap and the growing importance of more strategic publisher brand relationships.

These are not fringe topics anymore. They are shaping how people find brands, how publishers create value, how content gets surfaced, and how performance is understood.

For affiliate managers, that means the job is getting broader. You are no longer just managing a channel. You are helping shape commercial partnerships, content distribution, customer acquisition strategy and, increasingly, how performance partnerships fit into the wider business.

That is why the agenda covers both the strategic shifts and the practical side of what teams should actually be doing about them.

3. How do you prove value internally?

Plenty of teams know what they want to do. Getting it signed off is the harder bit.

That is why one of the most relevant themes in the Affilifest 2026 agenda is internal influence. Because the reality is, affiliate manager tips are only useful up to a point if you cannot get finance, legal, procurement or senior leadership on board.

One of the sessions gets right into this: how to get affiliate taken seriously internally and get big decisions over the line.

That matters because so much of modern affiliate marketing strategy lives or dies on internal perception. If affiliate is still seen as a tactical bolt on, it is harder to get budget for tests, harder to back new partner models, harder to defend incrementality, and harder to build a broader partnership marketing case.

The teams making the biggest moves in affiliate are usually not just the ones with the best channel knowledge. They are the ones that have figured out how to influence internally.

The sessions people will actually want to talk about after

One of the main things we cared about when building the Affilifest 2026 agenda was making it feel like an event with some personality. Not just useful. Not just commercially relevant. Actually memorable.

A few sessions do that particularly well:

Pulse Check: The Affiliate Hot Seat

This is not a standard panel. It is built to be more entertaining, more revealing, and a lot less polished. The whole point is to get beyond the safe media trained version of the industry and into what people actually think.

That matters because affiliate is full of conversations everyone dances around. What is over rewarded. What is under challenged. Which partner types get too much protection. What everyone knows but nobody says out loud.

This format is built to surface that.

AI or Die? How Discovery is Reshaping the Affiliate Channel

There is a lot of lazy AI content out there right now. This is not that. This session is focused on what discovery changes actually mean for affiliate, publishers, visibility and performance. It is one of the strongest agenda sessions for anyone interested in ecommerce affiliate trends and where publisher brand relationships may need to evolve next.

Because whether people like it or not, discovery is shifting. And if that shifts, affiliate strategy has to shift with it.

Influencer Isn’t Branding Anymore. It’s Performance

This is a big one for brands trying to figure out where creators sit.

The old split between “brand influencer activity” and “affiliate performance activity” is getting weaker by the minute. More brands want creators who can actually drive action. More teams want commission based models that feel commercially accountable. And more affiliate programmes are being asked to absorb creator relationships into the wider partner mix.

That creates a huge opportunity, but only if brands are clear on what they are trying to build.

This session gets into that properly.

How to Get Affiliate Taken Seriously Internally

Probably one of the most useful sessions on the whole agenda for in house teams.

Not because it is flashy, but because it speaks to the real blocker behind so many stuck programmes. Internal buy in. Stakeholder management. Political reality. Influence. Credibility.

It is very easy to say what a brand should do in theory. Much harder to actually get it through.

That is why this one matters.

Channels on Trial: What Actually Deserves a Place in Your Plan?

Affiliate teams are under more pressure than ever to justify where time, resource and budget goes.

So a session that properly challenges which channels still deserve space is exactly the kind of conversation the industry needs more of. Honest, commercially grounded, and a bit more willing to call out what is no longer working.

Why this matters for affiliate managers specifically

A lot of event content ends up being too broad to be genuinely useful to the person actually in the weeds.

This agenda is different because it is packed with sessions that reflect what affiliate managers are dealing with every day.

Questions like:

• how do I grow without more headcount?
• how do I convince internal teams to back a different approach?
• how do I find better publishers instead of just more of the same?
• how do I build stronger publisher brand relationships?
• how do I think about creators in a performance model?
• how do I defend the channel when last click logic still dominates?
• how do I make sense of retail affiliate insights without copying what every other brand is doing?

That is why Affilifest works especially well for brand side attendees. It is built for people who are trying to do the job better, not just nod along to theory.

Another reason this agenda matters is that it reflects the growing importance of performance partnerships as a broader discipline.

Affiliate is not shrinking. It is expanding into more models, more partner types and more areas of the business. That means teams that understand performance partnerships well are in a strong position.

You can see that clearly in the range of agenda themes. There is a bigger appetite for diversified partner strategies, a broader view of commercial models, and more openness to partnerships that sit slightly outside the traditional affiliate mould but still drive measurable results.

That is where the smartest teams are heading.

How to get the most out of Affilifest 2026

Do not just turn up and drift. Go in knowing what you need most.

• If your focus is affiliate program growth, build your schedule around sessions on partner mix, performance, incrementality and channel value.
• If your focus is publisher brand relationships, prioritise meetings, roundtables, publisher spotlights and any sessions around trust, strategy and collaboration.
• If your focus is partnership marketing more broadly, use the agenda to look at where affiliate is overlapping with creators, loyalty, AI, brand partnerships and wider performance strategy.

And if your focus is simply being a sharper operator, go to the sessions that will help you influence better, ask better questions, and challenge assumptions you may have been carrying for too long.

That is often where the biggest value is.

The Affilifest 2026 agenda matters because it reflects where the industry actually is, not where people pretend it is.

Affiliate is getting more strategic. More blended. More scrutinised. More commercially important.

That means the conversations need to get better too.

This agenda is built for people who want more than generic advice. People who care about affiliate marketing strategy, stronger partnership marketing, better performance partnerships, real affiliate program growth, smarter responses to ecommerce affiliate trends, and more useful retail affiliate insights. People who want affiliate manager tips that go beyond the obvious. People who want better publisher brand relationships and a clearer view of where the channel is heading.

So yes, there will be serious conversations. Just with better views :)

View the agenda here: Affilifest 2026 Agenda

Register here: free for brands until May 8th