DealMaker Australia 2026 Recap: The New Rules of Discovery

Last week DealMaker Australia took over Doltone House Jones Bay Wharf. The day centered around one idea: partnerships are changing faster than the playbooks written for them. Over 200 advertisers, publishers, agencies and partners spent the day working through what that actually means — for discovery, for creators, for measurement, and for the partner marketing relationships that hold it all together. 

If you couldn’t make it, here’s the recap. 

A New Era of Partnership Marketing 

Executive remarks from Holly Brim, Global Head of Marketing at Rakuten Advertising, framed the day around three forces reshaping the industry right now. 

Partnerships are expanding. Performance marketers need more flexible technology built for many partnership models, not just the ones the channel was designed around two decades ago. That’s where creator infrastructure and retail media are opening up genuinely new territory. 

AI is changing visibility. Discovery is creating more complex customer journeys, and brands need better visibility and measurement to keep up. 

Expertise matters even more. As complexity increases, strategy, optimisation and experienced guidance are what separate a program that works from one that just runs. 

The Future of Discovery in Partnerships 

Our keynote speaker, Jeff Deutsch, Fractional Head of Growth at Hourglass AI, took to the main stage to unpack what the “new era of AI search” demands of brands and publishers — drawing on 15 years in organic search and, in his own words, a past life as a “reformed SEO spammer”. 

Jeff’s winning formula came in three parts: 

1. Build an expert brain — real, named, credentialed expertise rather than commodity content at volume. 

1. Feed the index new content — consistently, so models have something current to draw on. 

1. Promote your expert POV — because building it and waiting is the slowest of the three available routes. 

From AI Discovery to Creator Performance 

“The New Rules of Discovery & Measurement” panel saw Niall Puren, Sales Director at Rakuten Advertising, joined by Adam Ioakim (Triple Whale), Gus Muffet (ShopBack) and Cristel Gonzales (City Beach). Two points landed hardest.  

First, GEO and AEO are not SEO with a new name — optimising for answer engines is a different discipline, and much of it comes down to the credibility of what is published about you elsewhere, because those are the sources LLMs actually pull from.  

Second, measurement is under the same pressure: as journeys fragment across eight or more discovery surfaces, default reporting no longer covers it, and the panel kept returning to incrementality as the real question. The takeaway for brands is to test whether AI discovery is genuinely influencing acquisition, and to ask publishers harder questions about where value is created. 

“From Influence to Performance” panel was moderated by Savannah Ross, Rakuten Advertising’s Director of Publisher Partnerships ANZ, with Lee Besser (Creator Marketing Consultant and creator), Claire Kearney (Forever New) and Vanessa Tsang (APG & Co). Creator marketing has spent years being treated as an awareness channel — great for reach, hard to tie to a commercial outcome — and that is changing fast as brands mature in how they trust and remunerate creators. The brands getting ahead are building creator performance programs that connect influence with affiliate, PR, paid media and social. Savannah’s term for it: Affiliencer. The panel’s other consistent message was patience: these programs take months rather than weeks, often the best performers are already in your network, and tracking needs to be right before you scale volume. 

Where DealMaker Earns Its Name 

Content sets the agenda, but networking is what people come for — and the afternoon is built entirely around it. The Connection Room ran across the South Pier with  impromptu conversation spilling out onto the deck.  

Lunch rolled into the PartnerSpace Passport Party, where attendees collected stamps across participating Featured Partner tables (impact.com, Escabags, Furthr, Linkby and ShopBack) and activations like live screen printing, hair tinsel and styling and even protein bar giveaways to fuel conversations. Thank you to Ally Fashion, COTTON ON, Dyson, Liquorland, Muscle Nation and Trip.com for powering the activations and putting the fun into business networking, and to our raffle sponsors Dyson, EatClub, JBL and Temple & Webster for sending people home with a little extra. 

Speaker’s Corner gave publisher partners the floor for quick-fire presentations to brands looking for new partnership models . We featured Allt.tv, Escabags, Nift, Nomix Group, Prizecart, Revolut and Wink.  

Everyone left with a win of some kind: a new connection, a partnership, or a takeaway from the content. 

Thank you 

The message from DealMaker Australia 2026 was clear: discovery is being rewritten, creators are becoming a performance channel, and measurement is the work that makes both of those things real. The brands and publishers who get ahead will be the ones building for it now. Thank you again to our sponsors, speakers and partners who made DealMaker Australia such a success.