The AI Standing Between You and Your Subscribers — with Chad S. White

Your email can pass every authentication check, land in the inbox, and still never get seen the way you wrote it.

Chad S. White has written nearly 4,000 articles on email marketing. He's the author of Email Marketing Rules and GVP of CRM Strategy at Zeta Global. And he says we've entered a new age of deliverability — one where inbox providers rewrite your subject lines, summarize your content, and rank your emails before a single subscriber opens them.

For publishers who mail daily and monetize the send itself, that's not a feature update. That's existential.

We dig into where the standard deliverability playbook still holds for high-frequency senders — and where it breaks completely.

In this episode:

• ▪Why the 2024–2026 wave is the biggest structural shift email has ever had
• What Apple Intelligence and Gemini are actually rewriting — and the "game of telephone" between you and your subscriber
• The new reputation loop: getting penalized for engagement outcomes the AI shaped, not you
• How to write subject lines and structure emails so the AI summarizes you accurately
• Whether opens are finally dead as a metric — and what France's regulators just decided about open tracking
• The Gmail Newsletters tab rumor, the Promotions tab evidence, and why "more opens = more clicks" is magical thinking
• Where standard frequency guidance actively hurts daily senders
• Why your most marginal subscribers can't be allowed to price your best subscribers out of the inbox
• Sponsored sends in an AI-summarized inbox: why image-only ads are now invisible
• Five years out: when your audience is half humans, half machines reading on their behalf

CONNECT WITH CHAD

📕 Email Marketing Rules: https://www.emailmarketingrules.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadswhite

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In this video, EXPLAIN.

Follow Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismiquel/ 

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Transcript

Meet Chad S. White

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The point of the engagement is to create influence.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

The biggest impact that's gonna happen is the actual AI learning for what's actually gonna inbox, just what's gonna happen with that learning.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

To me, the scary part. This moment is actually more disruptive than all of that.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

You gotta just write them very simple so they can't mess up what the heck you're trying to say in it. It can't be too complicated, too witty, or whatever, because it could confuse them.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

I think the inbox writers are still figuring things out. I think there's absolutely going to be a strategic advantage for somebody to like not have any AI.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

If you're a multi-day sender, high frequency, you should never send an email to the same people more than once.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Promo emails are very well written. They need to monetize the inbox. I get that, but now you're being transparent about what that content is.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Chad, glad to have you on here. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me on, Chris. Appreciate it. So we're gonna dive in quite a bit on the deliverability side, uh, what Chad's seeing. He's got obviously tons of years of experience, uh, more than I do, I would say. So we're gonna dig into a lot of things that have been happening, especially in the recent years. Uh so with that being said, you've written nearly 4,000 articles on email. You have the book. This latest wave from like 2024 to 2026, uh, with all the new changes, the Gmail Yahoo rules, Microsoft kind of adopting those their new requirements, uh, Apple Tabs, AI, uh, the AI world, and all the summaries that are happening now. I guess everything you've covered in the past, is

The biggest structural shift email has ever had?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

this the biggest structural shift you're seeing in email?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

I think it is. And that's I think a double-edged sword, right? It's I think pretty amazing to see inbox writers investing so much in inboxes. I think that is a very positive sign. That is not to say that all the things they're doing, I think, are positive for marketers. I think, I think we all know that that's that's not true. But there certainly are some things that I think are pretty positive. I think the the Yahoo uh requirements on net are very positive. Microsoft's you know, sort of half signing on is positive. The stuff around AI summaries, which I know we'll talk more about later, I think considerably less positive. Um, but certainly like the amount of change in these past years is definitely the most change we've ever had to grapple with. And I think, you know, and that's saying something because I think that exceeds the level of change that happened in the wake of the iPhone being introduced in 2007. That set off massive waves of redesigning uh emails, tons of talk about, hey, what's that, you know, what's that interaction flow look like? Where does it go? And everyone debating about uh how hey, it looks like people don't want to convert on on smartphones. And it turned out it was just because the experience was just so lousy. They were wrong on that one, they were wrong on that because the experience was just garbage, right? The email experience was garbage, the the mobile web experience was garbage, and like so that's why people you know went to desktops, but they was people were completely misunderstanding the signs. And we were talking about mobile-friendly design for oh my gosh, like from 2007, like the Fury kicked off pretty hard and fast. We were talking about it pretty strong until 2013, and I think it wasn't formally like really put to bed, and I think until like I think 2015 is when Google said, Hey, if your website is not mobile friendly, we're gonna be like penalizing you. And I think that was the final thing that got everybody, all the laggards to get up to speed. So, I mean, that was a long, long time, and that was a huge C change. But I think this moment is actually more disruptive than all of that.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

The one, the one thing I I will say on that is I mean, it's been like, okay, design mobile first for everything, you know, for the last, you know, whatever, five, six years, seven years, however it's been. But I keep looking on the data and I'm still seeing a big percentage of of desktop users 30% or so on on main places. So I don't want people to forget about that experience. Everyone's always like mobile first, but don't forget, totally like push your desktop aside because you're definitely getting a lot of traffic from there as well. That's need to be user-friendly, needs a totally different experience than than mobile. So absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

