Recent Writings
The Moat in Progency and NeoN:
Today’s digital battlefield is one where attention is the scarcest commodity. From global brands to local news publishers, everyone struggles to penetrate the cacophony of digital noise and fragmented consumer attention. This crisis has created unprecedented power for intermediaries: search engines, social media platforms, and marketplaces have become the gatekeepers of attention, wielding “licence to print money” through advertising revenues and transaction commissions.
Consider the mathematics of modern marketing: brands spend billions acquiring attention through platforms that immediately redirect that attention elsewhere. The click-through penalty alone destroys 80-90% of potential conversions, whilst platform intermediaries capture the lion’s share of advertising revenue. Meanwhile, there’s an overlooked channel that touches billions daily—the email inbox. It’s ubiquitous, owned, and free. Yet this channel remains criminally underutilised, cluttered with promotional messages designed solely to extract clicks rather than deliver value.
What if the humble email inbox could become the antidote to attention recession? NeoMails represent a radical reinvention of email for the era of engagement, not interruption. These are not your usual static newsletters or clickbait promotions. NeoMails are alive—dynamic, interactive, and habit-forming.
… As we enter the era of Agentic Web, where AI handles routine tasks and human attention becomes increasingly precious, NeoMails align perfectly with evolved consumer expectations. In this emerging landscape, the inbox becomes a sanctuary of signal amidst noise. NeoMails deliver content, commerce, and community—all in one place, fulfilling the uniquely human desires to learn, discover, reflect, and act. This is not just marketing—it’s meaning delivered.
10 Innovations to Transform Emails into Profit Engines:
Marketers are facing a mammoth problem reaching their own customers. Push-driven marketing messages, which are so critical to bringing customers back to their properties (website/app), are either not being delivered or not being acted upon – what I have previously called “attention recession.”.. The solution I propose to marketers is multi-layered:
- Focus on email because it offers the best combination of cost-effectiveness (fractions of a penny per send), universal reach (5+ billion global users), content versatility, and measurability.
- Become a daily habit through reliable hotlines by evolving beyond promotional offers to become a genuine utility delivering consistent value – creating “brain gain” experiences (as opposed to “brain rot”) that establish predictable connection patterns and transform occasional interactions into anticipated daily engagement.
- Monetise attention via NeoN – an authenticated advertising network that enables brands to transform email from cost centre to profit driver through precise targeting without platform intermediaries.
- Leverage AI agent orchestration to deliver hyper-personalisation at scale, making every communication feel individually crafted rather than mass-produced.
To rethink the email program, we need to look at innovations across the value chain:
- Gamifying opens: Mu and Mu Ledger
- Daily engagement: Microns and Magnets
- Greater interaction: AMP and AMPlets
- Monetisation: ActionAds and NeoN
- Multipliers: Progency and NeoMails
… NeoMails represents perhaps the most disruptive innovation in email marketing economics—the elimination of sending costs through a revolutionary business model. Traditional Email Service Providers (ESPs) charge brands for message volume, creating a cost structure that inherently limits frequency and reach. NeoMails inverts this model completely through the ZeroCPM approach: brands pay nothing for email sending, regardless of volume. Instead, revenue comes through ActionAd placements within the emails, with brands sharing a percentage of this monetisation.
… The future of marketing doesn’t lie in paying ever-increasing platform taxes to reach customers you already know—it lies in building owned channels that generate value for both brand and customer simultaneously. And there is no better channel to drive this revolution than the overlooked warhorse of digital marketing – email, reinvented for the attention economy.
