Read Time: Approx. 2 Minutes 55 Seconds
Author: Lewis Stretton
This year, Dave, Suzanne and Ben headed down to Rakuten Advertising’s NEW venue, Convene Sancroft in St Paul’s, London, which played host to DealMaker Europe 2026.
Rakuten Advertising DealMaker Europe 2026
The affiliate industry calendar wouldn’t be complete without Rakuten Advertising’s annual DealMaker event and this year it returned on Wednesday 25th March 2026 in London and it didn’t disappoint!
Hosted by Rakuten Advertising, DealMaker Europe continues to be one of the biggest networking events in the affiliate marketing space, bringing together hundreds of agencies, advertisers and publishers from Europe, the Americas and APAC for a full day of insights, meetings and partnership building.
For the CFD team, DealMaker has become a favourite on the events calendar and this year was a particularly special one.
Customer First Digital Sponsors DealMaker Europe for the First Time
After an amazing DealMaker 2025, this year marks an exciting milestone for us at Customer First Digital as we are proud to be sponsoring the event for the very first time.
As sponsors, we’ll have our own dedicated meeting location alongside other event sponsors: Blue Light Card, Bravo Voucher, Gocertify, Intent.ly, Klarna, PI Live Europe, Performance Marketing World, TerraCycle and Adjoe. We welcome conversations with all attendees, but Advertisers in particular are invited to join us at our spot to learn more about our exclusive DealMaker offer - a complimentary, no obligation programme appraisal designed to review your current set up and share any opportunities that we feel would benefit your programme.
We asked Dave Trolle, Founder at Customer First Digital for his thoughts on the upcoming event and his decision to sponsor the event for the first time “As one of Rakuten’s 14 platinum agency partners, DealMaker is one of the first events in our diary every year, not least because of the work we do together as agency and network partners, but with the thousands of conversations that happen on the day and an exciting new location to boot, it felt like the time was right to sponsor the event and acquire a dedicated meeting space to showcase our growing portfolio of brands.”
We’ve also been invited to the European Agency and Publisher Mixer – a dedicated space for conversations on how we can build profitable partnerships for our brands, all fuelled by coffee and croissants of course!
The mixer will get us into the flow ready for the busy day ahead! As always, we will be arranging meetings with both new and familiar faces to discuss opportunities and explore how we can help brands grow their affiliate marketing programmes. The sponsor table will also allow all attendees to come visit us and have a casual chat whilst collecting some goodies and entering our competition that we will be running on the day.
There’s a packed agenda with scheduled events throughout the day, here’s what’s in our calendar so far – we’ll be reserving our seats early:
Detect Brand Marketing Suite
Dine & Demo; Product Demos
A New Generation of Offer Management
Golden Link Awards
The Golden Link Awards ceremony took place in the Grand Hall during the afternoon of the DealMaker event and as always, it was a great moment to celebrate the successes of the affiliate marketing community.
This year, we were delighted to share that Customer First Digital had been nominated for two awards.
Firstly, Best Managed Affiliate Programme (New Campaign Strategy) with our partners Cowshed. This award spotlights fresh, creative approaches that have delivered exceptional results and set new standards for campaign innovation – we were up against stiff competition with the likes of Levi’s and Pets at Home also in contention for the award.
Secondly, Agency of The Year, which celebrates the agency that has truly mastered the art of elevating brands in affiliate marketing. The latter award also marked our third consecutive year of recognition for the team:
🏆 Winner – Agency of the Year (2024)
⭐ Shortlisted – Agency of the Year (2025)
🎉 Nominated – Agency of the Year (2026)
This continued recognition is a fantastic achievement and is testament to the dedication of the entire CFD team and the incredible brands and partners we work with.
It’s safe to say the team had a great day (although very long) and hopefully we’ll be back bigger and better next year! Thanks to everyone who managed to catch up with us and congratulations to all the award finalists and winners.
If you attended DealMaker Europe 2026, but missed the Customer First Digital team, we’d love to catch up! To book a call, simply email one of the team and we can arrange a suitable date and time.
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