Part of the Festival of Partnerships
Your next best-performing affiliate isn't a cashback site. It's a creator.
A full-day deep dive around a single question: how do you make influence accountable?
Affiliate marketing spent two decades making performance measurable. Now a new generation of partner is driving the sales.
Influencer marketing, once the brand-awareness budget no one could properly measure – has crossed over. Creators are driving sales, not just sentiment, and the brands who saw it first are quietly rewriting their acquisition economics.
But most organisations haven’t caught up. Affiliate and influencer still sit in separate teams, separate budgets, separate reporting. The infrastructure that made affiliate accountable has never been applied to creators – That’s the gap.
01 / WHY WE'RE LAUNCHING THE SUMMIT
Matthew Wood
FOUNDER, HELLO PARTNER
Affiliate built the plumbing. Creators reached the audience. The IC Summit is where those two things finally get connected properly.”
02 / WHAT IS THE IC SUMMIT?
A full day on one question: how do you make influence accountable?
The Influencer and Commerce Summit is a full-day deep dive sitting alongside PI LIVE Europe as part of the Festival of Partnerships in October 2026 — built for brands and agencies treating creators as a performance channel, not a brand-awareness line item.
Every session is grounded in the specific questions facing brands, agencies and platform teams right now. Not just how to work with creators, but how to measure, structure and hold them to the same commercial standards as any other channel.
How do you give creators genuine creative control while building programmes consistent enough to report against? That’s the tension this summit exists to resolve.
“How do you make influence accountable?”
THE SINGLE QUESTION BEHIND EVERY SESSION
03 / WHY THIS, WHY NOW?
The numbers tell the story.
51%
Jump in influencer-driven spend during Cyber Week 2025 while commission costs stayed flat. Influencers nearly doubled their share of total orders year on year — proof the model works.
eMARKETER & IMPACT.COM, 2026
37%
NEWMEDIA.COM, 2026
46%
Higher affiliate-driven sales for brands that combine influencer and affiliate programmes, compared with brands running affiliate alone.
eMARKETER & IMPACT.COM, 2026
108%
Growth in TikTok Shop US sales during 2025, reaching an estimated $15.8bn and accounting for 18.2% of all US social commerce sales.
eMARKETER, 2026
The era of influencer marketing as a brand-awareness luxury is over. The channel that replaces it runs on commission — powered by creators who own their conversion data better than most brand teams do.
04 / WHAT TO EXPECT
Keynotes, panels and case studies — for practitioners.
A full day for brands and agencies who are past the introduction stage and want to go further on what performance really means in creator commerce.
SAMPLE SESSIONS
01 /
Making Creators Your Best Affiliates
How to structure commission, tracking and attribution for creator partnerships. What the move away from flat-fee sponsorship means for your programme architecture, your network relationships and your reporting stack. The brands getting this right have rebuilt the channel from the ground up.
02 /
TikTok Shop and the Social Commerce Stack
Social platforms no longer just drive discovery — they process the transaction. This session maps the infrastructure behind social commerce, the margin implications, and where the smart money is moving as TikTok Shop, Instagram Checkout and YouTube Shopping mature into primary sales channels.
03 /
Measuring What Actually Matters
Reach and impressions were always the wrong metric. A practical guide to CAC, AOV and ROAS for creator programmes — and how to make the case internally when finance wants a number it can trust. Includes the attribution tooling available now and what best practice looks like in 2026.
04 /
The Micro-Creator Advantage
Micro-influencers generate 60% higher engagement on affiliate posts than macro-influencers — but scaling 50 micro-creators is operationally harder than signing one celebrity. The tooling, briefing and compliance that make it work at scale, while preserving the authenticity that makes the content convert.
05 /
Building for Longevity, Not Campaigns
The brands winning in creator commerce aren’t running campaigns — they’re building programmes with long-term relationships, evergreen content assets and compounding returns. How to structure creator partnerships for consistency while giving creators the creative control they need to perform.
05 / NETWORKING
As valuable off-stage as it is on it.
Dedicated breaks, peer-led collaborative learning and a hosted drinks reception at the close of the day bring delegates together with the wider Festival of Partnerships community.
As part of the Festival pass, IC Summit delegates also have full access to the PI LIVE networking campus across all three days.
16,500
PRE-SCHEDULED MEETINGS ACROSS THE FESTIVAL
06 / WHO IS IT FOR?
A B2B commercial event for brands and agencies with budget, accountability and decisions to make.
Not a creator-fan event — the brand and performance side of the conversation.
FOR EXISTING PI LIVE DELEGATES
Performance & affiliate marketing leads at brands and retailers
Agency teams managing creator & influencer programmes
Partnership & commercial leads at creator platforms and networks
Heads of social commerce & DTC acquisition
Anyone whose brief blurs the line between influencer and affiliate
COMING FROM CREATORFEST?
You’ve heard the creator perspective. The IC Summit is where the brand and performance side of that same conversation happens.
07 / PART OF PI LIVE AND THE FESTIVAL OF PARTNERSHIPS
The Influencer & Commerce Summit sits alongside the AIP Summit as one of two dedicated summits within the Festival of Partnerships — 19 to 21 October 2026, at Old Billingsgate and The Steel Yard, London. Both are included in the PI LIVE Festival pass and carry their own branding, programming and delegate experience.
MORE DETAILS ON THE PROGRAMME AND SPEAKERS COMING SOON
08 / WAYS TO PARTNER
Sponsorship options.
TIER 01
Headline Partner
Full-day stage presence, keynote slot, featured session, and branding across all festival touchpoints.
TIER 02
Learning Partner
Host a collaborative learning session, with exhibition presence across the day.
TIER 03
Networking Partner
Branded drinks reception, delegate list access, and exhibition presence.
09 / WHY SPONSOR THE IC SUMMIT?
“The only room in Europe where performance marketers and creator commerce leads are in the same conversation.”
Brands, affiliate and partnership leads, creator-platform teams and agency heads managing influencer budgets — all in one place, all actively evaluating the tools, platforms and partnerships your business can provide. No general social-media audience. No awareness-only conversation. One focused day with the people who are already buying.
If you want your brand in that room, start here.
20 OCT 2026
THE STEEL YARD · LONDON
Part of the Festival of Partnerships