Two Marketing Moonshots for Retention and Profits: NeoN and Progency

Published April 16, 2025

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Theses

I have been writing on new ideas in marketing for over five years now. With each essay, I refine my earlier ideas. As Heraclitus said, “A man cannot step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” So, even though the core ideas may seem repetitive, there are new nuances which come with every new writing. I want to begin by summarising my key theses and then discussing two moonshots that can transform marketing: NeoN, a new email-based ad network, and Progency, for performance-based martech.

1. The $500 Billion AdWaste Crisis: 70% of digital marketing budgets are squandered on reacquisition – repeatedly targeting the same customers through expensive adtech platforms. This spend is the #1 profit killer for businesses. The solution doesn’t lie in optimising adtech, but in revolutionising martech.
2. Root Causes of Marketing Inefficiency: Two fundamental problems drive this waste: the “Not for Me” problem (lack of true 1:1 personalisation) and the “No Hotline” problem (attention recession leading to inconsistent customer connections).
3. The BRTN Framework: A new customer segmentation approach based on engagement patterns rather than demographics: Best customers (top 20% who deliver 60-80% of revenue and 200% of profits) need Retention; Rest customers (the middle 50%) need Engagement; Test customers (dormant/churned 30%) need Reactivation; and Next customers need Conversion.
4. Focus on the Overlooked Middle: Brands lose money primarily through Rest and Test customers. These segments require breakthrough technologies – specifically Agentic AI and interactive AMP in email – to transform engagement and recapture value.
5. AI-Native Martech: Agentic AI (through AI Co-Marketer and Marketing Agents) combined with AI Twins enables true N=1 personalisation at scale. This creates a “Department of One for a Segment of One” – a marketer capable of managing millions of individual customer relationships simultaneously, solving the “Not for Me” problem.
6. From TradMails to NeoMails: AMP technology transforms static emails into interactive experiences through Atomic Rewards (Mu) and Microns (15-60 second “brain gain” activities). This creates reliable daily hotlines between brands and customers, solving the “No Hotline” problem.
7. Recapturing Rest Customers: The combination of NeoMails (ensuring messages break through) and Agentic AI (converting clicks to transactions) creates an efficient system for re-engaging the critical middle segment before they become dormant.
8. The Progency Solution: Most brands lack resources to maximise value from Rest customers while focusing on Best and Next segments. Progency combines Platform, Experts, AI agents, and Kaizen (PEAK) to deliver performance-based outcomes rather than merely providing software, making martech as simple as adtech.
9. NeoN: The Attention Exchange: For Test customers, brands need an alternative to expensive duopoly platforms (Google/Meta). NeoN creates a direct brand-to-brand marketplace where Brand A monetises its Best customers’ attention to help Brand B reacquire Test customers – enabling Brand A to “print money” while Brand B “saves money.”
10. The Path to Marketing Prosperity: NeoN and Progency represent marketing’s moonshots – transforming martech from cost centre to profit engine. They usher in the era of NeoMarketing, maximising LTV while minimising CAC, eliminating AdWaste, and putting brands on a sustainable “Rule of 40” path to profitability.

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NeoN: The Attention Exchange

NeoN reimagines advertising by creating a direct marketplace that connects brands through their most valuable asset: customer attention. Here are the key principles and mechanisms that define this revolutionary approach:

1. The True Cost of Customer Reacquisition: When customers become dormant (Test customers), brands typically resort to expensive retargeting through Google and Meta, paying premium prices in competitive auctions just to reach people already in their database. This creates a vicious cycle where brands fund their own obsolescence.
2. The Power of Authenticated Identity: NeoN leverages a fundamentally different approach based on authenticated identity (PII) rather than anonymous cookies or probabilistic matching. This enables precise targeting with near-zero waste, connecting brands directly to specific individuals.
3. From Platform Dependency to Brand Collaboration: Instead of renting access to customers through intermediaries, NeoN enables direct brand-to-brand collaboration. This creates a marketplace where brands simultaneously play dual roles – as publishers monetising their active customers’ attention and as advertisers reaching their dormant customers.
4. The Economics of Attention Exchange: When Brand A hosts ActionAds from Brand B within its NeoMails, both benefit: Brand A earns revenue from attention it has already captured (its Best customers), while Brand B saves 30-50% compared to traditional reacquisition costs for reaching its Test customers.
5. Privacy-First Architecture: Unlike invasive tracking, NeoN operates through “clean room” technology that matches audiences without exposing personal data. Customers retain control through granular permissions, creating a consent-based ecosystem that thrives in post-cookie environments.
6. Interactive, In-Email Transactions: Through AMP-powered ActionAds, customers can fill forms, browse products, redeem offers, and complete purchases without leaving their inbox – all actions happen directly within the email itself, eliminating the need for clickthrough to external landing pages. This drastically reduces friction compared to traditional click-through journeys that lose 80-90% of potential conversions.
7. Cross-Brand Audience Matching: NeoN’s matching algorithm identifies where Brand A’s active users overlap with Brand B’s dormant customers, creating efficient reactivation pathways. A sporting goods retailer’s active customers might help a fitness app reconnect with lapsed users through relevant, contextual offers.
8. Network Effects and Scaling Advantages: As more brands join NeoN, its value compounds exponentially. Each new participant adds both inventory (emails to their Best customers) and demand (reacquisition needs for their Test customers), creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem.
9. Measuring True Performance: Unlike opaque adtech attribution, NeoN provides transparent, accurate measurement since all interactions occur within authenticated environments. Brands pay only for actual engagement with their specific dormant customers, eliminating wasted impressions.
10. Complementary to Traditional Channels: NeoN doesn’t replace search or social advertising for new customer acquisition (Next customers) but provides a superior alternative specifically for reactivating dormant customers (Test customers). This allows brands to optimise their media mix for each customer segment.

