Renee Mate, Affiliate Program Manager at Rewards Affiliates, has been around the industry a long time, and has been bumping into our Becky Liggero Fontana at many industry events. At this year’s ICE London 2020, the two caught up again to discuss how far the affiliate side has come, and a quick look at what her firm is doing now.

Mate’s been in the industry 15 years now, and Liggero Fontana asked how much she’s seen change in that time. “So I remember when I started, everything felt really easy; it doesn’t feel easy anymore,” she said. “The biggest things that I remember have changed, obviously the U.S. market just changed overnight. That was probably the biggest boom for us. I remember when mobile first came in, everyone was like, ‘Oh no, why would people play on their mobile,’ you know? But now like, mobiles probably like bigger than PC use. Regulation which could be a good or bad thing, depends on where you look at it, depends if you’re actually in the regulated markets or not. Yeah, they’re just a couple of the bigger things, but definitely over the last 15 years, has changed a lot. “

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But as much as things have changed, many elements are just as they were when Mate started. Liggero Fontana asked her to comment on those pieces. “Well I think in terms of staying the same, like a lot of us old guys kind of obviously see people come and go but a lot of us have still stayed,” she said. “Even if they’ve left their companies, they’ll go and they always come back, because nobody can get out of this industry. It’s amazing, it’s so much fun, even relationships that you created with other operators fifteen years ago are now paying off in a different way because a lot of operators are while a lot of affiliate managers move from the affiliate program and go into you know affiliate operations. In terms of that, it’s really important to have a relationship with everyone, not just affiliates. So I think that’s probably the biggest thing that stayed the same. On the other hand, there’s so many new faces, like I don’t recognize a lot of people, I feel really old.”