A Red Dashboard. A "Can We Chat?" Message. Some People Need No Further Explanation.

You'll recognise the morning.

Before coffee, before messages, you check spend, the way you'd check on something that might have happened while you were asleep. Something usually has. Yesterday is red, or redder than it should be. And then, before you've opened the account to find out why, the message: "can we chat?"

You know the stomach drop. You also know the thing nobody at home quite gets: you don't really switch off, because technically the campaigns never switch off. They run at 3am. So does part of your head.

Now try explaining that to someone who has never run spend. The red number, the message, why it matters, why you're already thinking about it at dinner. It takes ten minutes and they still think you're describing a bad day at the office rather than a job that lives on a dashboard. Some people need no further explanation. The trick is being in a room with them.

What the relief actually is

Media buyers who come back from a good event tend to say a version of the same thing: the sessions were fine, and the valuable part was the conversation afterwards with people running similar spend, where it turned out everyone was wrestling with the same platform behaviour. A media buyer wrote it about a conference they'd rated: "the networking/smaller discussions are the most valuable part."

Be careful with what that means, though, because it's easy to overclaim. It doesn't mean everyone had your exact Tuesday, or that CPA doubled for everybody at once, or that the person next to you runs an account like yours and knows the fix. Relevant peers give you perspective, not a solution. What they give you is the knowledge that the platform's behaviour isn't your personal failure, plus the occasional useful sentence: what they'd test, what they stopped doing, how they explain a bad week upstairs.

That's practical. A media buyer wrote what the good version produces: "stuff I can take back to the team and say 'hey gang, let's test/implement this.'"

One useful thing to bring back

Since belonging earns attention but usefulness justifies the spend, here's a concrete takeaway to aim for: compare testing approaches. How does a buyer at a different scale, or in a different model, decide what to test first, how long they run it, and what makes them stop? That one conversation, had with two or three people, gives you a comparison you can't get from inside your own account, and it's exactly the kind of thing a team can act on the following week.

Rome, described honestly

Affiliate Grand Slam is in Rome from 2 to 5 November at Fiera Roma. It's a performance-marketing event, not a media-buyer meetup, and it's worth being straight about the mix. The floor is heavy with the commercial side of the job: direct advertisers and offer owners, marketplaces like ClickBank and Digistore, networks like MaxWeb and TerraLeads, native and payments companies, and TikTok, Meta and Google exhibiting with staff. On stage, operators who run businesses that buy customers, Nick Shackelford of Brez among them.

Buyers are there because that's who those companies want to meet. You'll find them the way you always do: in the coffee queue, at the welcome reception that every pass includes, next to you in a session. Not matched. Found. And you don't need to have decided anything to look at who's going.

A small plan, especially if you'd go alone

Most people go alone the first time. It goes better with a plan than with hope, and the plan is small.

Pick one company from the kit you'd genuinely want to talk to, relevant to your work: a platform exhibitor, an offer owner in your category. Write one question for them, the one you can't ask anyone at work. Once you hold a pass and the Match App is available, request that meeting, and pick a backup in case it's declined.

Prepare one opener for the coffee queue. It's fine for it to be honest: "first time here, I run paid for a [category] brand, what do you do?" It works on buyers, because buyers are relieved to meet other buyers.

Use one confirmed format. The welcome reception is included with every pass and is the easiest room in the event to start a conversation in, because nobody there knows anyone yet. The kit's guide tells you what else your pass includes, so you can plan one structured thing without upgrading because you're unsure.

Nobody can promise the chemistry. The plan makes it likely enough to be worth going.

The kit, and the guide, for a first visit

The AGS Rome 2026 Welcome Kit for Media Buyers gives you who's coming and why they're relevant, grouped by what they do, so the one company comes from somewhere real. It gives you the questions, including the testing-approach comparison above. And the Best Value for Money Guide helps you check the cost honestly: the pass options and what each includes, the whole trip budget, time away from live campaigns, and a plan for cover. The case for your manager is there if you want to ask; the self-funded route is there if you'd rather not.

Look first. The dashboard will still be there.