It's both. You need both of them. And I think it's also really critical. We sort of, I think we lose this sometimes in the math, in the data, is that we'll look at what's happening among our subscribers and we'll say, like, oh, you know, on this campaign, we saw this engagement in these channels, and we're like, okay, like that's our split. And that's that's not real, right? Because people, people float between channels. Uh, we see the same thing uh with like dark mode optimization. Like we'll look at this particular campaign and we can tell, like, oh, roughly this amount opened in dark mode. Um, and we'll be like, huh, okay. So it's it's only this big, but no, it's it's bigger than that because there are some people that switch between light and dark depending on what's going on in their environment. And so the numbers are actually wider, like it's bigger than that, and it's the same thing. Uh, only other thing I would add about mobile friendliness is that I'm still a little bit sad that you know 2007 was when the iPhone came along. There's still brands that are not getting mobile friendly correct. Uh, and part of that I think is because they're adopting responsive design and they're washing their hands and they're walking away. And that's a huge mistake because I see brands routinely using responsive design, but their font size is way too small. They're like a 10-point font in there, but it's not stacking. It's stacking, but it's it's completely unreadable, like so small, and links way too close together. So let's not like tick the responsive design box and think we're done. No, readability is really important. You know, the experience around links and not having them too close together. So you're fat fingering the wrong link. Like, there's no patience for that, right? You think you're clicking one thing and something else pops up, that interaction is probably done. People are just gonna move on. So, yeah, that's the that's the thing that I think is really kind of amazing about like the mobile-friendly journey, is that I still see brands, big brands, that are whiffing it because they're not paying attention to font size and link density.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

And then and and then touching on the AI uh aspect of it, um, you know, everyone's worried, and I'll talk about it later, but everyone's worried about the the summaries and the rewriting of subject lines, pre-headers. Like, why am I even writing stuff? They're just gonna change it. But where I mean, the biggest impact I'm gonna I think it's gonna happen is the actual AI learning for what's actually gonna inbox. They already do it now, you know. They're with all their algorithms, it's like you can get it in your spam, I'll get it in my inbox, he'll get it in the promo folder. There, it's so dynamic now based on domain reputation, even down to the subscriber level. Just what's gonna happen with that learning and stuff is is to me the scary part more than summarizing and and and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

I think it's the it's the mixture of all those things.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Well, the mixtures, yeah. Double whammy's not not great, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

No, the the summary stuff is what actually worries me the most at the moment. Um, but but you're right, it's it's a mix of all these things interacting with each other that I don't think the inbox figures have really figured out, honestly, completely.

Gmail/Yahoo sender rules: who actually got hurt

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Cool. Let's uh touch on uh sender requirement stuff. So it's been two years since the the big book sender requirement change, Gmail Yahoo adopted, and now Microsoft is is jumping on board. Who actually got hurt from this shakeup? Was it the spammers or is it actually legitimate high-volume publishers who just you know didn't have their ducks in a row, a little bit sloppy, uh especially on the authentication part, uh, that really hurt them.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Yeah, I think in general, this is actually a really good thing. You know, historically, deliverability was a black box, right? And you know, I know quite a few deliverability consultants, and it's like it's the dark arts, right? Like they are like reading the tea leaves, and for legitimate reasons, the Moxfighters don't want to tell us too much because when they tell us too much, then the spammers gain them. Um, and so it's really been just incredibly back black box um like my entire 20 plus years in this space. And so it was really good to see them say, hey, look, you need to fully authenticate and have a DMARC, you know, record published. You need to keep your spam complaints below, you know, this threshold. I think it was like you know, below 0.01 and definitely below 0.03. Um, that's really great. They're just being explicit about it. I didn't have that before. So I like that uh for a lot of the brands. Like I historically have worked with a lot of like very large enterprises, you know, think like very large retailers and airlines and things like that. And these requirements were almost a non-event for a lot of those folks. They were already at already had DMARC records, already at P equals reject, which is not even where we're at yet with those requirements. Um, they already had list unsubscribe headers. Uh, maybe some of them weren't um weren't the web links, they were like the email links. So it's just like a small change. And really, for the most part, uh inbox uh ESPs, uh email service providers were handling the list unsubscribe stuff that generally was at the ESP level. Um and for the most part, like those settings for spam complaint rates were very reasonable uh in a in a two-day unsubscribe process in this day and age, incredibly reasonable. I think people look back at CanSPam and they're like, wow, like you're going for like Canspam says 10 business days, and now you're saying two days, but Can Spam was passed in in 2003. That was like a hundred thousand years ago in the in like tech years. And so, like nobody even then, the 10 days was really to accommodate for brands that had like highly distributed, think like franchisees and branches and like insurance branches and things like that, where they're like sharing unsubscribes like in batches overnight, you know, and it was like kind of cascading through the system. Like that's what that 10 days was for. Like two days in this age, totally fine. That's not gonna break anybody's back. So, again, I thought those were all really positive. And so, and really I feel like they're trying to get ahead of what AI is going to do to spam. I feel like that was like a big driver of these requirements. Um, so that's how I kind of read it in that context is that they were they were actually trying to be proactive. Um, they kind of see where things are headed. I think already we're seeing a lot of AI-driven spam, and they were trying to get ahead of that. So I nothing but applause for that particular move. Now, that said, did it hurt some senders? Absolutely. It tended to really hurt uh senders who are on shared IP addresses. A lot of uh those ESPs that specialized in shared IP addresses and like smaller senders, they definitely struggled to figure out exactly what they were supposed to do. And like there was a lot of uncertainty. And I think all that's kind of settled out. But for those folks or smaller spenders, uh smaller senders and for ESPs catering to them, I think it was like a good rough year uh for those folks. And that's unfortunate because it's you know, obviously not like their fault at all, but it was definitely rough for them.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

You've said inbox routers are now standing between the brand and the subscriber before the open. Can you spell out what that means mechanically? You know,

What the AI is rewriting before anyone opens

SPEAKER_00 12:19

what exactly is Apple Intelligence or Gemini rewriting, compressing, or reprioritizing?

