From Insights to Innovation: A Recap of iPX2024 London

A month ago iPX2024 London was held at the top of the Leadenhall Building, with commanding views over London and commanding insights into the Partnership Economy. The sublime array of talent on stage was only matched by the quality and fervour with which networking was approached. 

The structure of success

The day started with Bruce Daisley former exec at Twitter and Google and current consultant.  He opened with a compelling session entitled ‘It starts with people’, a valuable reminder that the essence of a great workplace lies in its people. Often overlooked, the human element is crucial for fostering a positive culture. He highlighted two simple yet profound keys to happiness: getting more sleep and surrounding oneself with happier friends. Astonishingly, 40% of UK workers do not have a friend at work, and this lack of social connection spans across remote, office, and hybrid workers alike, according to the Gallup Workplace Survey.

Daisley revealed alarming statistics: 27% of British workers feel sad daily, only 10% are actively engaged in their jobs, and 38% feel stressed all day. He emphasised that culture significantly impacts productivity, profitability, and employee well-being.

Daisley identified four components for success:

1. Trust: This is the cornerstone of a healthy workplace. Psychological safety allows team members to admit mistakes without fear, fostering a culture of openness.

2. Control: Autonomy energises employees. Unfortunately, the time spent in meetings has tripled in the last decade, especially since the pandemic. Daisley suggests reducing meeting times and incorporating "Monk Mode"—an hour of digital detox daily.

3. Respect: When employees feel understood and respected, engagement soars. He noted that 70% of worker engagement comes from an engaged manager.

4. Connection: Having a friend at work is a significant predictor of engagement. Social connectedness and shared joy moments are vital for a thriving culture.

A platform for improvement

Next, impact.com Chief Product Officer, Max Ciccotosto, ran delegates through recent and upcoming enhancements to the impact.com partnership management platform. He began by explaining how much bigger and more complex the partnership world has become in recent years, embracing affiliates, influencers, creators, publishers, recommendation websites, customer advocates, and many other types of partner. But he called out the continued importance of a number of key elements, all of which have been and continue to be a major focus for impact.com as we continue to develop and evolve our platform. These are: 1. Tracking and contracting, 2. Attribution and insights, 3. Payments and compliance, 4. Discovery and recruiting, and 5. Brand safety and trust.

In addition to teasing the launch of our impact.com/advocate product and covering the highlights of some 70+ enhancements to the existing impact.com/creator product, Max also looked at the bigger picture. He told delegates that there had been more than 700 enhancements to the impact.com platform over the past year, across tracking and contracting, scheduled payouts, privacy, deep-linking, campaign management, AI, CRM and automation, as well as significant improvements to the mobile app.

Partnerships in practice

Then follow three panel discussions which were a rich source of practical insights. One key takeaway was the importance of fair and transparent compensation for influencers. As Adrian Valia (a content creator) and Júlia Salume (Influencer Marketing Lead at Moburst) discussed, pricing strategies must consider not just the deliverables but also the value added by elements like music rights and usage timelines.

In a session titled Collaborate to Elevate, Maria Milenkova (User Acquisition Director at Bitpanda) emphasised breaking down internal silos by aligning on business objectives and leveraging cross-functional collaboration. Lydia Perrin (Affilate Specialist at B&Q) shared success stories of overcoming silos by running low-risk trials and fostering communication between teams.

Finally the innovation panel, featuring Dan Harding (Enolve Tech), Vana Han (Tiktok), and Will Fraser (/advocate), underscored the role of data in driving partnership success. They advocated for taking calculated risks and ensuring privacy and security in all data-driven innovations.

A final thought

From these five phenomenal sessions, I came to some conclusions of my own about the future of partnerships. 

Partnerships need trust. Whether it was Bruce Daisley highlighting the value of psychological safety in the workplace, Julia  Salume describing the most productive creator partnerships being those where there is transparency, or even Will Fraser emphasising that innovations take trust. All of these demonstrate that a partnership is far from is its full potential when trust is not built. 

But as Bruce alluded to in his opening session, building trust takes time (and a lot of it). So how do you make time to build this essential component of a partnership? The answer is through automation. Max Ciccatosto highlighted more than a dozen enhancements that impact.com has made to help its users free up their time, from AI support to automated CRM. 

The final theme I found was to remember the people in partnerships. It is all too easy to see businesses as individual entities rather than a collection of individuals, but time and time again the value of building human connections has been proven. As Bruce pointed out, the number one indicator of how engaged an individual is in an organisation is whether they have a friend at work. And that is the entire point of iPX2024 London, to bring people together to foster new and deeper connections and therefore to enable partnerships to thrive.

You can find all the recordings from the day here: https://impact.com/partnerships-experience/#ipx2024-london