NeoN represents a fundamental shift from renting attention to trading it in a fair marketplace. By eliminating expensive intermediaries and enabling precision targeting through authenticated identity, it offers a compelling alternative to the wasteful status quo. This isn’t just a new advertising channel – it’s an entirely new economic model for marketing that values customer relationships over platform dependency.

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NeoN’s Secret Sauce – 1

There are four revolutionary ideas at the core of NeoN which make it a genuine moonshot in marketing, transforming the relationship between brands and their customers while eliminating the billions in AdWaste that plague modern businesses.

1. ActionAds: The Frictionless Conversion Engine

Traditional digital ads face a fundamental challenge: the “click-through penalty.” Every time a customer must leave their current environment to complete an action, conversion rates plummet—typically by 80-90%. This friction is perhaps the greatest hidden cost in digital marketing.

ActionAds eliminate this penalty entirely by bringing the entire transaction journey inside the email itself. Through AMP technology, customers can:

• Browse product options and variants within the inbox
• Fill out forms without navigating to landing pages
• Complete purchases with saved payment information (and if needed, an OTP as second factor authentication)
• Claim offers and apply discounts instantly
• Book appointments and reservations in seconds

The impact is transformative—conversion rates typically increase 4-10X compared to traditional click-through experiences. This dramatic improvement occurs not because the offers are necessarily better, but because the friction has been eliminated. It’s akin to the difference between ordering from a menu versus having to leave a restaurant to view the selection in another building.

Additionally, ActionAds completely eliminate click fraud—a persistent problem that drains an estimated 15-30% of digital ad budgets globally. Since all interactions occur within the authenticated email environment rather than through redirects to external sites, the bots, fake clicks, and domain spoofing that plague traditional digital advertising simply cannot exist in this ecosystem. Advertisers pay only for genuine engagements from real, verified humans.

What makes ActionAds particularly powerful is their ability to maintain context. Traditional advertising disrupts the customer’s experience, taking them out of their current environment. ActionAds respect the inbox as a personal space, creating a seamless extension of the email experience rather than an unwelcome interruption. The customer remains in control, with all interactions happening within their familiar email interface.

The technology is built to scale across use cases—from simple product offers to complex multi-step processes like travel bookings or financial applications. Each ActionAd is responsive, adapting to device screens and email client capabilities while maintaining consistent branding and functionality.

2. Matching Engine: Precision Through Authentication

The NeoN Matching Engine represents a paradigm shift in targeting technology. Unlike traditional adtech platforms that rely on probabilistic matching through cookies and device fingerprinting, NeoN operates on authenticated identity—real people who have explicitly logged in and shared their information.

This creates several profound advantages:

• Guaranteed Identity Match: When Brand A wants to reach its dormant customers through Brand B’s emails, the match is deterministic and precise—not an estimate or probability.
• Zero Waste Delivery: Every impression reaches exactly the intended recipient, eliminating the 30-50% waste typical in cookie-based targeting.
• Intelligent Content Selection: The engine doesn’t just match identities; it analyses relationship context to deliver the most relevant offers at the optimal time.
• Privacy-Preserving Architecture: Customer data never leaves secure environments. The matching occurs through “clean room” technology that identifies overlaps without exposing personal information.
• First-Party Data Prioritisation: As third-party cookies disappear, NeoN’s reliance on first-party authenticated data becomes increasingly valuable.

The Matching Engine operates as a sophisticated decision-making system, considering multiple factors simultaneously:

• Recency, frequency, and monetary value of past purchases
• Explicit and implicit preference signals
• Seasonal and contextual relevance
• Historical engagement patterns
• Customer lifecycle stage

This intelligence ensures that ads feel less like interruptions and more like helpful recommendations. A customer who purchased running shoes six months ago might receive an actionable offer for athletic socks or performance insoles—precisely when replacement or complementary products would be relevant.

Perhaps most importantly, the Matching Engine solves the “cold start” problem that plagues new ad platforms. Because brands bring their own first-party data (their dormant customers), the targeting is immediately effective without needing to build predictive models from scratch.

