The Real Guide to Affiliate Summit East and Mailer Meet-Up, NYC 2026

If you're at Affiliate Summit East, find me.

It's Gene. I'm doing some new things with email this year and I want to talk about them at ASE or Mailer Meet Up. We have a DSA Communist running the city so wanted to give you heads up. Come meet up while private enterprise is still legal, comrade. Nobody knows how long that window stays open. Worst case, we go have shots at Mari Vanna and mourn appropriately.

Every July the affiliate marketing industry parachutes into a Times Square Marriott to do the thing it does best: stand in a ballroom holding a warm Tito's, tell each other business is incredible, and privately wonder if their best offer got nuked by a compliance team in Boise sometime around 2am. Nothing about that changes this year. What has changed is the city underneath the ballroom, which now has a democratic socialist mayor and a DSA co-governing situation. I bring this up the same way you'd want to know the hotel pool is closed for renovation. Whatever, it's fine, we adapt, this is what we do.

Did you hear we have a communist mayor now? Socialism is like vodka. Cheers, first night, everything is warm, everyone is your friend, everything is free. Next morning you wake up like Ivan Drago hit you, except Drago at least trained for it and had a sponsor. My babushka had a saying for this, and I won't translate it exactly, but the polite version is: the state giveth, and then the state comes back for the giveth. Anyway. Great city. Let's talk email before somebody forms a committee about it.

The Events

Affiliate Summit East 2026 July 27-28, New York Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway. The original affiliate conference, older than your LLC, your second LLC, and possibly your marriage. Badge pickup is July 26, noon to 6pm, for the overachievers who want forty-five extra minutes of standing around before the real standing around begins. Meet Market runs noon to 6pm on the 27th, noon to 4pm on the 28th. Over 4,500 advertisers, affiliates, networks, and media buyers show up, all of them simultaneously pitching each other and complaining that nobody's buying, a business model that has somehow survived nineteen years, longer than most actual Soviet premiers. The official ASE party is Monday night, July 27, free, venue still unannounced, which is either suspense or a line item somebody's still fighting the CFO about.

MailCon No confirmed 2026 date. Their own site still says "New York 2025" like nobody's told them the calendar turned. If that changes, I'll update this. Until then, don't build a trip around it.

Affiliate Ball Monday, July 27, 9pm to 1am, Harbor NYC Rooftop, 621 West 46th Street. The industry's answer to prom, except prom didn't have a Baller sponsor tier and a live hip-hop act performing for a room of guys in quarter-zips discussing attribution windows between songs. RSVP is open. It fills up. If you're still deciding at 8:45, congratulations, you've already made your decision, it was no.

M@iler Meetup by Addicted Affiliate Same building, earlier call time, 6pm to 9pm. Open bar, real food, OPTIZMO doing compliance sponsor duty again, presumably because somebody has to be the designated adult at a cocktail party thrown for people whose entire industry is convincing strangers to open an email they didn't ask for.

SMS Meetup Tuesday, July 28, 2pm to 5pm, The Perfect Pint West, 123 West 45th Street. Invite-only, vetted, Telegram approval required, a genuinely alarming amount of due diligence for an industry whose product is texting strangers about their car's extended warranty. Even the KGB had a lighter vetting process.

Monday night is a doubleheader. Mailer Meetup 6 to 9, straight downstairs for the Ball, 9 to 1. Whatever productive Tuesday morning you were picturing, cancel it now and save yourself the disappointment later.

A Word on the City You're Flying Into

The mayor is a democratic socialist, the DSA is co-governing, and somewhere in City Hall a press release is being drafted about a rent freeze with the exact institutional confidence the Soviets used to announce a record wheat harvest, right before the winter where there was, once again, mysteriously no bread. I know how this sounds. I say it with love. I grew up around a babushka who could diagram a five-year plan on a napkin and then explain, calmly, over more vodka, why the plan didn't happen.

None of this is your problem for four days. You're here for the Meet Market, not the Central Committee meeting. Just don't act shocked when the subway doesn't run on time and someone tells you it's temporary. It has been temporary since 1974.

Times Square remains a theme park with a pickpocket problem bolted on. The mascots will hug you for a dollar and not let go until you produce a second dollar, which is the closest thing to a planned economy currently operating on 42nd Street. Elmo has not yet been unionized, but give it time, everyone else has been, and Elmo does not strike me as management.

There's a stretch on the west side, near the Javits Center and Penn Station, that's become our own West Side Skid Row, tents and all, the kind of thing every city apparently needs one of now. Route around it. No task force has been announced, but a press conference is presumably in committee, possibly the same committee reviewing the wheat harvest numbers.

Get a car for everything. Lyft, cab, whichever shows up first. The subway saves four dollars and costs you an evening. A cab door closes between you and the street. Your legs, historically, have never closed anything.

Don't make new best friends at 1am outside a bar. That's not friendship, that's a business model, and the business model ends with your drink spiked and your wallet gone. Nobody loves you that fast. Not your mother. Not a city councilman up for reelection. No.

Watch the scooters. They run red lights and go the wrong way down one-ways, especially near the avenues. Look both ways, then look again out of spite. Somewhere there is a proposed bill protecting scooter riders' labor rights. It has done nothing to stop them from running you over, comrade or not.

If someone puts a hand on you for your phone or your cash, hand it over immediately. No hero moment. A phone is replaceable at the Apple Store in an afternoon. You're not. Your family does not want a call about a body over a five-year-old iPhone. Give it up, walk away, file the report later if you file one at all. You are not the guy from that Liam Neeson movie, and no city agency is coming either, not before the next budget cycle, and definitely not before the next election cycle.

Come. Work the room. Close deals. Just don't act like a tourist about any of it.

For the Wife

She earned that ring. She wants to walk it up and down Fifth Avenue and let it catch light in front of Tiffany and Bergdorf's. She should get her moment, she did not survive an insurance enrollment period with me for a moment that lives in a hotel safe.

Keep it in a pocket on the walk over. Once there's a doorman and a security desk between her and the sidewalk, let it shine. Let the sales associate ask where she got it. Don't tell them the real story.

Stick to daylight blocks of Fifth, 40s to 50s. Bags zipped, worn in front. If a stranger compliments the ring on the street, a smile and a keep-moving is the entire transaction. Not an invitation to a conversation, a photo, or, per current municipal enthusiasm, a redistribution.

Same car rule applies to her. Door to door, especially with real jewelry on. Ten minutes, twelve dollars, cheaper than every other item on this list combined.

She should show it off. In the store. Not on the sidewalk between here and there. Some things stay private property a little longer.

Find me at the Mailer Meet Up or the Russian Vodka Room. Come talk email, come talk anything. Just don't ask me what a five-year plan is going to cost you, nobody in this city can answer that either, they're still finishing the current one.

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