Lee-Ann Johnstone Named One of 20 Industry Icons in Performance Marketing Awards’ 20th Anniversary

Konverj.io agency founder – Lee-Ann Johnstone has this week, been named one of 20 Industry Icons by the Performance Marketing Awards, as part of a special recognition program marking the awards' 20th anniversary.

The initial Icon's list, announced by the Performance Marketing Awards via its official channels, names Johnstone alongside nine other individuals in this first revealed group, including Chris Johnson, Heather Peebles, Anthony Clements, Linda O'Connell, James Little, Michelle Corp, Nick Fletcher, Rosalyn Berrisford, and Steven Brown. The full group of 20 was selected to honour those who have been most pivotal in shaping the UK performance marketing industry over the past two decades and who form a key part of the awards' own history. Johnstone will also be attending the exclusive Shortlist Networking Brunch at the 2026 ceremony in London, alongside other icons and shortlisted entrants.

An Icon – Twenty Years in the Making

The Performance Marketing Awards, now in its 20th edition and hosted in association with Hello Partner, is one of the most established industry recognition programs in the UK affiliate and performance marketing calendar. To mark the milestone, the awards introduced the Industry Icons list as a way of acknowledging the individuals whose sustained contributions have helped define the channel as it exists today.

For Johnstone, the recognition spans a career that began more than 20 years ago when she started out as an online media buyer, moving into performance marketing and eventually founding Affiliate Insider Limited, the holding company for Affiversemedia.com and Konverj.io with a clear mandate: help the industry do affiliate marketing better.

“I'm simply delighted to be selected amongst other industry icons for this prestigious award and grateful to the industry and followers, readers, and clients for coming along on this journey to help brands and publishers do affiliate marketing better” , says Johnstone.

That Affiliate Marketing mandate has taken several forms.

As a publisher, she oversees Affiverse's editorial and podcast output, which reaches more than one million impressions per month globally across a readership of affiliate managers, network professionals, agencies, and brands.

As an educator, she runs the Affiliate Management Training Academy which offers their flagship AMPP (Affiliate Manager Performance Program) , a 12-week coaching course that has trained more than 200 industry affiliate program managers, and hosts industry summits including AMPLIFY and ELEVATE.

As an Indie podcaster, she built the Affiliate Marketing Podcast into a Top 100 Business News podcast across more than 15 countries, generating more than 650,000 downloads since its 2019 launch and ranks in the Top 2% of Podcasts, Globally.

As founder of Konverj.io – the agency arm that services start up and enterprise brands such as Sage Accounting, Ziff Davis and many others with affiliate strategy and consulting, affiliate management services and competitive audits, she's leading an experienced team to support their clients to build award winning programs globally.

A Track Record of Affiliate Marketing Industry Recognition

The Industry Icons honour adds to a consistent pattern of external recognition for Johnstone's contributions to the channel. In 2024, she was named Performance Marketing Personality of the Year at the Performance Marketing World Awards. She was named one of iGaming Business' Most Influential Women in 2019, inducted into the Forbes Agency Council, and elected to the board of the Performance Marketing Association (PMA) in 2023 by industry membership vote.

Why This Recognition Matters for the Industry

The decision to frame the 20th anniversary of the Performance Marketing Awards around individual contributions, rather than campaigns or platforms alone, says something meaningful about where the industry is placing its attention right now. The icons selected represent people who invested in community, standards, and knowledge transfer over the long term, not just short-cycle performance.
For affiliate managers and program directors in this space, that framing is instructive. The practitioners drawing recognition from the Performance Marketing Awards at this milestone are those who treated affiliate marketing as a profession worth building, not just a channel worth extracting from. That orientation, toward education, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and raising the bar for program management, has been the editorial backbone of this publication since day one, and it is what the AMPP training program was built to deliver for managers at every stage of their career.

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Original – Cited source: linkedin.com/posts/performancemarketingawards_pma-top-20-industry-icons-activity-7445409814572265472