What NYC Told Us About Affiliate & Email Marketing

Performance has always been central to marketing discussions. But now that we live in an era of so much automation and agentic AI, teams are starting to care just as much about whether that performance can actually be verified.

In the second half of 2025, New York hosted two conferences that put that question front and center: at Affiliate Summit East, the focus was on how partner value is measured, while MailCon discussed execution and what it actually takes to run email inside today’s acquisition stacks.

The Attribution Question Everyone Was Asking

At ASE, last-click attribution was under the microscope. This time, the conversation pushed past the obvious — acknowledging that the last click rarely converts a lead on its own. The discussion moved into algorithm-driven discovery and LLM recommendations that expose how much last-click attribution leaves on the table.

For example, publishers that already have authority can shape the outcome earlier in the process, well before the conversion happens. Yet this is something every expert already agrees on, but when it comes to execution, it tends to disappear from the reports that keep pointing to the last click.

With this in mind, brands are starting to take a closer look at how partner contributions are evaluated, while publishers are pushing for ways to measure verified impact across more of the journey.

These types of discussions are already influencing how marketing budgets are allocated. Spend is slowly shifting away from isolated search and social tactics and toward partnerships that can demonstrate influence in more concrete terms, or even toward a more sophisticated measurement approach, like media mix modeling.

Where MailCon Fits Into the Picture

When talking about practical strategies to push the industry forward, MailCon fits naturally into the conversation. Owned and operated by Phonexa, the one-day deep-dive conference brought email and performance marketers together to discuss not only attribution, but effective tools — both operational and social — that can drive real impact.

Email, for instance, rarely came up in isolation. Instead, it was discussed as part of a broader operational setup. Data consistency and integration were as central to the conversation as messaging or cadence. The emphasis stayed on how email performs once it’s connected to the rest of the stack, and not as a channel operating on its own.

Email Today: Keeps Being Central, But More Demanding

MailCon showed how email is still relevant, and what has evolved is that technology now allows teams to connect it with a range of marketing automation tools, building a robust source of data that brings insights on what’s working and why.

That interconnected environment raises expectations. Visibility and accuracy matter, of course. But so does AI, which is starting to play a major role in the ecosystem, supporting churn prediction, re-engagement, and early interactions that help systems respond with less manual effort.

E-Delivery as Part of Execution

Within this context, E-Delivery operates as Phonexa’s execution layer for email and SMS. It works alongside lead data, call activity, consent records, and reporting, keeping delivery, validation, routing, and visibility inside the same environment.

As attribution becomes harder to agree on and trust becomes more central to partnerships, delivery itself becomes part of what teams need to account for.

If you want to explore how E-Delivery fits into this shift, and how email and SMS can operate with more control and visibility, you can take a closer look at Phonexa’s E-Delivery here: