Las Vegas — Thousands of performance marketing professionals packed Caesars Forum here last month for Affiliate Summit West, the industry's largest annual gathering, with a heavy contingent from the Los Angeles Westside where some of the country's most active digital advertising firms are based.
The three-day conference, held Jan. 12-14, logged more than 10,000 scheduled meetings and drew representatives from affiliate networks, e-commerce brands, ad technology companies and agencies. For firms along the Silicon Beach corridor — the stretch running from Santa Monica through Venice, Playa Vista and into Culver City — the event serves as an annual checkpoint on where the performance marketing industry is heading and who is spending money to get there.
The Locals in the Room
Hawke Media, the Santa Monica-based agency at 1714 16th St. that has served more than 6,000 brands since its 2013 founding, operates across the full suite of channels that ASW covers — paid social, paid search, affiliate, email and programmatic. The agency reached a milestone this spring when Google selected it as the first agency admitted to its new International Growth Certified Partner Program. Affiliate marketing is among its core service offerings and a consistent draw to conferences like ASW, where networks and brand-side advertisers shop for agency partners.
MuteSix, headquartered at 5800 Bristol Pkwy. in Culver City, has built its reputation on the same channels — Meta, Google, TikTok and Amazon — that dominate ASW's exhibitor floor. Founded in 2014 and now part of the Dentsu network, the agency has reported more than $1 billion in trackable client revenue and has been featured in more Facebook-published advertiser case studies than any other agency.
GumGum, the Santa Monica ad technology company founded in 2008, operates on the supply side of the ecosystem those agencies buy from. The company's contextual advertising platform analyzes more than 50 million web pages and videos daily to place ads based on content rather than user tracking data — a technology that has drawn increasing interest as third-party cookies have been phased out across major browsers. The company operates in 19 markets and counts roughly 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies among its clients.
Entravision, the publicly traded ad technology and media company also headquartered in Santa Monica, focuses on digital advertising and data analytics with particular expertise in U.S. Hispanic and international audiences — segments that have become increasingly prominent in ASW's programming as marketers look to reach underserved and high-growth consumer groups.
Ylopo, based in Venice, develops lead generation and digital marketing technology for real estate professionals. The company straddles two of ASW's core audiences: it is both a technology vendor selling into a specific vertical and a performance marketer running paid campaigns on behalf of real estate agents and brokers — a dual role common among the mid-sized firms that make up much of ASW's attendee base.
What Dominated the Agenda
Sessions at this year's conference covered attribution modeling, AI-driven campaign optimization, e-commerce scaling and lead generation strategy across eight content tracks. Speakers included representatives from Amazon, Vox Media, the New York Post and SKIMS, among others.
Artificial intelligence drew the most sustained attention across the three days. For agencies like Hawke Media — which has built its own proprietary AI analytics platform, HawkeAI, to process data across its client portfolio — the sessions offered less a theoretical introduction to the technology than a practical survey of which tools are gaining traction and which have not delivered on early claims.
The conference also reflected a broader consolidation taking place across the affiliate and performance marketing industries. Larger holding companies and agency networks have been acquiring independent performance shops — MuteSix's purchase by Dentsu being a notable local example — while technology platforms have moved aggressively to bring more campaign functions in-house, squeezing the margins on traditional media buying.
Context
The affiliate marketing industry has grown significantly over the past decade as brands shifted budget from traditional advertising toward performance-based channels where they pay only when a desired action — a sale, a lead, a subscription — is completed. That model has proven durable through economic cycles, and participation at ASW has grown accordingly.
For the Westside's marketing community, the January conference functions as something of a kickoff for the calendar year — a place to meet vendors, renew partnerships and take stock of where client budgets are flowing. The same community will have another opportunity next week when LeadsCon opens April 22 at the MGM Grand, focused specifically on the lead generation vertical.
The Santa Monica Daily Press will report from LeadsCon April 22-24.
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