The Performance Marketing Awards celebrated their 20th anniversary this year, with their annual celebrations held at Grosvenor House on Park Lane, London. It’s one of the most competitive nights in our industry, and the room was full of brilliant teams from some of the largest agencies and brands in the country.
We were shortlisted for three awards:
We couldn’t be prouder that we walked away with a silver medal in all three of these categories, and we’re even more excited to have retained our status as reigning champions in the Best Team in Performance Marketing category.
But what makes these awards genuinely meaningful isn’t the silverware. It’s what they say about the work, the clients who backed us to make some pretty bold calls, and a team that continues to push for bigger and better results.
Jewellery is one of the most emotionally driven purchase categories in ecommerce. Customers don’t buy an engagement ring on impulse after seeing a voucher code. They research for months, they compare carefully, and they buy when it feels right.
When we inherited The Diamond Store’s affiliate programme in late 2024, 70% of volume was coming from voucher sites. The numbers looked fine on the surface, but the strategy was not.
With peak season 2025 fast approaching, we made the call that not many agencies would. We stripped the programme back and rebuilt it around a partner mix that actually reflected how this brand’s customers buy. Sustainable affiliate success isn’t activated during a sale - it’s built through months of curated relationships, targeted campaigns, and precise planning. That conviction meant going into peak with a leaner, better-aligned programme rather than one propped up by easy volume.
The PMA judges noted it was “a bold, strategically sound decision to rebuild the programme from scratch and cut misaligned partners” and that confidence in the strategy is exactly what made the results possible. The “smart cross-channel integration delivered rare and highly useful insights into how early prospecting clicks drive later sales” which for us, points to where affiliate marketing is heading next.
Similar story, different brand, equally big call to make.
When we started working with Dulux in early 2025, 43% of affiliate revenue was coming from voucher and browser-extension partners. For a brand that doesn’t lead with discounts, that’s a structural problem. One you can either work around or fix properly.
Our approach was to fix it properly. That meant removing 50 non-aligned partners responsible for 34% of programme revenue, all in one go.
It takes a client with real confidence in their agency to allow them to make that move, but it also takes a pretty bold agency to make a recommendation that looks uncomfortable in the short term and then do the work of bringing the client along with you. The judges specifically called out that the Genie Goals team helped to re-educate the client on prioritising long-term gains over short-term losses, recognising it as a significant internal achievement.
The target was 30% YoY order growth. The team delivered 36%, even after stripping out the voucher volume, turning what began as a trial into a long-term partnership. As the judges called it, “bold, confident, and exactly right for the brand.”
Being shortlisted as a finalist for an award you won in previous years raises the stakes considerably. Our ambition wasn’t to defend the title. It was to prove that high performance can be strengthened over time. And the way we’ve tried to do that is by continuing to invest in our people. Not as a culture initiative that lives in a slide deck, but as a genuine operational model, which deliberately invests in team capability, autonomy, and collaboration.
We are proud to be recognised as a team that thinks beyond silos, challenges accepted norms, and takes principled decisions in pursuit of long-term value for clients and the wider industry. With record-breaking results and a continued recognition as a Great Place to Work, the judges described the Genie Ventures as “a mature, people-first operating model where investing in team structure and culture drives measurable commercial impact” - an eloquent way of saying what we’ve always believed: happy, trusted people do better work for their clients.
Our teams over at Genie Shopping Network and Broadband Genie also came away with a silver award for Publisher of the Year. Safe to say the whole group had a night to be proud of.
Our Head of Affiliates & Partner Marketing, Rachel Said, was at the awards on Tuesday. She said: “We are so proud of all of our awards. Being recognised as a winner once again for Best Team in Performance Marketing for Genie Ventures Group is unbelievably special, and to come away with Silver awards for the work we’ve done with some of our brilliant clients is so exciting.”
“Those client awards really do hit differently. For both The Diamond Store and Dulux, we reshaped what an affiliate programme can look like, working to build partnerships we can be proud of.” she continues. “It’s not always an easy path to do a complete programme reset and remove 80% of the volume to rebuild! But we don’t take the easy path - we take the path we believe adds the most value.”
“A big thank you to The Diamond Store and Dulux for trusting us with their programmes, and a huge congratulations to all of the Genie Goals and wider Genie Ventures teams who have worked so hard to achieve such fantastic results.”
Here’s to the next one!
