Inbox Media Network: How the Next Ad Category Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight (Part 4)

Why the Inbox Is the Most Underleveraged Attention Surface in Marketing – 2

Property four: portable and permanent

Social accounts get deleted. Apps get uninstalled. Device IDs break. Cookies expire. Platform relationships depend on the platform remaining relevant.

An email address endures. The same address works across every device, every platform, every application — independent of any single ecosystem’s fate. It is the most portable identity credential in digital marketing, and it has been for thirty years. The brand that has maintained an inbox relationship with a customer for five years owns something that cannot be replicated by any amount of paid media spend.

Why it has been underleveraged

Given these four properties, the question is not why the inbox should become a media network. The question is why it took so long.

The answer is that brands built the wrong product on top of the right surface.

Most email programmes reduced the inbox to two message classes: Sell and Notify. Sell messages drive the next transaction. Notify messages confirm what just happened. Both matter. Neither is enough.

The problem is not that these messages are bad. The problem is that they leave the long middle of the relationship empty. When the customer is not in-market — which is most of the time — the brand has little to say except more extraction. The inbox becomes a broadcast pipe: launch, offer, cart, urgency, receipt, alert, repeat.

That is what degrades the surface.

Once the inbox is treated only as a vehicle for asks and confirmations, its relationship value collapses. Open rates fall. Relevance gets measured only through conversion. The customer either buys or drifts. And when they drift, the same brand pays to reacquire them through paid media. The already-committed customer keeps receiving discount offers they did not need, until they expect a discount before every purchase. The channel looks healthy. The margin tells a different story.

The right argument for the inbox is not a channel case. It is an attention-surface case.

The surprising claim is not “email still works.”

The surprising claim is this: the inbox is the most valuable underleveraged relationship-attention surface in marketing. And the reason it has been underleveraged is not a technology limitation. It is a product limitation.

That is where AMP for Email changes the equation. Most marketers still think of email as a document. AMP changes its category. A message can now accept input, process forms, update content, and complete actions inside the inbox. The inbox stops being static. It becomes a surface.

That shift is fundamental. Because a media network requires action. A relationship surface without action is content. A relationship surface with action can become infrastructure.

The regulatory tailwind

The timing of this shift is not accidental. Four forces are converging simultaneously, and all four point in the same direction.

Cookie deprecation is removing the foundation of most programmatic advertising. Privacy regulation — GDPR, national data protection frameworks, and the broader global tightening of third-party data — is restricting the alternatives. AI is flooding every rented platform with more content and more competition, making purchased attention noisier and more expensive. And brands are beginning to understand — through incrementality analysis, through CFO scrutiny of ROAS, through the realisation that much of their attributed email revenue was correlation rather than causation — that the reporting they have relied on is inflated and that the reacquisition spend hiding inside their acquisition budgets is structural.

These are not headwinds for the inbox. They are tailwinds. Every regulatory constraint on third-party data makes authenticated first-party identity scarcer and more valuable. The inbox does not need to become the future. It needs to be recognised properly in the present.

The inbox already has the ingredients.

What has been missing is the machinery.

Thinks 1960

Martin Casado: Assume there’s 30mn professional software developers or something like that, and they make an average of $100,000 a year. This is a $3tn market. I mean, we’re just in the very, very early innings of this massive market.  A single lawyer can now do more cases, the accuracy of healthcare will increase. We know that the call centre stuff is working. We know customer support is working. But then there’s a long tail of stuff that we’re not quite sure about. It may also be the case that AI makes us feel more productive than we actually are. That’s a kind of phantom productivity. How often would you talk to ChatGPT, and it’s like, ‘that was such a great idea.’”

FT: “The dollar still accounts for roughly 57 per cent of global foreign exchange reserves and international payments, and dominates other aspects of international finance. Capital inflows into dollar assets, including US Treasuries, remain strong. True, the premium on Treasuries relative to other countries’ government bonds has declined, but that on other risk-free US dollar assets has not.”

Zvi Mowshowitz: “One of the stronger arguments against further AI progress was that scaling the models had stopped working. We had a standard ‘full-size’ for models like Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6. If you wanted a better answer, you had it think smarter and for longer, and in parallel, but you didn’t scale it bigger because that wasn’t worthwhile. Now we see that this is not true. It is worthwhile again. That changes things a lot, and in terms of existential risks and related concerns it is not good news. What to do about it? Unprompted, same as always, various people say ‘this only means we need to move forward, because if we don’t someone else will.’ Well, sure, they will with that attitude. Pick up the phone. Get to work. Lay the foundation.”

