At this year’s Awin ThinkTank in sunny Portugal, I sat down with Gary Reck, CTO and COO at Awin, to talk through the network’s evolving tech strategy.
From launching a streamlined creator platform to building Ava – Awin’s own affiliate-savvy AI assistant – Reck shared how the team is reimagining user experience, campaign planning, and publisher support. Here’s our full conversation.
Sol Wilkinson: Hello, we are here in sunny Portugal at Awin Think Tank 2025. I'm joined by Gary Reck from Awin. How's it going, Gary?
Gary Reck: Great! Enjoying the great weather. We've been having a great day.
SW: What has been the highlight of your day so far?
GR: Obviously, I enjoyed the keynote. That was a great introduction to the new features of our platform.
I also enjoyed Scott Galloway's presentation, where he shared his thinking around AI and quite a lot of political stances in the US.
SW: Absolutely. I was talking earlier with Sam Beattie about Awin Intelligence and Ava, but there's also a creator platform which is going to be launching. Could you talk a little bit about what that is?
GR: Sure. Previously, we didn't have a native application, so it gave us a great opportunity to start things from scratch.
Rather than reinvent or repeat what we already have in our existing platform, it gave us an opportunity to focus on a segment we wanted to focus on and build a new experience that would be tailored to their use. So, we focused on influencers.
What we've done is create a very simple platform that allows them to post links, and we're about to launch our product search and storefronts, which should enhance that capability.
