We are thrilled to announce the sessions and esteemed collective of speakers for Awin + ShareASale ThinkTank 2019.
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Keynote: The Future of Retail
Discover how consumers will shop in the future, where AI, Voice, and AR and Robotics will play a huge role. Whether you’re an advertiser, agency, publisher or blogger, uncover the hidden gems of opportunity for affiliate revenue.
Speaker:
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Sri Sharma is the CEO and Cofounder of Increasingly, the AI cross-selling technology that won Ecommerce Product of the Year and Breakthrough Innovation of 2018. Previously, Sri founded and sold two digital marketing technology businesses. He has won National Business Awards’ highly commended Entrepreneur of the Year, Sunday Times Tech Track 100 and Deloitte Tech Fast 50. Most recently, he won a Google awarded scholarship to study AI and futuristic technology at NASA. As a keynote speaker, he has been had by audiences across the globe and presented to over 1 million people so far. This includes to audiences at Google across Europe and Baidu in China. |
Session 1: Awin Report 2019 – Celebrating digital diversity
The Awin Report is the definitive global guide to affiliate marketing. This year’s 2019 edition celebrates the digital diversity of the channel by throwing a spotlight onto the numerous businesses around the world that it helps to connect. From publishers and advertisers, to trade bodies, digital legislative experts, influencer platforms and more, the Report features over 80 of Awin’s partners views on the current state of the affiliate industry.
In this session, Rob Davinson, Awin’s content analyst and editor of the Report, will share insights from this year’s edition and will explain why the affiliate channel’s diversity represents a refreshing antidote to the increasing monopolization of the wider digital ad industry.
Speaker:
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Rob Davinson is a content analyst on Awin’s group strategy team, where he produces content in a range of mediums based on the insights that the affiliate network tracks around the world. Alongside articles that have been published in a variety of leading digital news sites – including The Drum, Marketing Week and PerformanceIn – Rob produces whitepapers, hosts our in-house podcast Awin Talks, and presents at numerous industry conferences. He is also the editor of The Awin Report, the annual guide to the state of the global affiliate industry. |
Session 2: Awin Talks – Live
- Gary Kibel will provide an informative overview on the pending California Consumer Privacy Act and its likely impact upon the digital ad industry, as well as thoughts around the state of digital legislation.
- Kim Westwood will discuss the growth and increasing professionalization of influencer marketing and how it is likely to evolve in the future.
- Tijs van Santen will consider the state of mobile marketing within the affiliate industry and touch upon how changing user behavior is bringing mobile to the very forefront of digital commerce.
Speakers:
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Gary Kibel is an attorney and partner in the Digital Media, Technology & Privacy Practice Group of Davis & Gilbert LLP in New York City. He also serves as General Counsel to the Performance Marketing Association. Gary advises interactive companies, advertising agencies, media providers and other commercial entities regarding transactions for interactive media, behavioral advertising, social media, programmatic media buying, mobile marketing, affiliate marketing, data collection and usage, and other emerging products and services. He is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP) and advises clients in many industries regarding privacy and data security issues, including, internal information security policies, contractual obligations, security breaches, privacy law compliance and other matters in connection with an organization’s collection, storage and use of data in all aspects of its business. |
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Kim Westwood is the Founder and Managing Director of Shopping Links, a performance-based influencer and content marketplace that provides managed collaboration and product gifting services for leading international brands. Launched in 2014, Shopping Links has a network of over 18,000 influencers and actively works with Fortune 500 advertisers like Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and Nordstrom, with a focus on aligning brands with influencers who share their target audience. Shopping Links recently won the 2016 Governor of Victoria Export Award for business services and Kim’s experience has led her to be recognized as one of the top 50 industry leaders in 2018, particularly in the area of influencer return on investment. |
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Tijs van Santen is the Chief Revenue Officer of Button, the mobile commerce platform that maximizes the value of every tap. In his role at Button, Tijs oversees Marketing, Sales, and Partner Success. With more than a decade of international business leadership experience, Tijs joined Button from marketing technology platform Impact, where he served as CRO. While there, he successfully designed, built, and led teams across the US, Europe and Asia, and helped deliver over 1000% revenue growth, strengthening Impact as the platform of choice. Prior to his tenure at Impact, Tijs served as the VP of Global Sales at Forrester Research, and held a variety of positions at one of the world’s most influential research and advisory firms beforehand. Over the course of more than nine years, he grew and managed teams worldwide, successfully designing and building a new global sales and account management organization that was responsible for the company’s largest and most strategic enterprise accounts. |
Session 3: Innovations Panel
Hosted by Awin COO Adam Ross, the Innovations Panel will explore how participants have taken an out-of-the-box approach to growing their affiliate program using non-traditional technologies and tools to achieve their goal, whether that be an increased revenue, optimized partnerships, or stronger ROI.