WSJ: “[Edward] Fishman says a chokepoint has three attributes. First, a country or coalition must have a dominant enough market position to swing the supply or price of a commodity or service. Second, substitutes for that commodity or service must be hard to find in the short run (in the long run, everything has a substitute). Third, closing that chokepoint must have asymmetric effects, i.e., hurt your adversary more than it hurts you.”

Inbox Media Network: How the Next Ad Category Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight (Part 3)

Why the Inbox Is the Most Underleveraged Attention Surface in Marketing – 1

If you wanted to design the ideal foundation for a new media network from scratch, you would ask for four things.

Identity that is deterministic, not probabilistic. A permissioned relationship, not anonymous reach. Delivery that does not depend on a platform algorithm ranking every impression. And portability across devices, contexts, and time — independent of any single ecosystem’s fate.

That description sounds futuristic.

It is not.

It is the inbox.

The problem is that marketers have spent years thinking of email as a channel rather than an attention surface. That framing has kept the ambition too low. The standard debate sounds defensive and familiar: is email still relevant, do people still open it, can it survive messaging apps, what about open rates? All of those questions miss the deeper point.

The inbox is not valuable because email is nostalgic. It is valuable because it remains the single largest repository of first-party, authenticated, permission-based identity that brands already own. That matters more in an AI era, not less.

As AI floods rented surfaces with more content, more personalisation, and more competition, the relative value of channels where identity is known and delivery is direct goes up. In a world of synthetic abundance, the thing that becomes scarce is not production capacity. It is trusted access to human attention. The inbox sits exactly there.

Property one: authenticated identity

Every other advertising medium operates on inferred or probabilistic identity. A cookie is a device inference. A social profile is a self-reported description. A lookalike audience is a statistical model built on behavioural signals that may or may not reflect a real person.

An email address is a real person. Named, consented, explicitly shared. The brand did not infer it — the customer gave it. That is a category of identity categorically more valuable than anything the open web provides. And it is becoming more valuable, not less, as cookies deprecate, privacy regulation tightens, and probabilistic targeting degrades globally.

Property two: relationship context

Every media network built so far monetises attention at or near the moment of transaction. The shopper on a marketplace is thinking about buying. The traveller on a booking site is planning a trip.

The inbox contains something different: relationship attention. A customer who opens a NeoMail is not necessarily thinking about buying anything. They are simply present in a relationship with the brand. That is a different quality of attention — lower intensity than purchase intent in a single moment, but far more valuable in aggregate because it exists continuously, between transactions, across the entire lifecycle of the customer relationship.

Unlike retail media, where the attention sits close to the transaction, inbox attention sits in the long periods between transactions — when memory, habit, affinity, and preference are either being maintained or lost. If that attention can be earned and kept alive, the inbox stops being merely a delivery channel and becomes a foundation for media, monetisation, and distribution.

Property three: algorithm-free delivery

On every rented surface — social feeds, search results, display networks — the brand’s message reaches the customer only if a platform algorithm decides it should. The algorithm optimises for the platform’s objectives, which are not identical to the brand’s. Reach is rented, not owned. The rules change without notice.

The inbox does not work this way. A message arrives because of the relationship between sender and recipient — not because a platform’s ranking engine approved it. The brand does not bid for its own customer’s attention inside an email. It arrives because it was invited.

This property becomes more valuable as rented surfaces get more crowded and more expensive. As AI floods every platform with more content and more competition, the algorithm-free surface becomes a relative advantage it has never previously enjoyed. When everything else gets noisier, the inbox stays quiet.

Thinks 1959

NYTimes: “For decades, two kinds of scarcity kept the internet safe — or safe enough. Writing software was hard, so the people who did it were trained, careful and few. Finding bugs was also hard, so the worst flaws stayed hidden, sometimes for decades. It wasn’t a great system. But the difficulty on both sides created a kind of détente that held. Now, thanks to new A.I. tools, anyone can write code. Soon, bad actors could use those same tools to find out what’s wrong with code. The détente is over.”

Akash Prakash on the FPI narrative on India: “While we are probably at peak negative India sentiment, and this sentiment has some element of cyclicality, with the AI trade front-loading earnings traction in North Asia, it is not entirely wrong. We need to regain the growth narrative. Today most investors see no compelling reason to look at India. Not cheap enough, not growing fast enough, not a global leader in any technology, why be here?”

FT: “Can humans still flourish in a near-future jobs market dominated by AI? Yes we can, says the theoretical neuroscientist and social entrepreneur Vivienne Ming. But first, she argues in her new book Robot-Proof, we must change the way we educate and hire the next generation of students and graduates. Equal parts self-help book and corporate manual, Robot-Proof is aimed at the home and the C-suite, its arguments dispatched with a Bay Area confidence that its readers inhabit both (in one section Ming advises parents to move “from a model of knowledge transmission to one of capacity building”). Will the world we’re preparing our children for exist by the time they have completed their education? No, argues Ming: AI will “deprofessionalize” once high-skill careers, opening up the law, medicine and finance to lower-skill, lower-paid workers and transforming the day-to-day of those jobs into something resembling a production line.”

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index report. “AI capability is not plateauing. It is accelerating and reaching more people than ever. Industry produced over 90% of notable frontier models in 2025, and several of those models now meet or exceed human baselines on PhD-level science questions, multimodal reasoning, and competition mathematics. On a key coding benchmark—SWE-bench Verified—performance rose from 60% to near 100% in a single year. Organizational adoption reached 88%, and 4 in 5 university students now use generative AI.”

Inbox Media Network: How the Next Ad Category Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight (Part 2)

The Pattern: How New Media Networks Are Born – 2

Most brands spend enormous sums to acquire customers, gather email addresses, build databases, and collect first-party identity. And then they monetise only a thin slice of that base: the customers currently buying or already high-intent. Everyone else becomes cost already incurred and value still unrealised.

This is the hidden asymmetry in most CRM databases. They are treated as communication assets only at conversion moments, not as media assets in their own right. The non-buying majority is either ignored, suppressed, or later reacquired expensively through paid platforms. The attention between transactions goes unrecognised, and therefore unmonetised.

That is not because the customers do not exist. It is because the product built on top of the surface is wrong.

To see this clearly, it helps to borrow the incrementality lens.

The distinction between the already-committed customer and the genuinely influenced customer does important work here. The already-committed customer was going to buy regardless of whether a message arrived. The genuinely influenced customer is the one whose behaviour actually changes because of the intervention. Most reporting counts both equally. Most programmes treat them the same. The channel gets credit for both. The business only benefits incrementally from one.

That distinction reveals the deeper failure of most current email and CRM systems: they monetise transaction-proximate activity poorly, and they do almost nothing with relationship attention that is not yet translating into a purchase. The same database is being overused at the wrong moment and underused the rest of the time.

That suggests the next media network may not emerge from the point of purchase at all.

It may emerge from the relationship layer.

A media network built on purchase intent asks: what can we monetise when the customer is ready to buy?

A media network built on relationship attention asks a different question: what can we monetise when the customer is not buying — but is still reachable, still known, still permissioned, and still capable of paying attention?

That is the unanswered question. And it points to a surface most marketers still underestimate.

The inbox.

Not email as a legacy channel. Not newsletters as content. Not campaigns as sends.

The inbox as a first-party, authenticated, relationship-attention surface that has never been properly productised or monetised.

Because if the pattern behind every media network is real, then the important question is no longer whether a new media network can emerge from this surface.

It is this: what would it look like to build a media network on relationship attention?

Thinks 1958

WSJ: “The podcasting industry has been embracing video to a degree where audio-only shows are becoming the exception rather than the norm. YouTube is now the nation’s largest podcasting platform. Spotify and Apple Podcasts have enabled video in their feeds. Netflix is adding dozens of established podcasts to its streaming-video lineup. The shift is eliciting strong opinions from longtime listeners. While some say video is boosting podcasts’ appeal and making shows easier to discover on social media, others feel that their beloved medium is neglecting them as it caters to another audience. They fear that video might—once again—kill the radio star.”

FT: “Now a second [China] shock is under way — one that is even more threatening to China’s trading partners: an assault on high-end manufacturing. Vicious domestic competition, coupled with vast industrial scale, ample pools of engineering talent and some of the highest subsidies in the world, has generated world-beating Chinese champions in EVs, solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and a lengthening list of advanced manufacturing sectors. But the same forces that forge those companies also tend to generate overcapacity, crushing margins at home while flooding global markets and fuelling trade tensions. Aided by an undervalued exchange rate, Chinese groups are cutting a swath through the most advanced industries around the planet.”

Mint: “It is critical to distinguish between AI-assisted and AI-executed commerce. While fully autonomous agent-led transactions are still early, the influence layer—where AI shapes decisions—is already at scale. This matters because influence precedes monetization. Once decision-making shifts, value pools follow. Unlike earlier digital shifts, Agentic AI is not building new infrastructure—it is riding on existing rails. Payments, logistics, merchant networks and digital behaviour are already in place. Here’s a realistic adoption curve—Near term (0–2 years): AI-led discovery and recommendations scale; medium term (2–4 years): Early agent-led transactions in repeat categories; long-term (4–6 years): Scaled autonomous commerce.”

WSJ: “Speculators have poured their earnings into all kinds of investments since ancient times, but they always return to gold. The precious metal is a constant in human history—a store and symbol of wealth for everyone from Egyptian royals entombed in golden masks, to working-class immigrants crossing the Atlantic with gold coins sewn into their belts…Currencies cease circulation, markets fluctuate, tastes shift. Yet gold holds its value, even as its price ebbs and flows. Perhaps now more than ever, its safe-haven status has made it a reliable hedge against a tumultuous world. “[Gold is] one asset that’s easy, global, portable, accepted everywhere, with a 5,000-year history and not likely to go to zero,” says Steven Feldman, the CEO and co-founder of GBI.”

Inbox Media Network: How the Next Ad Category Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight (Part 1)

The Pattern: How New Media Networks Are Born – 1

In NeoMails: The Attention and Monetisation Surface Brands Already Own, I wrote: “Every generation of the internet has had a surface that concentrated human attention at scale. Search. Social. Mobile notifications. Each surface looked obvious in retrospect — and was profoundly underestimated in prospect. The next surface is the inbox. Not because it is new — it is fifty years old. But because it has structural properties that no other channel can match: personal, permissioned, identity-linked, algorithm-free, and habitual. And because the tools to make it genuinely worth inhabiting — interactivity, incentivisation, individualisation, and inbox-native monetisation — are only now becoming available.”

And then in Monetising the Rest: Why Every B2C Brand Needs a Media Play, I wrote: “Today, most inboxes are passive archives of offers and updates. Brands enter episodically, make a request, and leave. But once NeoMails, Mu, and WePredict are connected, the inbox becomes a place where value is earned, behaviour is repeated, identity is reinforced, and individual engagement connects outward to a social game. That is a very different role from campaign distribution. The inbox becomes not just where the brand speaks, but where the customer acts. And action, repeated often enough, is what turns a channel into a platform…The Rest were not a dead segment. They were an ignored one. Rest Media is what happens when that ignored segment becomes active attention again.”

This essay expands on the idea of emails as an attention and monetisation surface.

**

Every major media network begins the same way.

Not with an ad format. Not with a dashboard. Not with a sales deck.

It begins when someone realises that an existing attention surface — already large, already valuable, already habitual — is being used for one purpose when it could also be used for another.

Newspapers carried editorial, and then advertising. Television carried entertainment, and then advertising. Search turned intent into media. Social turned identity and scrolling into media. Retailers turned product discovery and purchase intent into media. Each time, the attention surface existed first. The innovation was recognising that the surface had monetisable media value and then building the commercial infrastructure to realise it.

That is the pattern.

Retail Media Networks are the clearest recent example. Amazon did not invent digital advertising. What it recognised was that its product pages, search results, and shopper journeys contained a rare combination of assets: first-party identity, explicit commercial intent, and a native place to put sponsored influence close to the point of decision. Walmart, Instacart, Flipkart, and many others followed. An ad category that barely existed a decade ago has become one of the fastest-growing in marketing.

What did retail media prove?

That when three things exist together, media-network economics follow:

  • a first-party attention surface
  • authenticated identity
  • a mechanism for action

Where those three meet, advertisers pay premium prices. Because targeting gets cleaner, attribution gets tighter, and the action happens closer to intent.

That insight is now spreading beyond retail. Travel platforms, finance companies, hospitality brands, food-delivery apps, and marketplaces are all trying to build some version of “media” on top of attention surfaces they already own. The broader category now called commerce media captures the evolution well: the logic of retail media extending beyond retailer websites into any environment where first-party attention and action sit close together.

But there is an important limitation in the current wave.

Nearly every media network built so far is based on transaction-moment attention.

Shopper attention. Search attention. In-market attention. Browse-to-buy attention.

That is powerful. It is also narrow.

Because the most underleveraged attention in marketing is not the attention that exists at the moment of purchase. It is the attention that exists between purchases.

That is where the real gap sits.

Thinks 1957

WSJ: “When I started on Wall Street, a veteran pulled me aside: “Tech stocks are just like Vancouver gold mining stocks. You buy them when the price-to-earnings multiple is high, even infinite, and sell them when the P/E is low.” Huh? Newly discovered gold mines, he explained, go public, attracting speculative investors. The miners spend a fortune on equipment, causing stocks to collapse since the mine makes very little profit early on. But even as profits increase, P/E multiples shrink as mines gets closer to extracting all the gold. We’ve seen it with personal computers, networking, dot-com, mobile, software as a service, electric vehicles and now artificial intelligence. A hype cycle with massive speculation is followed by a selloff as the hype fades and reality sets in. Then the winners who really do successfully mine the gold (or technology) emerge, and their stocks meet or beat their previous peaks.”

Bethany MacLean: “The seven companies are Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—“the Magnificent Seven,” Wall Street called them. At the close of 2025, these stocks had returned a remarkable 875 percent in 10 years. Indeed, over the last three years, they accounted for 55 percent of the market’s total returns, with the other 493 companies in the index making up the other 45 percent. Within a decade, they have skyrocketed from one-eighth the value of the S&P 500 to almost one-third.” [via Arnold Kling]

Mint: “Meta Platforms is expected to surpass Alphabet’s Google to become the world’s leading digital-advertising business, a first for the social-media company. Advertising research firm Emarketer projects that Meta will surpass Google in net ad revenue this year, reaching over $243.46 billion, edging past Google’s $239.54 billion. The research firm’s estimates account for revenue after deducting traffic and other content acquisition costs, such as the money Google shares with its creators. Meta’s ad business is seeing a lift, thanks to the success of new ad offerings, including the short-form video format Reels, and the broader boost that artificial intelligence has provided.”

Colossus: “Hyperliquid, a blockchain and cryptocurrency trading exchange, is one of the most profitable enterprises per employee on earth. Last year, its 11 employees generated over $900 million in profit. It is three years old, has a market capitalization of $10 billion, and has never taken a dollar of venture capital. The main figure behind it, Jeffrey Yan, is 31 years old and has become, not entirely by choice, one of the more recognizable faces in an industry.”

Thinks 1956

Bloomberg: “The bigger culprit for the woes of recent grads is an imbalance in supply and demand that’s been quietly building for years: From 2004 to 2024, college completions in the US rose by 54%, according to Lightcast, a labor market analytics company, whereas entry-level jobs suitable for those graduates grew by just 42%. To make matters worse, what students are studying is out of sync with where the economy is creating jobs. The result: In 22 of 35 fields of study, the ratio of entry-level jobs per graduate declined over the past two decades, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Lightcast data. “We’ve never seen so many changes all at the same time and at this speed,” says Elena Magrini, the head of global research at Lightcast. “This is the first time where the education pathway to jobs is kind of broken.””

Decrypt: “Japan isn’t interested in building the next ChatGPT. [Recently], SoftBank, NEC, Honda, and Sony Group jointly formed a new company with one goal: build a trillion-parameter AI model that runs machines, not conversations. The move is a direct bet on what the community refers to as “Physical AI”: the idea that the next frontier isn’t language models that write your emails, but AI systems that control a robot arm, drive a car, or run a factory floor. Japan, with its deep industrial base and decades of robotics heritage, thinks it has a natural edge that Silicon Valley and Beijing can’t easily replicate.”

FT (in the context of Anthropic’s Mythos]: “AI is like the atomic bomb — once you invent the means to build one, you live in a different world.”

Mint: “Consumer brands are reworking their e-commerce marketing strategies as digital advertising becomes more expensive with diminishing incremental reach, prompting a shift away from scale-at-all-costs growth. Instead of relying heavily on marketplace (Amazon, Flipkart, etc.) ads and aggressive discounting, small brands across categories such as food and personal care are now dispersing spends across platforms including their own websites, investing more in brand-building, and focusing on retaining customers. “At scale, it becomes very expensive to advertise because you don’t have enough incremental reach available,” said Jatan Bawa, co-founder of Sauce VC-backed oral care brand Perfora.”