Affiliate World Budapest 2026: What We Saw

Nine of us. It was our second Budapest in under a year, after the same show in September 2025.

This is the part you can copy if you're heading to a show yourself.

• We messaged people through the event app early. 100 messages per person went out before the opening. At a show this size your calendar fills up long before you get off the plane, and whoever writes first gets the slot.
• We posted at the same hour. We made a personal graphic for each person, with their own name on it, and asked everyone to publish at 18:00 the same evening. One post from a company page gets ignored. Several people from one team asking to meet at the same hour is harder to miss.
• We flew in the day before. Exhibitors Night was on 8 July, ahead of the opening, and a night like that gives you a first conversation before the crowd arrives.

Our team's calendar had Exhibitors Night, the Castle Party, the White Party and a TikTok meetup. For a media buyer these are often the better meetings. On the floor you get a few minutes between two other people's pitches. At a side event you can actually finish a sentence.

One small tool is worth stealing. We set a QR code with the team's contact as our phone wallpaper. You lift the phone, they scan it, and nobody spells a handle over the noise of the room. If you're going to a show next month, do this one tonight.

How many leads we came back with. We don't have a number we can stand behind, so we're not printing one. We're also not going to rank the exhibitors or tell you who won the show. We'd be making it up, and you'd be right to stop reading.

A recap is useful to one reader in particular, the buyer checking whether a provider is real before sending a top up. Your money is the thing at risk, and a team that turns up in person at the shows your market goes to gives you a fair way to test a name. If you're at that stage, these questions are worth having in hand.

Our team was there in Cancun in September too. Our 2026 calendar closes with Affiliate Grand Slam Rome, from 2 to 5 November at Fiera Roma, and Affiliate World Asia in Bangkok on 9 and 10 December.

The Budapest event page and the full list of events have the rest. If you'd rather not wait for a show, our agency accounts by platform are a good place to start, and the contact page gets you to the team.