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Yeah, so there are like sort of two different things happening in that sort of AI summary space. And they're and they're recognized that they're very different animals. So on the one side, you have the AI summaries that are happening that are driven by inbox providers. So Gmail and Yahoo Mail replacing uh preview text with summaries. In the case of Yahoo Mail, sometimes replacing subject lines and preview text with AI summaries pre-open, and then post-open, uh Gmail doing um deal cards that they're automatically applying to emails. Um uh Yahoo Mail in the primary tab. They have little uh, I forget what they call their AI summaries that are very much like Apple intelligence summaries. So that's like that's largely happening with no consumer choice, right? And certainly no marketer choice, right? I think by and large, we would love for all that to go away because it's deeply problematic for for marketers, uh, because as you point out, like we're being disintermediated. Like they're getting in between us, they're reinterpreting, we're playing this weird, weird game of telephone where we're saying something very clearly and the inbox fighters are repeating it sometimes accurately, most of the time accurately, but sometimes very inaccurately. And it's like, why are we playing a game telephone here? That's like you're not adding value. Um, so why are we doing this? It was a really interesting uh story that I was at I was at Litmus Live, I think it was this last year, and they had a panel of a lot of these uh inbox providers, and they were talking about AI summaries, and there was this really interesting moment when like two of them on the panel were like, oh, PTA emails, indecipherable, like crazy email, like really hard to understand what's going on. That's why we have AI summaries is to like fix that problem, like pointing at PTA emails.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

PTA, real PTA meeting.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

And like, okay, I get it. Like, I have I have three sons, I've gotten a lot of PTA emails, and it's true, they tend to be like sort of long and rambling and kind of all over the place. And I was like, but I'm like hard pressed to see how that justifies all of this activity, especially when most of these AI summaries are not being applied to PTA emails, they're being applied to the promo tab, right? To commercial emails, which you know, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that PTA emails not not written by a team of highly trained people uh in the email marketing space, unlike commercial emails written by a team of high of highly you know trained people who are great at communicating. I I think that promo emails nowadays are very well written. And subject lines are really clear, preview text is really clear, like I think we've got it all buttoned up, and that wasn't always the case. But I think by and large, like you know, A minus, at least, like we are doing so well. And to go in and like kind of tear all that up, but like that's where that's where AI summaries are really having the biggest impact is on the emails that arguably have like the most considerate, like most amount of time invested in them. So it's a it's a bit odd for sure. Now that said, there has been some encouraging uh motion there. So for instance, uh Yahoo Mail, they used to have deal summaries. After you open the email at the top of the email, it would push your email content down. You have these deal summaries. And as of like a couple of months ago, they've largely transitioned those uh deal summary spaces into just ad space. And now there's just ads. And I think that's great because before it was like this very odd mix of like some stuff that was pulled from the email, some stuff pulled from other emails in your inbox, and then ads. And like you never knew what the heck you were clicking on. And so I feel like let's just they just turn it into ad space, like they need to monetize the inbox. I get that, that's fine, but now you're being transparent about what that content is, whereas before it felt like a little bit, you know, I don't know, maybe deceitful is a strong word, but like it wasn't clear for sure. All right, so so that's the one kind of AI summary that's all driven by inbox fires. The other one is like you mentioned like Gemini. There's definitely a growing number of people who are using Gemini and other LLMs to summarize their inbox. This is a consumer making the choice of like, hey, tell me what emails arrived overnight, you know, or the last time I checked my inbox, and like just give me a summary, and then I'll decide you know what I need to go and like look at in more detail. In my mind, that's very different because that's a consumer making that choice. And we tend to see much more moderated behaviors when we see consumers like controlling those choices versus just like by default, everybody has to use something. Um, so that's that's one of the problems I have with these the AI summaries that the inbox writers are kind of forcing on people is that you can't turn those off. The consumer can't turn it off, brands can't turn it off. And in both cases, when it's wrong, consumers neither market or marketers, they don't have any recourse.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Right. I tried I tried integrating one of those and I had it on for like two days and I turned it off. It was just driving me insane. Like it was like trying to like you know bucket everything in certain folders and this and that, and I was just like, I I can't I can't live like this anymore.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Yeah, but that's but it's good for people to have choices. So I I I tend to have the view that that consumers make very good choices, and when you take choices away from them, it's bad. And you give them choices, then it's good.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Right, but that's the that that that stem right there is actually the the good thing is that and I had this conversation, I think uh my last podcast with Dan Oshinsky. We were talking about AI from the inbox and stuff, and and he was saying, like, you know, the email inbox providers, they don't even know what the email is gonna look like a year from now, two years from now, three like they're introducing stuff all the time, they're testing it. How are people using it? What's the user experience? And they chop more things than they keep on on the platform. So you're not you know, like like you said, they had the the summaries up there for the and now it's just the ads, like they'll continue to do things like that.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Yeah, I just don't yeah, I do think we're in a period of flux. I don't think people should get too excited to think like, oh, it's always gonna be this way or or or worse, right? Right? Like, I don't think that's how people should think. I think that I think the inbox writers are still figuring things out, and I think over time it's

How to influence your own AI summary

SPEAKER_01 19:21

gonna change. I think there's absolutely going to be a strategic advantage for somebody to like not have any AI, right? That like there's absolutely a growing backlash among consumers, and some consumers are gonna say, hey, you keep forcing this on me. I don't want it, therefore I'm gonna switch, you know, or I'm gonna do something else. Um, but you also ask, like, okay, how, you know, how is AI, you know, like interpreting content, like, you know, so I read in uh reading into that question is like essentially how can we influence AI summaries? And there are some things we can do there as well. Um, obviously having a good, clear subject line is great, but in terms like the biggest thing you can do is HTML text. HTML text in the email is really powerful. You gotta have that. Alt text is not routinely ingested. Sometimes it is. If you starve it of HTML text, sometimes it'll it'll kind of pluck out some of the alt text. But in general, HTML text is the way to do it. Uh, I've seen research indicating that hierarchy is is also important. So stuff that is higher up in the email uh gets greater priority. Uh with some of our uh clients, uh, we will have you know invisible, like white on white, uh like pre-header text that provides a bit of a summary. We find that that tends to be pretty successful and sort of guiding the summary in the right direction that we would like rather than you know rolling the dice. Because we certainly see AI summaries pulling stuff from the legalese at the bottom of emails. Like got legalese, all those disclaimers have gotten really become really dangerous copy.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Like because you'll see a lot out of control, especially in the finance space. They have like freaking a thousand-word essay at the bottom with the disclaimers.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