Moderator:
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Adam Ross is the chief operation officer at Awin. His career began at Awin in 2004. At the time, the company was a small but successful startup with just 15 employees. Over the next five years, Adam managed different areas of the business from technical to account management before joining the board in 2008. The company enjoyed tremendous success throughout this period, resulting in the eventual sale of the business to Axel Springer and PubliGroupe. In 2014, Adam was invited to join the Awin board. As COO, he oversees each of our countries, as well as many of our central functions including global sales and account management. He is a strong believer in the principle that innovative technology cannot yield benefit unless it is coupled with excellent service. |
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Chris Johnson is the Client Services Director at Groupon Coupons. His career in affiliate marketing began in 2004, where he worked for a small business affiliate company that later turned into the UK and Europe’s leading Performance Marketing conference and awards series, PerformanceIN (formerly known as the A4u).Chris then moved to join innovative discount publisher vouchercloud in 2015 to help grow the account team’s visibility and strategy when dealing with brands. Vouchercloud was later acquired by Groupon in May 2018 and Chris now sits as Client Services Director, where he is helping unify and grow the coupons business |
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Morgan Chemij serves as director of North American e-commerce marketing at HP.com, where he oversees demand gen and CRM programs inclusive of email, print, search, display and affiliates.Prior to that, he oversaw e-commerce marketing at FTD brands – before which he spent many years agency side at iCrossing and Wunderman creating best-in-class search and digital innovations for the likes of American Express, American Airlines, Disney, FedEx, Citibank, Land Rover and countless others. |
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Maryellen Garasky stumbled across affiliate marketing while owning and operating a business with her husband. Taking the reins on their marketing, she started a hyperlocal blog about things to do in her beautiful resort hometown of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Topics included everything from date-night ideas to free family activities. After quickly outranking the chamber of commerce and visitors’ bureau on “things to do in Coeur d’Alene” and other relevant terms, Maryellen landed a spot at an affiliate marketing agency. There she managed programs for brands like Philosophy, Charlotte Russe, Plastic Jungle, DownEast Basics, David’s Cookies, Roots and many more. Always a goal to work inside at an advertiser, Maryellen left the agency for Restaurant.com where she led the channel for both networked and direct affiliate partners. She later joined Jane in April 2015 and has been a happy camper ever since.Jane has been listed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing, privately held companies for the last four years in a row. Maryellen was also a finalist in the 2017 Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Manager of the year. Jane was honored with the win in 2018 for the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Advertiser of the Year. |
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Toby Sharpe is VP of Business Development at Intelligent Interfaces, an AI-driven intelligent recommendation platform. Having joined the team in mid-2018, he is responsible for driving new business sales and building channel partnerships, with a particular focus on the North American market.Relatively new to the affiliate world, Toby and Intelligent Interfaces are working with Awin to help advertisers better engage with their customers and to convert more webstore sales. This is done through reducing choice paralysis by providing customers with a guided buying journey and an individually personalized experience. Beyond this, Intelligent Interfaces’ analytics suite offers clients access to deep insights into their customer demographics and behaviors following engagement with their bespoke decision engines |
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Mike is the founder and CEO of Monotote, the world’s leading distributed e-commerce provider. Mike helps retailers and publishers to enhance their customer’s journey through “Instant checkout” by bringing the retailer’s shop to the shopper. Monotote is partnered with over 100 merchants including eBay, HP and Loews hotels.He was recently named as one of the top 50 most influential figures in performance marketing. Monotote has been hailed by Awin for its potential to “significantly alter” the way affiliate marketing is done. |
Session 4: Industry Insights Panel
Join Awin’s Group Strategy Director Kevin Edwards and our exclusive panel of affiliate marketing decision makers as they discuss the current state of the channel, including the Performance Marketing Association’s inaugural US Industry Survey, the Amazon effect, an increasing move towards globalization and more.
Moderator:
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Kevin Edwards is the group client strategy director at Awin and has worked in affiliate marketing for 15 years – more than 10 of those with Awin. In his role, he’s responsible for empowering the company’s employees and clients with the right data and insights to make the most informed decisions about their campaigns. He also takes an active role in creating best practice standards and self-regulation. Kevin was previously chair of the Affiliate Marketing Council in the UK, and continues to play an active role in the IAB’s Legislation and Standards’ Committee. |
Panel:
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Rachel Honoway serves as the President of the Board of Directors of the Performance Marketing Association (the PMA). She has held executive roles within the performance marketing space since the late 90′s, spending over a decade with KowaBunga!, just over five years with Lurn/Affiliate Classroom, and four years leading FMTC. She is now co-owner of Rust Built, an agency that combines influencer and affiliate marketing through services and events including the Type-A blogging conference and community. |
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Nilla Ali is the vice president of strategic partnerships at BuzzFeed. Nilla is a University of Virginia alumni, graduating with an economics major and leadership minor. With a proven track-record of success, Nilla is focused on redefining eCommerce and identifying new channels to support revenue growth. A data junkie at heart, she is committed to identifying unique methods for attribution tagging, leveraging key data points to identify opportunities for growth, and establishing measurable benchmarks for a successful business. |
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As President of Acceleration Partners, Matt Wool oversees day-to-day operations of the business and has helped drive the company’s growth from five employees when he joined in 2012 to over 130 employees on four continents today. Matt’s experience growing a global leader in affiliate marketing gives him a unique perspective on the dynamics and trends of the industry, and has helped support Acceleration Partners strategic work with over 200 clients, including 12 of the Fortune 500. |