Thursday (February 20) marked two years since the opening of Webgains Bristol office, dubbed the “Tech City of the UK” and to celebrate the occasion, the company hosted Innovation & Cautionary Tales – an evening of inspiring talks on creating opportunities, handling failures and delivering long-term success.
With tech and innovation a big drive in what Webgains do, the session provided a snapshot of the growth, successes and plans to come from the international affiliate network. The session saw speakers Jack Davies (commercial services and partnerships director, Webgains), Humphrey Shell (PhD in Machine Learning) and Victoria Bruce (director of e-commerce, Immediate Media) share their valuable insights and stories around initiatives they implemented with partners surrounding big thinking, new technologies and buy-in — reflecting on both the opportunities and challenges and how they overcame the adversities to achieve success.
Never stop learning
The evening was a chance for peers to drink, network and learn something new. Webgains CEO Richard Dennys opened up to discuss the firm’s growth to date and overview of the past 12 months, which saw them win new accounts, establish relationships with existing partners and solidifying teams across its seven international offices — all of these achievements driven by the firm’s innovative vision. This weaved into the first talk led by Jack Davies, who demonstrated some successful examples from Webgains exclusive partnership with Social Chain as they bring together social content and affiliate to scale, given advertisers access to over 50 online brands and a total of 80 million customers worldwide on a CPA model basis.
Meanwhile, Humphrey Shell, who has been working closely behind the scenes with Webgains on the company’s machine learning (ML) proposition, shared his tales on the current landscape of AI and ML, including the pros and cons and how data and software algorithms have now advanced further to carrying out human tasks.
Lastly, now at Immediate Media, Victoria Bruce discussed her journey leading the affiliate arm of The Telegraph as she helped the newspaper publisher’s digital platform to embrace other metrics aside from display advertising, utilising content to guide consumers through the purchasing journey to drive conversion and incremental revenue all whilst capturing key data and new audiences for the business.
Overall, an excellent and informative session that brought together friends old and new whilst providing a glimpse of Webgains’ continued advancements within the affiliate marketing industry. With further plans set to roll out later in the year, be sure to keep a close eye on the company’s developments.