Rakuten Advertising Dealmaker Europe 2023

Rakuten Advertising Dealmaker Europe is an annual event hosted by Rakuten Advertising, to allow meetings between agencies, advertisers, and publishers. It is a great opportunity for all involved, as brands (advertisers) can speak to agencies, if they are looking for support with any aspect of their business or they can discuss any opportunities with publishers to help promote their product. Publishers use these events to not only try gain more clients but to also promote new campaigns or technology that will help drive performance. As well as the huddle table networking, product demos and other sessions are scheduled throughout the day. These Dealmaker events are hosted around the world, including locations such as USA and Australia! 

Dealmaker is one of our favourite events of the year! We love to meet face to face with the Rakuten Advertising team and publishers who we may or may not already work with. We attend to represent our clients, who we support with their affiliate programme. We meet with publishers to give a review of our clients, including any new products and campaigns. We then discuss how they may be able to support and what activities/placements could help grow brand awareness and performance. We also find the opportunity to speak with other brands, to explore whether we can help them on their journey. We offer a FREE Audit/Consultation for Rakuten clients where we can review their account looking at potential, gap analysis and efficiency/scaling the programme. Dealmaker also offers us the chance to discuss our free brand partnership service which in turn helps us grow our Brand Partnership community. 

Our main focus was to speak with content and influencer type publishers this year, as the upper funnel is one of the main priorities for our clients at the moment. Of course, we took the opportunity to catch up with familiar faces including our friends at Bravo Voucher, Gocertify, Intent.ly and Revlifter. Between us, we had 23 meetings booked as well as a special lunch with the RAIC committee. It was lovely to have our first face to face with Meesha from Linkby, to discuss recent coverage with Sheerluxe and RedOnline for our client Threadbare. Maria did a great job to explain how Future Publishing operated, connecting us with other members of the team who manage Who What Wear and Marie Claire. It was very useful to learn the onboarding process for Global Savings Group (GSG) and who our clients could be exposed by, such as Daily Mail. I think influencer platform, Metapic is a great way for our clients to reach other audiences and their gifting program sounded like a good starting point. Shopstyle and Stylink were two publishers we were keen to speak with to learn how to onboard and what we need to launch with. Dave also had time to have some impromptu chats with people that he used to work with before launching Customer First Digital. We finished the event with a special catch up with Cary from Rakuten Advertising who travelled all the way from US. Cary focusses on agency partnerships in the US and he is bringing this approach to the UK, working closely with the Rakuten agency team, it was great to finally meet him in person! 

 

We also spent time building our Brand Partnership community, which gives our clients added value. We can see Brand Partnerships becoming a big trend as it’s another way to market, helping gain brand awareness and in turn creating new leads and sales. Our clients have been collaborating with each other and with the community of brands we have began to grow. We spoke to many brands such as Refy Beauty, Hot Diamonds, Nobody’s Child and Trip.com. We are looking forward to sharing our case studies and helping them connect with our clients and seeing their successes.