3. Co-operative Structure: The Network Effect Accelerator

NeoN’s co-operative structure is perhaps its most ingenious element. Every participating brand plays dual roles—as both publisher and advertiser—creating a self-balancing ecosystem that scales organically.

As publishers, brands monetise their Best customers’ attention through ActionAds in their emails, generating new revenue without additional costs. As advertisers, they efficiently reacquire dormant Test customers through other brands’ emails, saving significantly compared to traditional platforms.

This structure creates powerful incentives:

• Built-in Supply-Demand Balance: Each brand contributes inventory roughly proportional to their reacquisition needs, naturally balancing the marketplace.
• Exponential Network Effects: Every new brand joining NeoN adds both email inventory (supply) and dormant customers to target (demand), creating a virtuous cycle of increasing value.
• Collaborative Advantage: Brands benefit from collective scale without sacrificing control of their customer relationships.
• Anti-Competitive Safeguards: The system is designed to prevent direct competitors from targeting each other’s customers, ensuring brand safety.
• Equitable Value Exchange: Value received correlates directly with value contributed, creating fair distribution.

The co-operative approach solves one of digital advertising’s most persistent challenges: creating sufficient quality inventory at scale. By leveraging existing email programs that brands already operate, NeoN taps into billions of premium, authenticated impressions without needing to build audiences from scratch.

This structure also creates natural defences against fraud and quality issues. Since every participant has a stake in maintaining the ecosystem’s integrity, there are strong incentives for high-quality experiences. Poor-performing ActionAds or disruptive content would damage the value for all participants, creating self-regulation within the network.

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NeoN’s Secret Sauce – 2

4. DIY/Self-Serve Platform: Democratising Access

The DIY/Self-Serve Platform makes NeoN’s sophisticated technology accessible to businesses of all sizes. Through an intuitive interface, brands can:

• Upload their customer lists for matching
• Create ActionAds without technical expertise
• Set targeting parameters and bid strategies
• Monitor performance in real-time
• Optimise campaigns based on results
• Scale budgets based on performance

This democratisation is crucial for widespread adoption. Traditional adtech platforms often require significant expertise and resources to operate effectively, creating barriers for smaller businesses. By making NeoN accessible through a self-serve model, the platform can scale across the market spectrum—from large enterprises to independent retailers.

The platform employs intelligent automation to simplify complex processes:

• Template Library: Pre-built ActionAd formats for common use cases
• Dynamic Creative Optimization: Automatically testing and improving ad variations
• Budget Optimisation: Intelligent allocation of spend across targeting segments
• Performance Prediction: AI-driven forecasting of expected results
• Simplified Reporting: Clear metrics focused on business outcomes

5. Beyond the Core Four: Additional Differentiators

While these four elements form NeoN’s foundation, several additional factors contribute to its potential as a marketing moonshot:

Transparent Economics

NeoN’s economic model represents a dramatic improvement over traditional ad platforms:

• Performance-Based Pricing: Brands pay primarily for actual results (clicks, conversions) rather than impressions
• No Platform Tax: Direct brand-to-brand transactions eliminate the 30-50% “tax” typically captured by intermediaries
• Revenue Sharing: Publishers receive 70-80% of advertising revenue, significantly higher than typical ad networks
• Predictable Costs: Without auction dynamics driving unpredictable price inflation, costs remain stable and predictable

First-Party Data Advantage

As privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookies disappear, NeoN’s reliance on first-party authenticated data creates significant advantages:

• Future-Proof Architecture: Built for privacy from the ground up, not retrofitted
• Compliant by Design: Clear consent frameworks and transparent data usage
• Zero Dependence on Cookies: No impact from browser privacy changes
• Enhanced with Zero-Party Data: Integrates explicitly shared preferences for better targeting

Cross-Channel Potential

While initially focused on email, NeoN’s architecture can extend to other authenticated channels:

• Mobile Apps: Leveraging logged-in state for in-app ActionAds
• Customer Portals: Extending to authenticated web experiences
• Messaging Platforms: Adapting to WhatsApp, SMS, and RCS as they support interactive content

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The Moonshot Value Proposition

What makes NeoN truly a moonshot is not just its technological innovation but its potential economic impact. The global digital advertising market spends approximately $500 billion annually on reacquisition—reaching customers who are already in brands’ databases. By eliminating this waste, NeoN addresses a massive inefficiency in the marketing ecosystem.

For individual brands, the value proposition is compelling:

• Publishers (Best Customers): New revenue stream from existing email programs without additional costs
• Advertisers (Test Customers): 30-50% cost reduction for reacquiring dormant customers compared to traditional platforms
• Overall: Transformation of email from cost centre to profit centre

At scale, NeoN could fundamentally reorganise the economics of digital marketing, redirecting billions from platform intermediaries to the brands who create actual value for customers. This isn’t merely an incremental improvement—it’s a paradigm shift in how marketing resources are allocated and optimised.