It's like yeah, the and I understand why that's there and why you gotta have it, but that is introducing quite a bit of risk uh in terms of what an AI summary is going to say or what a deal card is going to say. Because we've seen you know, deal cards and Gmail like pull out like percentages out of like disclaimers and stuff, and how like oh employees like their discount is capped at X, like and then X shows up in the deal card, which of course is not what you want to show up there.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Right. This this next uh topic is is it's what keeps me up at night, what keeps a lot of uh my clients and colleagues up at night. Uh we'll just call it the unfair uh engagement loop. So AI is summarizing your email. And you're saying, like, sometimes it could be bad, sometimes it's okay. But in general, like if it keeps on going and you're getting all these AI summaries and they're rewriting things, and it affects your open arrays, it affects your click rates, it affects you know what's happening within your emails, then theoretically it's gonna affect your your reputation because you're not seeing enough engagement with the subscribers that you have, and then you're gonna get penalties for that, and then all of a sudden you're not delivering as well, and but then the summaries, or like there's this whole loop of like, I mean, how are you gonna be able to know how to deliver if engagement, which is always the primary, you know, both positive and negative signals was always a primary thing that we looked at to judge our deliverability. Well, what's gonna happen there? How can we even figure this out? Or is there uh not gonna be an inbox anymore?

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Yeah, no, um that that scenario is something I worry about as well. So traditionally, there were a number, there have been a number of factors that influence sender reputation. Uh, and most of them were were attached to the sender itself. So, but so just to quickly list them. So the first one was infrastructure, and that's really the main one that's controlled by your ESP. So, like your choice of ESP definitely can affect your sender reputation, you know, how emails are sent off, how they're throttled, you know, to the the volumes that inbox providers want to see, right? They don't want to see like a gazillion emails go out and like hit their servers all at one time. They want to see a particular rate, they want to see your IP and your domains warmed up appropriately. So the infrastructure there is important, uh, volume is important, the content of your email is important, although today it's mostly like code-based uh issues and link reputation. That's big. Uh complaints, IP reputation, engagement, uh domain reputation. Those have been like the traditional seven for a long time, and all of those are your choice, right? Your behaviors, what you're doing, how your subscribers are responding, your choice of ESP, those are all within your

Penalized for the inbox's decisions: the new reputation loop

SPEAKER_01 24:08

control. And now, inbox AI, as you pointed out, for the very first time, inbox providers are measuring their own performance. If their AI summaries of your content are good, are accurate, that's that helps you. And if they're bad, that hurts you. And and that's really like a mat I can't over-emphasize this is the first time inbox writers have ever measured themselves. They've measured the own their own performance, the performance of their AI systems when measuring Cinder reputation. And I think that's really, really huge because you're absolutely right that I could send an email, it could be a great email, and the AI summary could mess things up, get the details wrong, make it not appealing. I've seen all kinds of instances of this, including instances in Gmail where uh like retail brands send an email and Gmail says that the deal is expired when the deal has not expired. Like if I'm if I'm if I'm a subscriber and I see that it has an expired tag, you know, on the deal, like am I opening that email? I'm probably not. Like you just Gmail is like just torpedoed that entire send and things just roll along, right? Like there's no there's no recourse, there's there's nothing to be done. You just like your your campaign just got sabotaged. Um, not intentionally, but you know, the net net of it is that very few people are gonna open an email that has an incorrect expired tag on it. Um, but like that's what we're talking about, and that's again a hundred percent brand new. That is a very new challenge that we did not have to reckon with before.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

And that's tough. Do you think there there couldn't be some uh I mean there there's always regulation stuff they're trying to pass, um you know, especially when it comes to email privacy. Do you think there's a case of a policy kind of enforcing them to not be changing this stuff because it's not what the the sender wanted to give the subscriber? Like, is that so-called legal to just yeah?

SPEAKER_01 26:25

I don't think that there it's not I've talked to some lawyers and it's not clear that what's happening now is necessarily illegal in and of itself, but I do wonder like the the the area of the law that I am concerned about is about like it's like misleading, like you know, ad copy, like misleading uh copy. Um so like the I'm kind of surprised this hasn't already happened, to be honest, because we are so litigious in America. But like for instance, uh in deal cards, one of the things that Gmail really struggles with is BOGOs. So buy one, get one. And so I will frequently see brands that and I think maybe maybe they're maybe Gmail is onto this. So I think I've been seeing them less uh uh lately, but like it's very common for a brand to have like a buy one, get one, 50% off, and the deal card just says 50% off. That is a huge difference between buy one, get one, 50% off, and just 50% off. And I'm surprised that there hasn't been a consumer that has tried to take the retailer to task to say, hey, you know, your email says 50% off, give me that 50% off, and like sued them for that. And then in court, you know, of course, the retailer would say, like, nope, we didn't say 50% off, we said BOGO 50% off. It's actually Gmail that said it was 50% off, and that was inaccurate. But like Gmail isn't a party to that lawsuit, so then that spawns a separate lawsuit. But the honest truth that everyone has told me is that nobody wants to sue Google. Like, nobody wants to like flush five years of their life down the toilet for very uncertain goals at the end of it. And that's sort of the problem with all these, is that all these inbox providers are also just massive tech companies with you know fleets of lawyers. Nobody wants to take them on. But I do like I do wonder about the legality like of that space, about how you know, hey, that deal, you know, is not being accurately portrayed.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

