Building A Scaled Email Curation Stack (Using Passendo)
This newsletter is being penned during a partial solar eclipse. Lots of people are running around with makeshift eclipse-friendly goggles made out of empty Rice Krispies boxes, jostling to see one of nature’s most wondrous (anti-climactic) events on a parched hill somewhere in London.
This useless piece of information is being communicated to you, dear reader, via email - the last piece of media real estate untouched by scaled ad tech. The reasons for this are myriad: no RTB infrastructure, no third-party cookies, and blocked identifiers. The list goes on. It just doesn’t fit the typical buyer’s checklist. And yet it is a hugely trusted medium - even more so in the age of AI slop.
Re-Inventing The Value Of Email Ads (The Sales Pitch)
Email ads have been a tough sell to both brands and agencies. But you feel now that email advertising is about to have a moment. Liveintent did a great job trying to scale it. But ultimately, it pivoted more into an ID play than a monetisation layer.
What email is missing is a re-invigorated sales narrative. It’s been typecast as either lower-funnel performance, attracting bottom-feeding demand from the chum box merchants, or an insanely expensive direct-sold brand sponsorship play.
Where it really needs to sit is in the mid-to-upper-funnel branding layer. Of course, this will need to be sold into agencies and brands as programmatic curation. In this edition, we sketch out this email curation offering using the Passendo tech framework - with a few additions.
How Email Curation Works
Now imagine you are an entity (publisher, ad net, ad tech) with a large sales organisation with a track record of selling curated deals. Things start to get a little hairy on the open web. If you believe the trade press and influencers, we are all doomed (the open web particularly). CTV is overcrowded. Retail media is a busted flush. Where to look for your next monetisation opportunity?
Agencies are crying out for more trusted, non-walled-garden channels to push client marketing messages, to avoid concentration of spend and reliance on a gamed (rigged) walled garden ecosystem. Why not email? But how do you sell it, activate it, and measure the efficacy of the email ad?
Below is a visual outline of how it might work - powered by the email ad specialists at Passendo, activated by world-class DSP, Bedrock Platform, and measured by peerless brand uplift studies provider, Brandmetrics.
If you have any questions about this latest piece of out-of-the-box ad tech thinking, get in touch. Passendo is happy to field any questions about email curation - and why it will be the next big programmatic frontier.
Update On That Video Player Asset Sale
As you know, we are selling a publisher/app video player. Details were outlined in the most recent edition of the FPC newsletter. You can read about it here: https://newsletter.firstpartycapital.com/p/for-sale-ai-video-platform-with-content.
If you are short on time, these are some basic details about the video player asset for sale:
Adds video to any page, matching relevant clips via a relevance score, with an engagement dashboard (plays, completions)
Includes licensed sports content (football, tennis, motorsport, boxing).
Generates a text article from video content.
One-off purchase, no ongoing licence fee.
We are now at the due diligence stage with a number of interested parties and are looking to close this off very soon. If you are interested in finding out more, then get in touch: contact@firstpartycapital.com.
FPC hopes you might think more about the value of email (from an ad tech perspective) after reading this email. Email curation FTW. Until next time.