FirstPartyCapital Invests In Good-Loop; Why Privacy Can Help Boost Revenue
This is the FirstPartyCapital weekly newsletter. It covers news and updates about the FirstPartyCapital fund and its portfolio companies.
Why We Invested In Good-Loop’s Series A Round
ESG is now standard practice for brands. And as we have pointed out before in this newsletter, digital advertising has a ridiculously bad carbon footprint problem.
It is important to note here that this isn’t “greenwashing”. Big shareholders in public companies are pressuring executives to take this issue seriously, forcing them to comply with aggressive environmental benchmarks. Ad tech is now in the ESG spotlight.
Good-Loop, a UK-based tech company, has been building a solution that addresses head-on the environmental cost of serving ads online. We believe this will be a big and important category, as the industry tries to reduce its big emission output.
For that reason, FirstPartyCapital is delighted to announce that we are participating in the Good-Loop series A. Our Managing Partner, Rich Ashton, crystallises nicely our motivation for investing in this Series A round:
Good-Loop are building technology that is addressing the massive carbon footprint of digital advertising. FirstPartyCapital believes Amy and the Good-Loop team will ultimately play a critical part in providing the media execution infrastructure for a cleaner and greener ad tech.
We think Amy and team are building the media execution layer that fits the growing ESG requirements of brands - becoming a key infrastructure layer for the industry. We are delighted to be an investor, and are looking forward to the platform roll-out, and continued international expansion this year.
Privacy-As-A-Revenue-Generator
Most companies in our space are treating privacy as a chore - a task forced upon them by platform functionality (Apple’s ATT,, Google 3PC deprecation) and a fragmented legislative framework.
In a post this week, Rune Broker, CEO at WULT, outlines why this strategy is now a reductive approach. He believes that privacy can have a positive effect on revenue if you see it as an investment rather than a forced cost:
Companies need to look at compliance as infrastructure and offer solutions built with a privacy-first mindset. It is not just about avoiding consumer backlash or fines. It is about ensuring a competitive business in the next 5 or 10 years.
Companies cannot continue to deny this business reality. They will embrace privacy as a critical function of their organisation. Rune and the WULT team are the obvious solution for realising that objective.
Don’t fear privacy, readers. Despite what you read in the trades, it’s not the death of everything. Instead, see it as a positive evolution, putting customer security and safety ahead of bad practices that have plagued this industry for well over a decade.
Morrissey Nails It: Ad Tech Always Evolves And Adapts
Brian Morrissey is one of the finest analysts in our trillion dollar/pound/euro industry, offering unique insight that very few rarely match. He has helped build and scale some of the industry’s biggest trades over a two decade long career. Since leaving Digiday, Morrissey launched his own email newsletter focusing on the business of digital media.
The Rebooting is a must-read weekly newsletter. The FirstPartyCapital team are subscribers and avid readers.
In what can only be described as an EPIC post this week, he tackled the issue of ad targeting in a post-id, post-cookie world. Morrissey rightly points out that the legacy ad tech approach cannot and will not work going forward:
The industry itself should shoulder much of the blame. User privacy has long been treated as an irritant, left to the last panel of the day at ad tech conferences, the proverbial “last thing standing between you and cocktails.” Privacy advocates were treated as weirdos, not people to be taken seriously. And over the years, the response I most often heard to questions about the use of promiscuous collection and use of data: We don’t use personally identifiable information and besides the direct mail guys are sketchier.”
Is this the end of ad tech, the open web and digital advertising? No, of course not. Ad tech, as Morrissey points out, is malleable, adapting to whatever constraints exist across the media and marketing landscape.
That’s why we love this industry. That’s why FirstPartyCapital started a 15 million dollar fund and syndicate to invest in world class startups.
Ad tech and martech exist to solve hard and difficult problems. That is the sector’s core raison d’être.
So the next time someone tells you the “industry is f***ed” or Google/Amazon/Meta will kill us all (YAWWWNNN!), look them square in the eye and tell them with as much gusto as you can muster:
It doesn’t matter what happens - 3rd party cookie deprecation, ATT, TCF illegality or even a nuclear winter - the cockroach always wins.
MadTech FTW, people.
Deals Live On The FirstPartyCapital Platform
Evorra: The perfect application of “clean room” technology to a real world problem, moving a $200 billion data market into the privacy-first era …
Passendo: The leading category tech vendor in the email ad server space that just raised a pre-series A €2.3 million round …
The FirstPartyCapital fund: A $15 million fund investing in the next wave of innovative ad tech, martech and digital media startups, predominantly at the seed stage…