That I yeah, I think that they have to change, like they shouldn't be trying to extrapolate deal cards out of content. Like if they want to do it, just have the metadata forced to be included in the email and they'll pull that. If they don't have it, don't show a damn card.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Yeah, no, it I mean, that was how this all started. It started as a an add-on, right? So brands were encouraged to add right deal annotations to their emails, and the feedback loops like weren't good. So brands could not see if like these were like it was extra coding effort, and they couldn't see if it was actually making a difference. So they stopped doing it. And you know, like at one point, I think it peaked at like five, maybe five percent adoption, and then it went to essentially to zero, and that's not what Google wanted, so then Google started using automatic extraction to apply it to emails that it seemed to think was appropriate, and so and it has like a mixed track record of of getting that right. Often, yeah, most oftentimes it gets it right, but sometimes it gets it very wrong.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Well, maybe hopefully now with AI and everyone create using it to help be more efficient with their emails and stuff, everyone can just use it for creating their own cards on the fly, putting in the right scam or whatever's needed.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

Yeah, we certainly have encouraged brands to do that more often. Like if you have a deal that can be easily represented in a deal card, because deal cards don't handle all kinds of deals well. But if you are sending like a you know, a straight up 25% off sale kind of thing, like code it, like you know, part of what we're struggling with is is accuracy. And so if that's a step you can take that will make that deal card more likely to be accurate, you should do that. Now, the frustrating thing is that even if you do that, it's a little bit of a dice roll whether or not Gmail is gonna honor that. And that's super frustrating, right? When you, as a brand, take the time to write that additional code into your email to have Google just ignore it and then like automatically extract its own content. That's super frustrating, but that happens.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

I mean, I I I would say that there's got to be a liability on that one. I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

And certainly I I think if that ever did go to court, that would be harder to to defend. Like we even included the correct content, but no, it just got ignored. Yeah, again, I think it kind of goes back to you know, nobody wants to sue Google, no one wants to sue Microsoft, no one wants to sue Yahoo. Like these are really big companies, and certainly in the case of of Google, I don't think anybody's just as big.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

Well, I don't think people want to sue Amazon either.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Anyway, Amazon can sue Google. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, but they're messing with their their deal card or anything that they have going on. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Yeah, I don't even know that the I don't think the big guys generally want to fight each other either. Again, I'm I'm hopeful that this that we won't get to that that point. I you know, again, I'm hopeful, like I'm really encouraged by what Yahoo Mail has done, right? Where they were doing these deal summaries, the experience was, I think, not good for consumers, and they evolved that space into simply an ad space, which is totally cool. I don't have any problems with that. You know, the content is clear, it's clear that it's ads, it's clear what happens when you click on them, you know, and then the consumer can decide, you know, am I interested in in that ad or am I not? Or am I just gonna scroll down and engage with the email? That's fine. So I'm hoping that some of this stuff will self-select away because I mean, I think everyone is is realizing that like, you know, AI is not cheap, it's not free. And so, like, they're also like increasing their overhead to supply this. And I think at a certain point they're going to wrestle with, okay, is this additive? Is this better? Is it creating a better experience for consumers? At what cost is it creating a better experience? Is this giving us a competitive advantage, or is it just ticking people off? I don't think we've like, I think Yahoo clearly like reached that that threshold. And I think that you know, the Gmail may not be far behind them and having, you know, yeah, kind of rationalizing their use.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

Yeah, because of that actual uh fact, there is why I think that now, especially with the full adoption of the list unsubscribe uh and the header and everything, that they're gonna just start auto-unsubscribing people from people's lists that aren't engaging, aren't activating, or whatever, just so they stop getting all these emails that they don't even need to process, they don't need to do stuff in to save on infrastructure costs. They have the technical setups all there. Well, they'd be like, oh, this person hasn't opened an email in freaking a year, and a lot of the senders don't manage your lists very well. So let's just hey this guy unsubscribe him for people that have like full inboxes. Like this guy's not using his email, he hasn't logged into his email in freaking three months. Unsubscribe him.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

Well, I mean, I think we already have essentially a process for that. Yeah, it's called the spam folder. So, like to have messages go in there and eventually just get blocked. So I would be surprised if inbox writers were to take that step to like automatically unlike to actually unsubscribe someone versus just you know routing those emails to spam and then eventually blocking them, right? Like, I don't think they need to that they already have a process for handling that stuff. So that would be alarming to see because unsubscribes come from people.

SPEAKER_00 33:54

Sort of the emails that we send people the right copy and the right text and the right link.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Yeah, no, that would well that would I would consider that to be quite an escalation of where we are now. That would be uh yeah, definitely worrisome.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

I think you touched on this a little bit ago, but um, you know, writing the pre-header text was always a craft, like how we're gonna support whatever our subject lines are doing. Subject lines are obviously always a thing as well. Uh, if the machines are rewriting both, what is there for us to optimize? Or how should we optimize? Is it like you gotta just write them very simple so they can't mess up what the heck you're trying to say and it can't be too complicated, too too witty or whatever, because it could confuse them.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Yes. No, I do think that that's where we're at. So before I got into marketing, I was a journalist. And, you know, I remember when SEO really came on the scene, it had the effect of taking all of our very clever and engaging, you know, titles for stories, and all of a sudden we were rewriting those really creative titles into very boring,

Email's SEO moment

SPEAKER_01 34:58

straightforward titles because we were now optimizing for search engines. And I think that's kind of where we're at now with email is the creative subject lines, like the really clever ones. I think this is hasten their demise. Clarity, clarity, clarity. That's the name of the game. And it's both good for helping uh inform AI summaries. Definitely, subject lines are ingested, you know, uh pre-header text that shows up as preview text that gets ingested. So these are very important bits of copy that have very like high hierarchy, very high priority in AI summaries, those are really important to get right. Also, if an AI summary whiffs on understanding your email, you want your subscriber to at a glance be able to like, maybe I didn't understand that, and then look at the subject line and be able to know, hey, what's the truth? Right. So, like I've gotten I've gotten emails that say my package is now going to be delivered on Tuesday. And the AI summary says it's gonna be delivered on Monday, and so like it's off by a day. But the subject line says right there that it's gonna be delivered on Tuesday. Like that is the voice of the brand of the sender, like that becomes the truth. And I'm not saying that's not confusing, but you definitely, you know, the subject line is and in the preview tax is your opportunity to say what is most critical, like and to guide the AI summary. So like it's those two points.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

Got it. I've always said, I mean, everyone, not just me, but you know, opens have basically been a dead single for a long time. Uh with MPP,

Are opens finally dead?

SPEAKER_00 36:41

pre-fi uh fetching, security scans, bot opens. Is is this AI layer now gonna just kill it for good and our clicks next?

SPEAKER_01 36:50

Yeah, so I I don't really share that view that um that emails are that opens are dead. Um, you know, I feel like all of these changes have made it so that we've kind of pushed email opens into the category that they've always should have been in, which is that they're they're health metrics. They don't really tell you the performance of things uh for most brands. I know in publishing it's a little bit different, it's sort of a KPI, but for most brands, what we've seen is opens being used much more appropriately as a health metric, and and that's good. I don't know if if everybody here in the US is aware of what's going on in France, but the privacy, the privacy organization there has just, you know, eight years after uh GDPR decided that GDPR actually applies to open tracking as well. So as of as of July, mid-July, uh a rule went into effect where you have to ask for consent for different kinds of open pixel tracking data usage. So there's not just like, hey, can I collect you know opens to use them for whatever I want? You actually have to ask for specific use cases, uh, which nobody's gonna do. This is really, there's a really a really, really high bar. Um, but even even there, the privacy organization there, C Nil, or or I think it's just called Neil, uh, actually uh has recognized that open tracking is important for inactivity management, so for managing deliverability. And so there's a carve out where brands can save the last open. So they can't keep a history without an opt-in, but they can keep a record of the last time an email was opened from you as a way of being able to manage in activity to understand, hey, is the subscriber engaging with these emails, you know, um, so that I can either stop sending them emails or send them at a lower cadence or do something different. Um, and so there is this sort of fundamental understanding that that is one of the core uses of open. So that was great to see Neil recognize that because that was not actually in their initial draft of this this new rule. So they kind of after consultating with uh with marketers, they added that in, which is fantastic. But I think for most brands, like that's one of the most valuable uses of opens. And certainly the other thing with opens is like auto opens. A lot of brands now get auto-opens, and that's not engagement, but it's an amazing inbox placement signal. And I think that's what Apple wanted to give us, but that's what they did. Uh if you're getting an auto-open, it means that email is landing in the inbox, it's not landing in spam. And so when that signal goes away, it means you're landing in spam for that particular user. That's an incredibly valuable signal. So there are absolutely uses for opens now, but I do think that in general, everything seems to be pushing uh engagement measurement. You know, it's like it's moving from the campaign level up to the customer level. And at the same time, it's spreading out from the email channel across all channels. So you need like a much more holistic uh view of your subscribers, like as customers. Um, and that's kind of always been the case. Like 10 years ago, uh, if you had a subscriber who you could tell was a very happy customer, right? You saw engagement, you saw conversions, you saw all this activity around them, but you didn't really see much email activity or any email activity. Like I would have told you 10 years ago to keep that subscriber, keep emailing them because our visibility into email engagement is not great. It wasn't great 10 years ago, it's certainly more questionable now. Um, and so that advice I think is just become more vital. Like if you are if you are seeing at the customer level a very healthy amount of engagement, you know, if you're a publisher and you're seeing, you know, uh engagement in your app, if you're seeing web visits, but you're not really seeing a lot of email visits, it could be because they're getting that email and they're seeing, you know, the the subject line, or maybe they're seeing, you know, a summary and they're like, ah, all right, I'm gonna go check out like their website today. And so like maybe they're not reading the email, but it's driving them to your website or to your app for content. And that's

The Gmail Newsletters tab (and the Promotions tab evidence)

SPEAKER_01 41:36

the name of the game, right? Is engagement and influence.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Got it. Saw that the Atlantic CEO warned this spring that a Gmail newsletter tab uh could be coming out, separating out for different publishers the way promotions did for retailers. Uh obviously it doesn't exist right now, uh, but Gmail does have the new AI inbox, which you can have on or off, uh, which filters out whatever it decides is unimportant. And I think that came out in January or something. Is that basically the newsletters tab by another name? Um, what does the promotions tab history tell us about what could happen with this newsletter tab if it does come to fruition for all those publishers, media brands that are out there?

SPEAKER_01 42:17

Yeah, I I think that marketers love to demonize tabs, and I don't know that the evidence really backs up um these acquisitions, these accusations. So tabs obviously not new. 2013 uh Gmail introduced tabs, and so they've been around a long time. Consumers are really used to them, they they know how they work, and it's been interesting because in recent years we've seen a lot of mistabbing by Gmail. So we've seen, for instance, retailers all of a sudden not in the promotions tab anymore, they're in the primary tab. And what we tend to see happen is that uh opens go up quite a bit, but clicks don't budge. And really what that tells us is that people are like, what the heck is this doing here? And like they'll look at it and they'll be like, Oh, all right. But like there's this idea that if I could only get more opens, I would get more clicks. And that is just that is not borne out, like that is just not true. If you can trick people into opening your email, then they're magically gonna be more interested in your email content. That that just magical thinking is not how the inbox works, and that's why I think in some on some level, the fact that we're being forced uh into having more descriptive subject lines is a very good thing. That way you're not, you know, you're attracting the right people to open that email. Because like the the funnel, you can't optimize the funnel in its individual layers because it's all the same person, right? So you want your subject line to help subscribers self select into. Funnel, right? Because you want them to not just open it but to click, right? And ultimately convert. And to do that, you need to have alignment all the way down. So if someone opens, like almost the last thing you want to happen is to have someone open and go, oh, that's not what I thought this email was about, and then go away. Because that's going to hurt your chances the next time around. Right. You really want them to read that subject line, open it, and say, Yep, that's the what's that's what I thought this email was about. Great. And then click through and like hit a landing page was like, yep, yep, that's also what I thought was going to happen next. Like you want that all to be connected. And so this uh this magical thinking of like, oh, if I could just be extra clever, extra entertaining, or extra vague, that will just make people really curious and they'll open it and they'll go, like, oh man, you really got my attention. And all right, and now I'll buy your thing or I'll engage or whatever. Like, that's that's not how it works.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

I think it was like a couple months ago, or uh maybe a few months ago, the accidental experiment happened where like Gmail was just pushing everything in the inbox for like a 24-hour period or 48-hour period. Not what it was, and like it's exactly what you said. Like, no more clicks, no more conversions, open rates spiked up a little bit, but only thing that that that really was affected is unsubscribe rates went up.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

Yes, yeah, that tends to be like you get more opens and you get more unsubscribes. Probably not what what you want to happen. Yeah, so yeah, again, there's there's it's not like a ton of data, but we have like these instances, especially with Gmail in recent years, where they've you know they've had some issues with their tabbing algorithm. And so we've been able to kind of peek and see like what happens if we were suddenly more in the primary tab. And it's not good. I think what it shows is that, you know, first of all, in Gmail, like anybody can move anything out of the promo tab into the primary tab and have it show up there all the time. Like they can they can do that. Um, so if they want that, they can do that. Um, but I think what it shows is that people are very used to tabs, it's not some mystical black hole. Sometimes we talk about the promo tab as being like another spam folder, which is like the farthest thing from the truth. Right. Uh like people are very comfortable with that. And I think in general, it's it's very positive. Anything that makes the inbox a more positive, controlled experience for our subscribers is a good thing. So I don't get terribly alarmed with the introduction of tabs. I want to say that Yahoo Mail actually had a newsletter tab at one point. I'm not sure if they have it anymore. I'm pretty sure that didn't like, you know, eradicate uh newsletters or do something horrible to them. So I don't get too excited about that. Two other things I would point out is that yes, uh, you know, Apple's just introduced tabs. It's worth pointing out that half of people roughly have turned off Gmail tabs.

SPEAKER_00 46:54

Like they just decided I don't like I don't use them.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Yeah, they're like, I don't like this. I don't like tabs. I want everything, I want the monolithic inbox. And again, roughly half of Gmail users have just turned it off and they go back to the monolith. I think the exact same thing is gonna happen in in Apple Mail over time. And I think the exact same thing will happen with Swork by relevance versus you know swarp by recency. The same thing will happen there is that some people will like that and some people won't. Do I think we need to bring the social media algorithm to the inbox? I don't think we need that. Um, I think people can make good decisions and for themselves, but some people will like it and some people won't. And so I think it'll all these things that we think have like a really dramatic impact. I I think some of them don't. But again, the AI summaries where people don't have a choice, that's that's the part that gets me the most alarmed. But I feel like when people have the choice, a lot of them opt out, and then you know, the people who have it like it works for them and say love you.

SPEAKER_00 47:59

Cool. I have a few more questions. Uh it's getting close to the end of the hour. I don't know if you have a hard stop. Nope. Um, okay, cool. So most deliverability bytes out there assumes people are mailing like once or twice a week. A lot of it goes to B2B, e-comm, things like that. My audience mails

Where the playbook breaks for daily senders

SPEAKER_00 48:17

daily, sometimes twice daily, sometimes more than twice daily. Uh, and natural send as a publisher, uh media brand is the product. Where do the standard guidance actually hurt a daily sender?

SPEAKER_01 48:28

Yeah, so I'm not sure I love the language. Like the guidance is certainly not designed to hurt anybody. Right. Uh the guidance is a direct reflection of what inbox providers allow senders to do. So, like, that's that's the heart of the guidance. Uh, over a lot of my career, I've worked with a lot of retailers and again, a lot of like other like B2C brands that are sending once a day or twice a day or three times a day in some cases. So, definitely I've worked with some some high frequency uh senders, and it's absolutely true that they have sort of a higher bar um because someone, if you're a brand who's sending once a week and someone goes inactive and they stop opening your emails over the course of a month, if you're sending once a week, they've just un they have not opened the last four emails. That's not nearly so dramatic as oh, someone stopped opening your emails for a month, and now that's 30 emails that have gone unopened. Like that is going to much more dramatically affect your engagement rates. Um, and you know, as I mentioned earlier, engagement is definitely one of those factors that impacts uh sender reputations. It's it's a pretty sizable one nowadays. Uh, brands don't want to, I mean, I'm sorry, inbox fighters don't just want to see that their users are tolerating your emails. They want to see that they're engaging. But like, I don't think that those engagement bars are are really unreasonable. What's in most cases what happens with these high volume like retailers that I've worked with is that when you start to see uh a long period of disengagement, where you're not seeing any activity, the wise thing to do is to put them into like a re-engagement uh segment where you're then sending them emails like at a much lower cadence. So if you were sending every day, now you're sending like twice a week or or maybe once a week until you see engagement again, and then you throttle back up. Right. Um, that's the kind of thing that I would also recommend for media companies. And it's obviously a little bit different because there are expectations, but you know, what are you gonna do? You have to protect your sender reputation for all of those subscribers that you have who are actively engaged, and that's always been the trade-off is all right, yes, I absolutely want to protect or try to, you know, keep people on the list, you know, that are disengaging because you know, you know, some of them are going to re-engage over time and be you know, and those are going to be good customers, right? But you can't allow pursuit of that to threaten all those subscribers who are actively engaged with your emails and expect to get your emails. You can't allow one to jeop, you know, that the the fringe, essentially, like the you know, the hopeful, you know, 20% that you have to jeopardize the 80% that's driving your business. And that's that's always been the calculus. And so I would just remind folks that that's what the math is, unfortunately. Um, you never ever want your most marginal customers to jeopardize your best customer and the types of engagement and experiences you're building for them. Right. That's that's just the math. And so, you know, you should be constantly monitoring your deliverability and monitoring your engagement to be able to understand for your brand, for your subscribers in the inboxes that are most important to you, where are those lines? Where do you start to get in trouble? That, all right, if I am having, you know, if I'm looking at inactivity at the three month mark, you know, and taking folks who are inactive for more than three months and putting them in a special segment where I'm emailing them a lot less, is that enough? Is that enough to to keep my deliverability, you know, really high? Or, you know, does it need to be, you know, does it need to be 10 weeks? You know, or am I doing fine? And maybe it could be at the four month or the six-month mark. You know, everybody should be constantly kind of you know doing that math and watching that. Um, and that's just the that's the reality of things. But I don't think that those thresholds at most inbox writers are unreasonable. That would not be my take.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