By combining ActionAds’ frictionless experiences, the Matching Engine’s precision, a Co-operative structure that aligns incentives, and an accessible Self-Serve Platform, NeoN creates a complete ecosystem for attention exchange. This isn’t just another advertising channel—it’s an entirely new model for how brands connect with customers who already know them, transforming wasted spend into valuable engagement.

The true north star of NeoN isn’t just efficiency, but effectiveness. By bringing together the right offers, to the right customers, at the right moments, through a frictionless experience, NeoN doesn’t just save money—it creates better customer experiences. That’s the ultimate secret sauce that makes it a genuine marketing moonshot.

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Progency: Performance Marketing Reinvented

Progency represents a fundamental reimagining of how martech delivers value, moving beyond software provision to outcome generation. This hybrid approach combines proprietary technology with expert services and AI orchestration to transform retention marketing. Here are the core principles:

1. The Marketing Execution Gap: Most brands lack the resources, expertise, and bandwidth to fully leverage martech platforms, typically using only 30-40% of available features. This execution gap prevents martech from delivering its potential value, particularly for Rest customer segments.
2. Beyond SaaS: The PEAK Framework: Progency transcends traditional SaaS by combining Platform, Experts, AI agents, and Kaizen methodology (PEAK) into a cohesive service. Rather than just providing tools and leaving implementation to clients, Progency takes ownership of outcomes.
3. Outcome-Based Economics: While adtech platforms charge for performance (cost per click, acquisition, etc.), martech traditionally charges for software access (based on monthly active users) regardless of results. Progency aligns incentives by adopting performance-based pricing tied directly to revenue impact.
4. Focus on the Overlooked Middle: Progency specialises in maximising value from Rest customers – the 40-50% of customers who have engaged within the past 90 days but are showing signs of declining activity. This segment represents the highest ROI opportunity for intervention.
5. The Product-Agency Fusion: Unlike traditional agencies using third-party tools or martech vendors providing just software, Progency offers a unique hybrid: deep platform expertise combined with specialist talent and AI acceleration, all tied to performance guarantees.
6. AI Agent Orchestration: At Progency’s core is a sophisticated system of AI agents working in concert with the Co-Marketer: Journey Agent, Consumer Insights Agent, Segment Agent, Content Agent, Designer Agent, Scheduler Agent, Analytics Agent, and Merchandiser Agent.
7. Closed-Loop Revenue Impact: Progency doesn’t measure success by vanity metrics like opens or clicks but by tangible business outcomes: reactivation rates, incremental revenue, and improved lifetime value. This creates direct accountability for financial results.
8. Parallel Operations Model: Rather than disrupting existing marketing workflows, Progency operates alongside them, focusing specifically on Rest customer engagement while brand teams concentrate on Best customer retention and Next customer acquisition.
9. Competitive Moat Building: For martech companies, Progency creates a sustainable advantage that pure software competitors can’t easily replicate. The combination of proprietary technology, specialist expertise, and performance commitment forms a defensible market position.
10. Scalable Value Creation: Progency achieves the seemingly impossible: delivering customised, high-touch marketing at scale through AI orchestration. This enables the economics of mass marketing with the effectiveness of personalised engagement.

Progency solves the fundamental “Who Will Do It?” problem that has limited martech’s impact. By combining technology with talent and tying compensation directly to results, it bridges the execution gap between software capabilities and business outcomes. This isn’t merely a service enhancement – it’s a complete reinvention of how martech creates and captures value in the enterprise market.

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Progency’s Secret Sauce – 1

1. The AI Agent Revolution: Marketing’s Quantum Leap Forward

The true revolutionary breakthrough in Progency lies in its orchestrated ecosystem of AI agents—a “Department of One” that collaborates seamlessly to deliver what has long been marketing’s holy grail: true N=1 personalisation at scale. This isn’t incremental automation; it’s a fundamental reinvention of how marketing expertise is deployed, enabling brands to achieve levels of precision and effectiveness previously impossible with human teams alone. These specialised agents function as a collective intelligence, each handling distinct aspects of the marketing process while working in concert toward common goals—all without the resource constraints, cognitive limitations, or operational delays of traditional marketing structures.

Consider the agents announced recently by my company, Netcore Cloud.

Co-Marketer

• Orchestrates and coordinates all other AI agents.
• Translates strategic objectives into tactical execution.
• Ensures cohesive integration across all marketing initiatives.
• Functions as the central intelligence connecting specialised agents.

Journey Agent

• Designs an ideal journey for the given use case.
• Identifies the best communication touchpoints.
• Customises wait nodes and wait times according to user behavior.
• Implements preferred channel capabilities.
• Continuously optimises campaigns based on real-time performance data—so every next campaign performs better.

Consumer Insights Agent

• Generates insights on customer behaviour and preferences.
• Identifies the best communication touchpoints.
• Customises wait nodes and wait times according to user behaviour.
• Implements preferred channel capabilities.
• Continuously optimises and adapts based on user interactions.

Segment Agent

• Creates audience segments based on activities, attributes, affinities, and channel preferences.
• Optimises segments to maximise campaign ROI and channel effectiveness.
• Defines segment-specific strategies to enhance customer relevance and engagement.

Content Agent

• Generates personalised campaign content across various platforms.
• Optimises content for engagement.
• Optimises subject lines and engagement.

Design Agent

• Designs creatives for email, web messages, and in-app messages & notifications.
• Generates templates based on brand guidelines and campaign needs.
• Dynamically adjusts creatives for maximum user engagement.

Scheduler Agent

• Schedules the campaign for optimal timing to maximise clicks, opens, and conversions.
• Implements STO (Send Time Optimisation) capabilities.
• Optimises campaigns to avoid saturation.

Analytics Agent

• Provides campaign performance analytics with key metrics & insights.
• Identifies real-time patterns and trends to find low-hanging conversion suggestions.
• Recommends data-driven optimisations.

Merchandiser Agent

• Optimises product recommendations for maximum visibility.
• Adjusts merchandising based on customer behaviour.
• Automates visual merchandising decisions.

Transforming Marketing Through Collective Intelligence

What makes this agent ecosystem truly transformative is not just the individual capabilities, but how they function as an integrated whole. Like a well-orchestrated symphony where each instrument plays its part perfectly, these agents create marketing outcomes far greater than the sum of their parts. They collaborate continuously, learning from each interaction, sharing insights across functions, and adapting strategies in real-time.

This collective intelligence enables brands to finally overcome the fundamental limitation that has plagued marketing departments for decades: the inability to scale personalisation without proportionally scaling human resources. Now, a brand can deliver millions of genuinely individual experiences simultaneously, each precisely tailored to specific customer needs and preferences.

For the first time, Progency makes it possible for brands to focus their human marketing talent on high-level strategy and creativity for their Best and Next customers, while deploying this powerful agent ecosystem to maximise value from Rest customers. This isn’t merely augmenting human capabilities—it’s fundamentally reinventing how marketing operates, creating unprecedented opportunities for brands to build deeper, more valuable relationships with every customer they serve.

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Progency’s Secret Sauce – 2

2. Performance-Based Pricing: Aligning Incentives for Success

Progency’s transformational approach extends beyond technology to fundamentally reimagine the business model for marketing services. At its core is a performance-based pricing structure that transforms martech from a cost centre to a strategic investment with measurable returns.

Unlike traditional SaaS providers who charge flat fees regardless of outcomes, Progency adopts the adtech model of paying for performance—but applies it to the far more valuable realm of customer retention and monetisation. This creates perfect alignment between the Progency provider and the brand:

• Scientifically Measured Uplift: Using rigorous A/B testing methodology with control and test groups, Progency establishes clear causality between its efforts and business outcomes. This isn’t vague correlation—it’s statistically valid proof of incremental revenue.
• Revenue-Share Model: Rather than fixed pricing, Progency typically takes a percentage of the incremental revenue generated. If the brand doesn’t benefit, neither does the Progency.
• Multi-Metric Flexibility: Performance contracts can be structured around various KPIs depending on business objectives: revenue lift, reactivation rates, cross-sell success, or reduced churn. This adaptability ensures perfect alignment with specific brand goals.
• Risk-Sharing Approach: By taking on performance risk, Progency demonstrates confidence in their capabilities while reducing financial uncertainty for brands.
• Transparent Attribution: All performance measurement uses transparent, agreed-upon methodologies, eliminating the “black box” attribution that plagues traditional marketing services.

This model represents a complete departure from both traditional agency hourly billing and SaaS subscription pricing. By focusing exclusively on outcomes, Progency finally transforms marketing from speculative expense to predictable profit engine.

3. Specialized Focus on “Rest” Customers

Another powerful differentiator in Progency’s approach is its specialised focus on the often-neglected middle segment of customers—the “Rest” group who have engaged with the brand but aren’t fully active:

• Complementary Focus: While brands naturally dedicate internal resources to their Best customers (top revenue producers) and Next customers (new acquisitions), Rest customers frequently fall through the cracks. Progency fills this gap without disrupting existing team priorities.
• Targeted Expertise: Progency develops deep expertise specifically in converting semi-engaged customers into active ones—a specialised skill set that differs significantly from new customer acquisition or VIP management.
• Scalable Attention: The AI agent framework enables genuinely individualised attention for Rest customers—something impossible for human teams to provide at scale for this segment.

By focusing precisely where most brands have operational gaps, Progency creates immediate value without organizational disruption.

4. Domain-Specific Knowledge Accumulation

Perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of Progency’s secret sauce is its capacity for cross-client knowledge transfer while maintaining strict data privacy:

• Pattern Recognition: AI agents learn which engagement strategies work across similar customer segments, industries, and scenarios without sharing confidential data.
• Accelerated Optimisation: Every client benefits from the collective learning of the entire Progency system, achieving optimization far faster than they could in isolation.
• Vertical Specialisation: Progency providers develop deep expertise in specific industries, understanding the unique customer dynamics of retail, financial services, travel, or other sectors.
• Macro Trend Identification: By analysing patterns across the customer base, Progency can identify emerging behavioural shifts that individual brands might miss.

This accumulating expertise creates a flywheel effect: as Progency serves more clients, its effectiveness increases, which attracts more clients, further enhancing its capabilities.

5. Seamless Technology Integration

Unlike traditional agencies that struggle with technology access or martech vendors with limited services capabilities, Progency offers seamless integration that eliminates operational friction:

• Native Platform Access: Built directly on the martech platform, Progency has complete, secure access to all capabilities without the API limitations that constrain third-party agencies.
• Zero Setup Overhead: Brands can activate Progency without complex implementation projects, technical resource allocation, or long onboarding periods.
• Continuous Enhancement: As the underlying martech platform evolves, Progency immediately leverages new capabilities without integration delays.
• Unified Analytics: Performance reporting integrates seamlessly with existing brand dashboards, eliminating reconciliation headaches.

This frictionless integration dramatically reduces time-to-value compared to traditional approaches that require extensive setup and integration work.

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The Moonshot Value Proposition

What makes Progency truly a marketing moonshot is its potential to fundamentally restructure the economics of customer relationship management. By combining AI agent technology, performance-based pricing, specialised customer focus, accumulated expertise, and seamless integration, Progency addresses the most critical challenge facing modern marketers: extracting maximum value from existing customer relationships in an increasingly privacy-focused, cost-conscious environment.

For brands, the value proposition is transformational:

• Reduced Dependency on Acquisition: By maximizing existing customer value, brands can reduce their reliance on increasingly expensive acquisition channels.
• Operational Efficiency: AI agents deliver sophisticated marketing operations without proportional headcount increases.
• Financial Predictability: Performance-based pricing converts marketing from uncertain expense to predictable profit centre.
• Competitive Advantage: Brands that effectively monetise their Rest customers gain substantial advantages over competitors still focused primarily on acquisition.

Progency represents not merely an evolution of existing martech approaches but a completely new paradigm. It combines the best aspects of specialised agencies (expertise, outcome focus) with the advantages of martech platforms (technology depth, data integration) while eliminating the weaknesses of both through AI agent orchestration and performance-based economics.

Just as SaaS transformed software from product to service twenty years ago, Progency now transforms marketing from technology to outcomes. This is a foundational shift in how marketing value is created, delivered, and measured. That’s what makes Progency a true marketing moonshot: a radical reinvention that solves the most pressing challenges facing today’s brands while unlocking previously impossible opportunities for growth.

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Flywheel

The true power of NeoN and Progency emerges when we understand how they work together to create a self-reinforcing flywheel—a perpetual motion machine for retention, engagement, and profitability. While each represents a moonshot on its own, their combined impact fundamentally redefines marketing itself, creating the foundation for NeoMarketing and AI-native Martech.

The Retention and Profits Flywheel

The flywheel begins with a brand’s existing customer base, segmented into Best, Rest, and Test customers. These segments represent not just different value tiers but different relationship stages requiring distinct approaches:

1. Activate the Flywheel: The cycle begins with Progency deploying its AI agent ecosystem to engage Rest customers—those showing declining engagement but not yet dormant. Through N=1 Personalisation, these customers receive precisely tailored interactions that rekindle their interest and activity.
2. Acceleration Phase: As Rest customers become more engaged, some ascend to Best status, growing their lifetime value and purchase frequency. This creates immediate revenue lift while simultaneously building a more valuable email audience—the exact audience that powers NeoN’s publisher side.
3. Recovery Operation: For customers who slip into Test status despite Progency’s efforts, NeoN provides a supremely efficient reactivation pathway. Instead of expensive retargeting through adtech platforms, these dormant customers are reached through the NeoN network at 30-50% lower cost.
4. Monetisation Multiplier: As the brand’s active audience grows through both retention and reactivation, its publishing value within NeoN increases proportionally. Each engaged Best customer represents not just direct revenue but also monetisable attention that generates incremental ActionAd revenue.
5. Reinvestment Cycle: Revenue generated from both improved customer value and NeoN’s attention monetisation creates resources for further investment in Progency’s capabilities, expanding its impact to additional customer segments and use cases.

This flywheel transforms marketing from a linear funnel (acquire, convert, repeat) into a continuous cycle where each customer segment—whether actively purchasing, drifting, or dormant—contributes to overall profitability. Most importantly, it eliminates the inefficient “leaky bucket” syndrome where brands constantly pour acquisition resources into a customer base that’s simultaneously churning out the bottom.

The Foundation of NeoMarketing

Together, NeoN and Progency form the twin pillars of NeoMarketing—a fundamentally new approach that prioritises retention over acquisition, relationship over transaction, and precision over volume. This approach delivers three transformative outcomes:

1. The End of AdWaste: By providing superior alternatives to expensive reacquisition and enabling true 1:1 engagement at scale, NeoN and Progency systematically eliminate the $500 billion currently wasted on redundant targeting. This isn’t just cost cutting—it’s redirecting resources from inefficient spend to value-creating activities.
2. Attention to Relationships: Both solutions transform fleeting attention into lasting relationships. NeoN turns the inbox from a promotional dumping ground into an interactive engagement platform, while Progency converts basic customer data into meaningful, ongoing dialogues. Together, they solve marketing’s persistent challenge: maintaining connections in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
3. Martech as Profit Centre: Perhaps most revolutionary, this combination transforms martech from cost centre to profit engine. Through NeoN’s attention monetisation and Progency’s performance-based model, marketing technology finally shifts from expense line to profits driver—the holy grail that CMOs have sought for decades.

AI-Native by Design

What makes this flywheel uniquely powerful in today’s environment is its AI-native architecture. Unlike traditional marketing approaches retrofitted with AI capabilities, both NeoN and Progency were conceived from the ground up around artificial intelligence:

• Continuous Learning: The system becomes more effective with every interaction, continuously improving targeting, personalisation, and conversion rates.
• Autonomous Execution: Daily marketing operations happen without constant human intervention, freeing teams to focus on strategy and creativity.
• Predictive Capabilities: The flywheel doesn’t just respond to customer actions—it anticipates needs and behaviours, enabling proactive engagement.

This represents the future of marketing: not just automating existing processes but reimagining them completely through the lens of what’s possible with AI. Instead of marketing departments struggling to keep pace with exploding complexity, the NeoN-Progency flywheel creates a self-optimising system that delivers superior results with dramatically less operational overhead.

By anchoring NeoMarketing in these twin moonshots, brands can finally break free from the acquisition addiction that has drained their resources for decades. Instead, they can build sustainable, profitable growth engines powered by the most valuable asset they already own—their existing customer relationships.

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Claude Summary

The $500 billion AdWaste crisis is perhaps the most significant yet underaddressed challenge facing brands today. This staggering figure—representing 70% of digital marketing budgets—is squandered on repeatedly reacquiring customers brands already know. It’s the marketing equivalent of paying rent for a house you’ve already built.

Solving this crisis requires more than incremental improvements to existing systems. It demands revolutionary approaches—true marketing moonshots that fundamentally reimagine how brands engage customers and deploy marketing resources. Two such transformative innovations are emerging: NeoN, an attention exchange network, and Progency, a performance-driven martech model.

The AdWaste Crisis: Understanding the Problem

The AdWaste crisis stems from two fundamental marketing failures:

1. The “No Hotline” Problem: Despite having customer contact information, brands lack reliable channels to consistently engage their audience. Email open rates hover in single digits, push notifications get blocked, and social feeds are algorithmically filtered. Without dependable connections, brands resort to expensive ad platforms to reach people already in their database.
2. The “Not for Me” Problem: Generic messaging and crude segmentation fail to resonate with individual customers. When communications feel irrelevant, customers disengage, creating a vicious cycle where disengagement drives more ad spending.

These failures are particularly costly for two customer segments—what I call the “Rest” (middle 50% showing declining engagement) and “Test” (dormant 30%)—that represent the greatest opportunity for value recovery.

NeoN: The Attention Exchange Revolution

NeoN reimagines advertising by creating a direct marketplace that connects brands through their most valuable asset: customer attention. Unlike traditional ad platforms that function as expensive intermediaries, NeoN enables direct brand-to-brand collaboration through authenticated identity.

The Secret Sauce

Four revolutionary innovations make NeoN transformative:

1. ActionAds: AMP-powered interactive ads that enable complete transactions within email—eliminating the 80-90% “click-through penalty” that plagues traditional digital advertising. Customers can browse products, complete forms, and make purchases without leaving their inbox.
2. Matching Engine: Unlike cookie-based targeting that relies on probabilistic matching, NeoN’s engine uses authenticated identity for deterministic, precise targeting with near-zero waste. When Brand A wants to reach its dormant customers through Brand B’s emails, the match is exact—not an estimate.
3. Co-operative Structure: Every participating brand plays dual roles—as both publisher and advertiser—creating a self-balancing ecosystem that scales organically. Brands monetize their Best customers’ attention while efficiently reacquiring their dormant Test customers at 30-50% lower costs than traditional platforms.
4. DIY/Self-Serve Platform: An intuitive interface democratizes access, making NeoN’s sophisticated technology accessible to businesses of all sizes without requiring technical expertise.

NeoN’s economic impact is profound. By eliminating platform intermediaries and enabling precision targeting through authenticated identity, it offers brands two compelling benefits:

• Print Money: Brands monetize their Best customers’ attention through ActionAds, generating new revenue from existing email programs.
• Save Money: Brands efficiently reacquire dormant Test customers through other brands’ emails at significantly lower costs than traditional platforms.

Progency: Performance Marketing Reinvented

While NeoN addresses dormant Test customers, Progency focuses on the critical Rest segment—those showing declining engagement but not yet inactive. It represents a fundamental reimagining of how martech delivers value, moving beyond software provision to outcome generation through a hybrid approach combining proprietary technology with expert services and AI orchestration.

