Resetting ESP and Adtech Industries

Published April 15-24, 2023

Search Wars

OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, its partnership with Microsoft, and the subsequent integration of GPT into Bing has upended the Search industry, long monopolised by Google. Google has replied with Bard. At stake: $200 billion of ad revenue. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, put it (referencing Google) in an interview to The Verge after the Bing announcement, “Today was a day where we brought some more competition to search. Believe me, I’ve been at it for 20 years, and I’ve been waiting for it. But look, at the end of the day, they’re the 800-pound gorilla in this. That is what they are. And I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance.”

Jaspreet Bindra added context:

The First Search Wars started 14 years back, when Steve Ballmer and Microsoft launched the search engine Bing to take on Google. Google had annihilated other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite to become a virtual monopoly, through a combination of superior search results and a profit-spinning business model.

Much like the First World War, the Bing-Google search war was a grinding battle fought in the trenches of technology. Google emerged victorious, still controlling more than 90 per cent of the search market, besides overtaking Microsoft in revenues and profitability. Microsoft vowed to soldier on, and Bing still exists, though as a very poor second alternative. Therefore, the undisguised glee in Nadella’s tone when he declared the Second Search Wars.

… Search advertising is extremely profitable for Google, and Microsoft now wants to attack it squarely. Nadella said as much in an interview with Financial Times: “From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever…There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all.” It is this “asymmetric” competition which is enabling Microsoft’s jujutsu move. As Microsoft drives overall search margins down, it hits Google asymmetrically. That potentially impacts Googles investments in other businesses, including cloud, where it is locked in a ferocious battle with Microsoft for the number two position. Google has been subsidising its cloud growth with its search profits, and that tap could dry up. Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps making its money through its software and gaming businesses, offsetting its minuscule search losses. This is the ‘3D chess game’ that Microsoft is playing, a genius move in strategy.

The Economist wrote: “[N]othing lasts for ever, particularly in technology. Just ask IBM, which once ruled business computing, or Nokia, once the leader in mobile phones. Both were dethroned because they fumbled big technological transitions. Now tech firms are salivating over an innovation that might herald a similar shift—and a similar opportunity. Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) let users gather information via typed conversations. Leading the field is ChatGPT, made by OpenAI, a startup… As in the 1990s, when search engines first appeared, a hugely valuable prize—to become the front door to the internet—may once again be up for grabs.”

What is happening in Search has happened many times in the past – new technologies and innovations have upended incumbents, resetting industries. In this series, I will look back at some other examples and peer into the future and ask if that could happen to email service providers (ESPs) and in the adtech industry.

When Industries are Reset

In a 2015 post, Benedict Evans wrote: “Sometimes, an entire industry gets reset to zero, and all the entrenched advantages and parameters go away. The iPhone had that effect, and so did HMS Dreadnought… It was launched by the Royal Navy in 1906 and was the first modern battleship, such that all previous battleships are known retrospectively as ‘pre-dreadnought’. Amongst other innovations, it was the first to have turbine engines and the first to have a single large-calibre battery. Rather like the iPhone, it contained few things that were fundamentally new – most of the key features had been around for a while and considered elsewhere – but it was the first to put all of them together in one place in the right way, and, like the iPhone, this changed everything. Every other warship afloat was obsolete… This is rather what the iPhone did, to both the mobile business and the entire consumer technology industry. All the existing parameters and entrenched advantages went away and the whole market was reset to zero.”

I asked ChatGPT for an explanation on what “resetting the score” meant: “”Resetting the score” is a metaphor that is often used in the context of innovation to describe a situation where a new innovation or technological breakthrough disrupts an existing industry, causing a shift in the balance of power between incumbents and newcomers. The metaphor implies that the old “score” or established way of doing things is no longer valid, and that a new score or set of rules is needed to reflect the changed landscape.”

In another post in 2020, Benedict Evans wrote: “When Steve Wozniak created the original Apple I in 1975, IBM dominated the computing industry. It was nicknamed ‘Big Blue’, it was so far ahead of its competitors that people talked about ‘IBM and the seven dwarves’, and it had just come through yet another anti-trust case. IBM’s dominance, of course, was based on the mainframe, which was the central paradigm of the computing industry, and it had sealed its dominance just a decade earlier with the launch of the 360 system. However, over the next decade it became obvious that the flood of PCs that followed the Apple 1 were going to overtake the mainframe. All of the focus of innovation, investment and company creation moved to the PC. Indeed, PCs created the very idea that software could be a separate industry, and not just something that was bundled with your hardware. Microsoft, not IBM, dominated the PC ecosystem, and so Microsoft became the centre of the tech industry – it became the new sun in the solar system.” He added: “The competition [is] something that solves the same underlying user needs in very different ways, or creates new ones that matter more. The web didn’t bridge Microsoft’s moat – it went around, and made it irrelevant. Of course, this isn’t limited to tech – railway and ocean liner companies didn’t make the jump into airlines either. But those companies had a run of a century – IBM and Microsoft each only got 20 years.”

These two posts, the recent developments in search, the changes forced by the pandemic for many industries, and my own thinking about AdWaste (half of the $400 billion being spent on adtech – primarily Google and Meta – is being wasted) made me wonder if the idea of an “industry reset” could be applied to the work I (via Netcore) have been doing. But before I get to that, let’s look deeper into the reset of industries, a process first explained by Joseph Schumpeter.

Creative Destruction

What we have termed as the resetting of industries has been around for a long time – this was what created prosperity for billions of people and some nations in the past 250 years, starting with the Industrial Revolution. Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” in 1942. Investopedia explains: “Schumpeter characterized creative destruction as innovations in the manufacturing process that increase productivity, describing it as the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. Basically, the theory of creative destruction assumes that long-standing arrangements and assumptions must be destroyed to free up resources and energy to be deployed for innovation. To Schumpeter, economic development is the natural result of forces internal to the market and is created by the opportunity to seek profit.”

ChatGPT: “[It] is the process by which new innovations and technologies replace old ones, leading to the destruction of existing industries and business models. It refers to the phenomenon of how new and innovative ideas can disrupt and displace established ways of doing things. The idea behind creative destruction is that economic progress and growth are driven by the continuous cycle of innovation and obsolescence. When new technologies and ideas emerge, they often render existing products, industries, and ways of doing things obsolete. This can lead to the decline and eventual disappearance of established businesses and industries, but also creates opportunities for new businesses and industries to emerge… Creative destruction is a fundamental aspect of capitalism, where competition and innovation are the driving forces of economic growth. While it can be painful for those affected by the destruction of established industries, it is ultimately a necessary process for the economy to continue to grow and evolve.”

Examples abound. From ChatGPT:

The development of the automobile industry in the early 20th century disrupted traditional modes of transportation such as horse-drawn carriages and trains. This led to the creation of new industries such as car manufacturing, road construction, and gas stations.
The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century disrupted traditional modes of communication such as telegraph and mail. This led to the creation of new industries such as telephone manufacturing, infrastructure development, and phone book publishing.
The emergence of mass production techniques in the early 20th century disrupted traditional craft production methods, leading to the decline of artisanal trades such as shoemaking, furniture making, and tailoring. This also created new opportunities in manufacturing and assembly line production.
The development of radio and television broadcasting in the mid-20th century disrupted traditional forms of entertainment such as live theater and cinema. This led to the creation of new industries such as broadcast media, advertising, and program production.
The advent of digital photography has disrupted the traditional film photography industry, leading to the decline of companies like Kodak and the rise of digital camera and smartphone manufacturers.

China along with other East Asian countries disrupted manufacturing globally riding on the globalisation wave. Indian IT services companies did the same with their outsourced software development model. The pace of creative destruction and digital disruption has increased in the past few decades, as I wrote in “The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime”.

Digital Disruption

Disruption is an idea that has been much discussed. Paramount to disruption is the idea of the “innovator’s dilemma.” There are times when incumbents are able to fight back and retain their dominance, but more often than not, newcomers win and dominate – until they are disrupted. This is the cycle we have seen play out time and again. Until a few months ago, Internet search was a Google monopoly, and now there is talk of what GPT-powered Bing could do.

I asked ChatGPT to list out industries which have seen disruption in recent times, listing winners and losers:

Internet and World Wide Web:
- Incumbents: Traditional media companies, such as newspapers, magazines, and television networks.
- Winners: Online media companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Netflix.
Personal computing:
- Incumbents: Mainframe computer companies, such as IBM and DEC.
- Winners: Personal computer companies, such as Apple and Microsoft.
Mobile devices:
- Incumbents: Traditional phone manufacturers, such as Nokia and Motorola.
- Winners: Smartphone manufacturers, such as Apple and Samsung.

Besides these, the entertainment industry (music and streaming) has also seen a reset. ChatGPT: “The advent of digital music and online streaming “reset the score” by disrupting the traditional model of selling physical albums through record stores. This shift in technology and consumer behavior created new winners, such as online music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, and caused traditional incumbents, such as record labels, to lose their dominant position in the industry.” Amazon has done the same to traditional retailers. ChatGPT: “The growth of e-commerce and online marketplaces like Amazon has disrupted the traditional retail industry, with brick-and-mortar stores struggling to compete and some major retailers, such as Toys “R” Us and Sears, going bankrupt.”

Bloomberg Businessweek lists 85 of the most disruptive ideas in our history. In the top 5: the jet engine, microchips, green revolution, Wal-mart, TV.

I had discussed recent digital revolutions in an earlier series, and written: “Even as it has been an amazing ride in my 56 years lifetime, tomorrow’s world promises a lot more. As consumers, business owners and managers, researchers and entrepreneurs, we will see many new and exciting technologies in our lives, with the promise of many more revolutions in the years and decades to come.”

In 2004, an article in Harvard Business Review had this advice: “You can’t make intelligent investments within your organization unless you understand how your whole industry is changing. If the industry is in the midst of radical change, you’ll eventually have to dismantle old businesses. If the industry is experiencing incremental change, you’ll probably need to reinvest in your core. The need to understand change in your industry may seem obvious, but such knowledge is not always easy to come by. Companies misread clues and arrive at false conclusions all the time…To truly understand where your industry is headed, you have to shut out the noise from the popular business press and the pressure of immediate competitive threats to take a longer-term look at the context in which you do business.”

In the rest of this series, I will look at two related industries: email service providers (ESPs) and digital advertising (adtech, led by Google and Meta). I will argue that new innovations have the potential to reset the score in both industries.

ESPs

B2C Email – businesses sending email to their customers – has been around for a long time. Email Service Providers (ESPs) have been the enablers. From a previous essay: “B2C emailing has become a $7-8 billion annual business. For brands seeking ways to bring customers back to their digital properties (website or app), email offers the best RoI among all channels. The power of push messaging gives control to the brand to initiate a communication, rather than waiting for a consumer pull…The enterprise email service providers (ESPs) have also morphed through the years. The first-gen ESPs were bought a decade or so ago by the marketing cloud providers: SalesForce bought ExactTarget, Adobe bought Neolane, Oracle bought Responsys, IBM bought Silverpop. The large second-gen ESPs were all bought by CPaaS players in the past few years: Sendgrid was bought by Twilio, Sparkpost was bought by Message Bird, and Mailgun (Pathwire) was bought by Sinch. In one of the largest deals in the email space, Intuit (known for its accounting and financial software prowess) bought Mailchimp for $12 billion. There has also been some consolidation: CM group and Cheetah Digital merged.”

But, “there hasn’t been much innovation on the email front in the past 15 or so years – other than plain vanilla text emails becoming HTML-ised. There has been a lot of action around email – in its creation, sending (send time optimisation, triggers), personalisation and segmentation (as opposed to mass broadcast), automation (journeys), and AI-driven utilities like predictive segments, subject-line optimisation, and churn prediction. But the email itself – it has mostly remained the same.”

I then explained the two mistakes of ESPs: “the first mistake ESPs made is that they did not position email as the “profit channel”… The second mistake ESPs made was to not innovate inside the email…These two mistakes have been expensive for the email industry in terms of lost revenues, profits and influence. Email vendors do not have a seat at the table where marketing strategy decisions get made; they are not “in the room where it happens” (to borrow a phrase from a song in the “Hamilton” play). But email’s durability means the game is not yet over.”

In the same series, I discussed five email innovations: AMP, Atomic Rewards, Email Footer, Email Ads, and Micronbox. “Taken together, these five innovations usher in an upgrade to Email. They make email cool (again). The 1-way broadcast channel becomes a 2-way hotline with interactive, dynamic and real-time content. The promise of gamification and asset appreciation will also drive greater engagement, which should lead to better brand-customer relationships. The better the retention, the lesser will be the need for new acquisition to plug the gap – thus reducing AdWaste and helping improve profitability at brands.” A sixth one could be free B2C email, funded by ads.

So, how can the status quo in the ESP business be challenged?

Challenger ESP

The challenger ESP (CESP) will need to combine five innovations to reset the industry: AMP, Atomic Rewards, AI, Progency and Prime. Two additional unlocks will be needed: a consumer email service (QuizMails) and a clutter-free inbox (Micronbox). All of these ideas have been discussed in previous essays. The key is how to aggregate and integrate them to disrupt the ESP business. Let’s begin by reviewing these ideas.

AMP brings interactivity to emails, thus eliminating the need for clickthroughs to landing pages. Think of AMP as adding the software “spice” into an email making it come alive. This enables the creation of apps inside email, making it the third owned property for marketers (after their website and app). The advantage of AMP emails is that marketers have control on the push – and therefore don’t have to wait for consumers to come to the site or open the app. For more, see AMP’s Magic: Coming Soon to Your Email Inbox.

Atomic Rewards brings gamification to emails in the form of micro-incentives for marketer-desired actions. Think of this as a pan-brand loyalty program which helps with non-transaction behaviour: attention and data in the upstream, and ratings, reviews and referrals in the downstream. While AMP can drive more in-mail actions, Atomic Rewards can ensure more opens. For more, see Atomic Rewards: The Solution to Attention Recession and Loyalty 2.0: How Brands can Tokenise Customer Attention and Data.

AI can help simplify content creation and message delivery, thus easing a big pain point for marketers, helping with the right person, right message, right time. For more, see Email and AI: A Perfect Match.

Progency is a product-led agency. It combines creative and coding skills, to help marketers fast-track projects that they have limited bandwidth for. Creating AMP emails is one such task. Traditional agencies do not have software skills, while internal teams may not have the creative talent. This is where Progency comes in. An additional hallmark is that the Progency can bring in skin in the game by pricing its services based on outcomes linked to KPIs. For more, read Progency for Martech: The Missing Link.

Prime is a B2B loyalty program, which rewards brands for their AMP-related spends with Atomic Rewards (in the form of Mu) which they can use to change consumer behaviour in the inbox. This becomes a double benefit for marketers: AMP spending gets them Mu, which they can use as Atomic Rewards to get more opens. Taken together, AMP and Atomic Rewards with Mu as the common thread can drive 10-50X more actions. For more, read Rethinking B2B Loyalty Programs.

QuizMails is a consumer service to seed interest in AMP and Atomic Rewards. It creates a must-see interactive email (an “Em” consumable in 30 seconds or less). A timer challenges the brain, while mu provides the reward. It also provides a showcase for the Challenger ESP to demonstrate innovative AMP uses cases, as well as a “Mu Shop” for redemption. For more, see Quizzing in Email: An Innovation in the Inbox.

Micronbox is a new clutter-free, spam-free consumer inbox which aggregates all the AMP and Mu mails together. While a virtual Micronbox can be created initially with the Gmail and Yahoo Mail apps (which are two email providers who support AMP), over time a cleaner inbox may be beneficial for consumers. For more, see Micronbox: A New Inbox.

By combining all these innovations, we can create a gamechanger to reset the ESP industry.

All-in-Email

The Challenger ESP (CESP) has all the ingredients to create the next generation of Email – let’s call it All-in-Email. Every action imagined by the marketer can be completed inside the email. From search to shop, pay to play, form fills to feedback, browse to bookings, chat to cart management, surveys to spin-the-wheel – everything can now be done inside emails. For brands, this is the solution to AdWaste by solving the twin problems of attention recession and data poverty, and creating a 2-way hotline with consumers. While AMP itself can be offered by any ESP, the CESP can create a monopoly and moat with the other elements: Atomic Rewards, AI, Progency, Prime, QuizMails and Micronbox. Let’s take this step-by-step.

The unlock to this new world comes with QuizMails. It ensures that consumers get experience interactive and incentivised emails. By making it as both a “brain break” and a “brain booster”, the CESP can also ensure that the inbox is opened multiple times daily. This brings attention back to the email inbox from other inboxes like SMS, push notifications and WhatsApp. Once the inbox is opened more, the probability of consumers interacting with more brand emails goes up – especially if there is Mu in the Subject serving as an attractor. And once these emails are opened, there is the next big surprise: no old-style image heavy emails with the clickthrough to a landing page as the only action, but instead an app-like experience inside the email. A search bar can be a standard in all emails; abandoned cart emails can now have payment options inside the email; transaction confirmation mails can have NPS ratings with a single click. The email footer can have AMPlets to collect preferences (“zero-party data”) and gamelets to redeem Mu with 6-second games. Thus the email becomes an exciting communication from the brand, bringing in surprises and fun, besides saving time. Over time, the same experience can be provided with the second consumer unlock – the Micronbox, which could ensure AMP support for even B2B emails.

The CESP will need to go beyond just email sending and delivery, and become an active partner in the reinvention of the email channel. Using Generative AI can ease the marketer’s friction. Progency can help with creating the AMP emails with utilities like an AMP Editor and AMPifier which converts HTML emails to AMP emails in an instant; Prime can bring in the Mu to reward the brand’s users and also help expand dominance to other messaging channels. This entire ecosystem of solutions will be hard for incumbents to match. Network effects for Mu should kick in for both brands and consumers.

All-in-Email thus can become the way the incumbents in the ESP business can be disrupted and the entire value equation can be reset. Just as the digital advertising industry moved from CPM to CPC (impressions to clicks), the email industry also needs to move from cost per email to KPI-based pricing. The prize is a dominant share of the $7-8 billion ESP business, which as we shall see, can be made much bigger by focusing on AdWaste.

Disrupting Adtech

The biggest waste in digital advertising is happening because of wrong acquisition and reacquisition. About half of the newly acquired customers had no reason to be acquired – either they scooted right away or they should have been reactivated because they were already customers once. This is the $200B AdWaste that I have written about multiple times. [See Martech 2.0 and Web3: Solving Advertising’s 50% Problem and Solving the $200 Billion AdWaste Problem.] And where is waste, there is wealth – for entrepreneurs who can solve the problem. Adtech is an industry that is waiting to be reset. Bing’s possible success with GPT in search will only shift the ad dollars; the need of the hour is for the industry to shrink. The $200 billion is coming from the profits of brands and higher prices that consumers end up paying for products and services. This is the reset the global adtech industry needs. How can this happen?

The starting point has to be to first understand why this additional spending is happening and what is the intervention that is needed to create the wedge for innovations to make an impact. I explained the problem in my recent ProfitXL essay: “Marketers spend money acquiring customers, and then hope to monetise them on their properties (website and app). This is easier said than done because unless marketers are able to imprint their brand on the consumers subconscious, they face a continuous battle to bring them back for transactions. This is done through a process called engagement: messages pushed to our already flooded inboxes, along with nudges and recommendations when consumers clickthrough. The problem is that as consumers we are numb to all these exhortations and ignore the incoming offers. This “attention recession” has serious consequences for marketers – because if we don’t open and act on their emails, SMSes, and push notifications, they have little choice but to retarget us on the Badtech auction platforms spending even more money to reactivate their relationship with us.”

This is where the All-in-Email solution comes in. By eliminating the (at times, interminable) wait for consumers, marketers can push the conversation, conversion and commerce funnels close to the user. The magic of interactivity and incentives in the inbox is something consumers have not experienced before. The convenience and excitement will help increase engagement by magnitudes. And as existing customers engage and buy more, brands will need to spend less on the adtech platforms acquiring new ones. All-in-Email (with WhatsApp in some countries) can “convert the unidirectional push channels into two-way rich interactive hotlines, thus finally enabling marketers to bridge the chasm between new customer acquisition and attracting traffic to their properties. Hotlines are thus the gateways to building deep and lasting relationships, a win-win for both brands and customers.”

Waste Reallocation

In my ProfitXL essay which discussed how brands can supersize profits, I had outlined the SHUVAM framework.

I had written: “Done right, the SHUVAM framework unlocks the key to supersizing profits – and helps marketers reclaim control of their destiny which they have mortgaged to Badtech for many years. It will help them drive not just growth, but profitable growth. Happy customers will make that exponential and forever, thus laying the foundation for early adopters to build a firewall of profits in the category. By ensuring a “profits monopoly”, a profipoly can build longevity for itself. While not permanent (because innovators will always work to chip away), it can give incumbents a significant advantage against startups. In the tech world, Microsoft’s Windows and Office, Google’s Search, Apple’s high-margin iPhones all created profipolies which have helped them invest in new businesses. Modern marketers can do the same in hypercompetitive businesses. And the starting point needs to shift from LossXL to ProfitXL.”

The key to disrupting Adtech lies in reallocating the AdWaste. This $200 billion waste (growing at 25-30% annually) is split three ways.

The first is rewarding existing customers for their attention, data, ratings, reviews and referrals. As I have said in the past, brands should “pay existing customers, not Big Adtech.” Because if they don’t reward their existing customers, they will end up spending 10-100X more on new customers. So far, the challenge brands had was that it was hard to build deep relationships with their existing customers. The All-in-Email suite of innovations solve this problem by converting inert 1-way messages into enthralling 2-way hotlines.

The second is investing in better martech solutions and creating a new business unit for Best customers. Marketers need a unified stack rather than point solutions so they can get a single view of their customer across all channels. They need a better search, personalisation and recommendations solution. They need to audit their customer base, calculate lifetime value right, and decode the Best Customer Genome. They need to create differentiated experiences based on exclusivity, ease and access for their Best customers. Finally, they need to ensure that the new acquisition they actually do learns from data about their Best customers. Marketers need to invest in the right technologies to make all of this happen.

Once these investments in Atomic Rewards and a next-gen martech stack have been done, what’s left flows to the brand P&L. This is the third carveout of AdWaste. This is money brands can invest in R&D and new business acquisitions, thus building a foundation for exponential forever profitable growth and eventually, a profipoly. The All-in-Email intervention (as seen from the brand side) thus becomes the starting point to end AdWaste and supersize profits.

The Urgency of Now

This is a unique moment in time: even as Generative AI ushers in a new revolution akin to that of the Internet and smartphone, there is a looming slowdown likely globally because of the excess money printing during the pandemic years which caused high inflation and is now resulting in interest rate increases to ensure a cooling. The easy/free money of the past couple years is over. With layoffs starting to happen as companies seek to conserve cash in expectation of a consumption slowdown, the time is right to reset the score in the email and adtech industries.

In this series, I have written about how two industries can be reset – ESPs and adtech. They are connected. It is the All-in-Email solution with its enabling of hotlines which opens up the possibility of redirecting AdWaste and thus resetting the adtech industry. The wider impact will be big: the power of Big Adtech diminishes as their revenues reduce, brands will have more to invest rather than being trapped in a customer acquisition cost (CAC) arms race for new customers, and consumers will be compensated for their attention and data. Everyone wins except Big Adtech. So, while we rejoice at the Second Search Wars, we must be careful not to replace one overlord for another; what brands and consumers need is freedom from BigAdtech.

We need to keep the big picture in mind. These three slides from Benedict Evans tell the story: global internet users continue to rise, digital advertising in all its formats has become the most important way to reach consumers, and India and China account for half of global Internet traffic.

Jim Barksdale said, “There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.” Google and Meta bundled free services in search and social to monetise attention for marketers seeking growth. It is now time to unbundle and divest. All-in-Email’s innovations (AMP, Atomic Rewards, AI, Progency, Prime, QuizMails, and Microbox) and ProfitXL’s SHUVAM (Story, Hotlines, Unistack, Velvet Rope Marketing, Acquisition, Metrics) framework offer marketers the building blocks to regain control of their P&L. The starting point for this is the need to reset the adtech industry by flipping focus from new customers to existing customers.

The reset of adtech can begin in India and then spread globally. Google and Meta’s combined revenues in India were at $5 billion for the year ending March 2022 – that is a potential AdWaste pool of $2.5 billion waiting to be tapped. This combined with the global ESP market of $7-8 billion means there is a $10 billion near-term global opportunity available for disruption with the All-in-Email and ProfitXL solutions. If the US slowdown turns into recession, the AdWaste pool will expand sharply to an additional $100-150 billion and the global pool to over $200 billion. This is the opportunity for entrepreneurs and startups to target. Email began the digital era of brand-customer relationships, and it is only fitting that it plays a starring role in its reinvention.

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