1. We have designed the first way to buy and sell email ads like display – bought at the point of impression, not on send. That’s a big deal, since this has not been done before across an exchange.

2. Selling banner ads in email is simple to do if you are buying all the recipients of a list that is sent. Buying specific openers based on demographics, geo, time, and other factors – like how it is bought in display – across thousands of newsletters simultaneously using a single IO, that is our innovation.

3. Scale. Are you kidding? Everyone uses email. Everyone subscribes to newsletters. And email volume is growing everyday. How do you hear about a Facebook request, Google+, linkedin request, Twitter retweet or @mention….all via email. The scale is fantastic, especially if you are the only company that can buy it, like we can.

4. Click rates in mobile emails are better than click rates in mobile display. Also, we are finding that people see the ad on mobile and then open the same email later on a larger screen and click there. Another plus – we optimize the landing page to match the device, so that people who click on a mobile link can be directed to a mobile friendly landing page.

Frank, feel free to be skeptical. We’re used to it. However, we’ve done this, and it works and the metrics are outstanding.

Banner ads in email don’t work. There is plenty of proof around that – again to my first point – if they worked, why wouldn’t more folks sell them?

Selling banner ads in email is not any more difficult than selling display ads.

About scale – let’s think about that a moment. You can’t actually think that banners in email scale as well as banners on websites. For every email that is sent, there are probably millions of web impressions created in that same instance. The minute you try to incorporate “display like” buying- e.g RTB, day-parting, data targeting, you have absolutely 0 scale to speak of. Are you even considering email open rates? Bulk email open rates? Even with a CTR that is 10x that of display ads, your scale is likely 1000x LESS than display. 3 billion email address vs. how many page impressions / day? I don’t think its even close…

And who the hell is going to “click” a banner ad in an email rendered on a mobile device?

Julie – LiveIntent does something that Kwanzoo can’t do…not really a comparable to us. If it could bid on and buy impressions within email newsletters, it would be a comp. It doesn’t. There are tons of tools for buying routine display inventory. There is only one for buying and selling email display in real-time.

Cloutman – this is not ‘bulk email’ and LiveIntent ads only show up in email ‘Opens’, not in ‘Sent’, so there is not a single wasted impression. Are you telling me that you never read breaking news alerts, or newsletters you have subscribed to? I don’t believe that. Next, the ads do not have any effect on deliverability and in fact we have never received a complaint from either a client or a user that would indicate that we negatively affect deliverability. We are DAA and IAB compliant. Take this seriously. We have been in the email business for a long time, not noobs. Next, you would be hard pressed to build what we have (the front end, business logic, the algorithm, reporting engine and the buying/selling interface and network of publishers and advertisers) in 2 years with a superstar team. Based on your comments, I am not sure you fully understand what we do, my bad for not explaining – it is a buying and targeting technology with a real time bidding and optimization engine. A lot of math here. And as far as scale, email has tons of scale – way more than crappy little ads in crappy little mobile apps that no one clicks on. Email isn’t a closed platform like FB or LinkedIn, etc. The scale is global. It isn’t going away, in fact it is growing.

Frank – Publishers have given away email not because it isn’t valuable, but because it is hard to serve ads into. Salespeople are lazy and email has been hard to sell. We’ve changed the way that publishers sell the inventory and the way that advertisers can buy it, so it is like display. Publishers who use our technology make *alot* of money from the ads that we (or they can) sell into their newsletters. Scale – Hmmm. There are 3 billion email addresses in the world – they all operate on the same standards set, and now smartphones have HTML email readers. And as far as ‘advertising medium that doesn’t work’, that is probably the least informed comment on this thread. You know what doesn’t work? In-App ads. Banner ads on websites. Those don’t work. Our email ads do. For Publishers and Advertisers. And for consumers.

You all should see Patrick’s post for more info on scale. http://goo.gl/9lJRY

While your metrics are accurate regarding CTRs for email vs. display, what you fail to realize is how much less scale you have in email.

I just don’t see how any advertisers would be willing to pay money for an advertising medium that is proven not to work.

Companies work very hard to incentivize consumers to subscribe to bulk mailings because they perceive a high ROI from those communications using whatever metric they associate with success. Even with proper incentives, consumers are very weary of subscribing to something that is going to be perceived as spam. Therefore, a successful email campaign is going to have a well crafted call to action that is presented in a compelling, or at least innocuous way. If you throw third party ads into that mix, you can forget about that. It will completely dilute the message. So if I don’t understand why a publisher that is sending out email with low ROI is going to think to increase ROI by throwing in ads that alienate their audience. The smart ones will ask how they can change their message to produce higher ROI, or why the are sending out mail at all when it has low ROI.

As for you comparison between your ads and Web impressions, sure its better. But customizing ads to a consumer when you know exactly who the consumer, since you have their email and probably more information, is obviously going to be better than the vague guess you might get with traditional banner advertising. And it is not a particularly compelling statistic until you have longitudinal data that proves that your advertising doesn’t dramatically increase the level of unsubscriptions over multiple mailings. And I think that is the reasonable reaction to expect from normal subscribers who are only marginally engaged.

Now, I’m sure you’ve put significant amounts of engineering into your product, but I really doubt that it is difficult to replicate. I feel confident that I could write an application to do most of what you are doing in a crude fashion by myself in a few days. Not that I want to. It think it’s a really bad idea.

I agree that our concept is just as stupid as providing advertising in magazines, newspapers, on TV and the radio. It’s almost as stupid as banners on websites, except that the ads that we run in our publishers’ newsletters click at .4%, a rate that is about 10x the click rate in web display.

What we do is help publishers pay for the email that their subscribers sign up for. Otherwise the publishers lose money sending email. The technology works, the ads are optimized based on geo, device, newsletter and time of day and users do not complain.

All in all, really hard to do but really beneficial for publishers, advertisers and consumers – who receive ads that are targeted much better than ads that have been manually placed.

I hope that helps you understand the value. thanks!