The Secret Sauce

Progency’s transformative power comes from several innovative elements:

1. AI Agent Ecosystem: A sophisticated “Department of One” with specialized agents handling distinct aspects of marketing—from journey orchestration and consumer insights to content creation, design, scheduling, analytics, and merchandising. These agents work in concert, enabling true N=1 personalization at scale without proportionally scaling human resources.
2. Performance-Based Pricing: Unlike traditional SaaS providers who charge flat fees regardless of outcomes, Progency adopts a revenue-share model tied directly to measurable business results. This creates perfect alignment: if the brand doesn’t benefit, neither does the Progency.
3. Specialized Rest Customer Focus: While brands naturally dedicate internal resources to their Best customers and new acquisitions, Rest customers frequently fall through the cracks. Progency fills this gap without disrupting existing team priorities.
4. Domain-Specific Knowledge Accumulation: AI agents learn which engagement strategies work across similar segments and industries while maintaining strict data privacy, creating a flywheel effect where each client benefits from the collective learning of the entire system.
5. Seamless Technology Integration: Built directly on the martech platform, Progency has complete, secure access to all capabilities without the API limitations that constrain third-party agencies, enabling frictionless implementation and immediate value delivery.

Progency transforms marketing from an unpredictable expense to a reliable profit center by focusing precisely where most brands have operational gaps: maximizing value from existing customer relationships in an increasingly privacy-focused environment.

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The Retention and Profits Flywheel

The true power of NeoN and Progency emerges when understanding how they work together to create a self-reinforcing flywheel for retention, engagement, and profitability:

1. Activate: Progency deploys its AI agent ecosystem to engage Rest customers through precisely tailored interactions that rekindle their interest and activity.
2. Accelerate: As Rest customers become more engaged, some ascend to Best status, growing their lifetime value while building a more valuable email audience—the exact audience that powers NeoN’s publisher side.
3. Recover: For customers who slip into Test status despite Progency’s efforts, NeoN provides a supremely efficient reactivation pathway at 30-50% lower cost than traditional adtech platforms.
4. Monetize: As the brand’s active audience grows through both retention and reactivation, its publishing value within NeoN increases proportionally, generating incremental ActionAd revenue.
5. Reinvest: Revenue from improved customer value and NeoN’s attention monetization creates resources for further investment in Progency’s capabilities, expanding its impact to additional segments and use cases.

This flywheel transforms marketing from a linear funnel into a continuous cycle where each customer segment contributes to overall profitability, eliminating the inefficient “leaky bucket” syndrome where brands constantly pour acquisition resources into a customer base that’s simultaneously churning.

The Foundation of NeoMarketing

Together, NeoN and Progency form the twin pillars of NeoMarketing—a fundamentally new approach that prioritizes retention over acquisition, relationship over transaction, and precision over volume. This approach delivers three transformative outcomes:

1. The End of AdWaste: By providing superior alternatives to expensive reacquisition and enabling true 1:1 engagement at scale, these solutions systematically eliminate the $500 billion currently wasted on redundant targeting.
2. Attention to Relationships: Both solutions transform fleeting attention into lasting relationships, solving marketing’s persistent challenge of maintaining connections in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
3. Martech as Profit Centre: Through NeoN’s attention monetization and Progency’s performance-based model, marketing technology finally shifts from expense line to profits driver—the holy grail that CMOs have sought for decades.

What makes this approach uniquely powerful is its AI-native architecture. Unlike traditional marketing approaches retrofitted with AI capabilities, both NeoN and Progency were conceived from the ground up around artificial intelligence, enabling continuous learning, autonomous execution, and predictive engagement.

The Path Forward

For brands struggling with rising acquisition costs and diminishing returns from traditional marketing approaches, these twin moonshots offer a clear path forward:

1. Segment your customer base using the BRTN framework (Best, Rest, Test, Next) to identify where your greatest opportunities lie.
2. Implement NeoN to monetize your Best customers’ attention while efficiently reacquiring your dormant Test customers.
3. Deploy Progency to maximize value from your Rest customers, preventing them from sliding into dormancy while increasing their lifetime value.
4. Redirect resources from wasteful reacquisition spending toward deepening relationships with your Best customers and acquiring genuinely new customers.
5. Measure success not by impressions or clicks but by incremental revenue, customer lifetime value, and reduced acquisition costs.

The brands that embrace these innovations will gain tremendous competitive advantages: lower marketing costs, higher customer retention, new revenue streams, and ultimately, sustainable profitable growth. Meanwhile, those clinging to traditional acquisition-focused approaches will find themselves increasingly trapped in the AdWaste cycle, paying ever-higher prices to reach customers they should already own.

The choice is clear. The future of marketing isn’t about finding better ways to buy attention—it’s about building better systems to earn it, keep it, and turn it into lasting, profitable relationships. NeoN and Progency aren’t just innovations; they’re transformations—true marketing moonshots poised to eliminate AdWaste and usher in a new era of marketing prosperity.