So I've I've always had the policy, and I and tell everyone that we work with that like if you're if you're a multi-day sender, uh high frequency, you should never send an email to the same same people more than once. It should always either get tighter, like you might have one that's like your looser segment with the bigger send, and then you're tightening up for the next one. So it kind of controls the frequency automatically. You're you're adding triggered sends into the cable where you're really getting more engaged people, more people who've engaged in the last week versus three days, and that's how I have them segment uh who they're sending to to send more frequently, because I'm I'm gonna feel like if you send three emails in one day to say you have a list of 200,000 people, you send 200,000 people, all three emails, and 150,000 of them

The triggered-campaign opportunity for publishers

SPEAKER_00 53:31

don't know if all three emails. I mean, you're just telling the inbox provider that you don't really care about these people, you're just sending them all these emails, they're not care about it, and it'll it'll take your reputation faster than tightening up across the way.

SPEAKER_01 53:42

Yeah, certainly. Um, yeah, no, one of the, you know, in the age of AI where it is becoming easier for brands to produce more emails, one of the things I would love to see more of is more segmented sends. I would love to see more brands replacing a broadcast sends with a segmented send or or spinning up more triggered campaigns that really leverage engagement. Um, in the retail space, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of like 15% of retail brands get the majority of their email engagement and revenue from triggered campaigns, which generally represent like 5% or less of their email volume. Like that's a great opportunity for brands. You know, so like that shows you what's possible when you are responding to interest in a very specific and targeted way, the right content. Um, and I think publishers, you know, have some similar opportunities that they could they could leverage. Certainly when you're talking about um like segmenting by like interest and stuff, that like that follow-on story or that related story.

SPEAKER_00 54:57

And and then going omni-channel uh with your engagement. So if you see them on the website, you know, on a certain page or you know, whatever, then might be a time to trigger them something, or if they're in in their app or they're in receiving a text, uh, an SMS message and they reacted with that one, okay. Well maybe you can follow it up there. So don't just think that the only engagement you're looking at is an email. You can use it to other channels to trigger things within email and the other channels themselves as well. A hundred percent. Absolutely. So I work with a lot of financial publishers uh and they monetize with sponsored sends and ads in the email.

Sponsored sends in an AI-summarized inbox

SPEAKER_00 55:32

How do you think or see AI summarizers treating commercial contents out editorial emails? And should publishers be restructuring how ads sit in the template?

SPEAKER_01 55:41

Yeah, to my knowledge, AI summaries do not differentiate between editorial content and commercial content. I don't I could be wrong, but as far as I know, there's there's no uh deference one way or the other given. Um I mentioned before that like hierarchy is definitely a consideration. It's not like everything, but um, but certainly content that's higher up in an email gets more priority. I think you do need to be a little bit careful here. Like if the goal is to try to get like advertising content into the summary, like that may not be actually the thing that you want. Like they that may not drive engagement with the email the way that maybe you think it would. Like maybe that would be good for the advertiser, but the but bad for the publisher more broadly. Um, so I think you have to be a little bit careful there. But as again, as far as I know, there's no differentiation between different kinds of content in an email.

SPEAKER_00 56:45

Right. I'll see, you know, I'll see um publishers will will kind of have a put their obviously native or commercial ad at the top of the page and then add, you know, content and articles underneath it. But then sometimes the subject line will be tied to the would be tied to the article. The native ad is that like you said, hierarchies all the way at the top. So kind of really pushing that one first, but then that's the whole almost tricking them into the open to see the the ad first and doesn't match whatever the the subject line was, versus just putting maybe the you know the subject line or headline of the offer up there so that you're not really confusing.

SPEAKER_01 57:23

Yeah, you do need to be a little bit careful, but again, the the hierarchy thing is important, but it's not like absolute. So it's not like uh oh, if I put this ad at the top, it's totally gonna get pulled into the AI summary. Um, especially if it's just a a graphical ad, then it's not at all, right? Because it's only HTML text that's really informing things. Again, even if you were to have all text on that ad, probably not gonna get pulled in, except for in some fringe cases. Um so again, if if all the ads are purely graphical, then they're kind of invisible to AI.

SPEAKER_00 57:57

All right, we're gonna put our prediction hats on here. Five years out. Is email still a direct channel? Are we all just negotiating with AI for attention?

Five years out: humans, machines, and influence

SPEAKER_01 58:08

Yeah, so uh I think that the future will have us sitting in between these two audiences for sure. Uh, I think that we'll be absolutely still communicating directly to some people, and in other cases, we will be communicating directly with machines that are working on behalf of some other people. Um, and I don't know that that's necessarily bad. Uh, one of the things that that we we haven't talked about that I think is really interesting is Google's personal intelligence. It's this new program that Google has launched that allows you to connect Gemini to your accounts for Google search, Google Photos, YouTube, and Gmail. And this information gets pulled into essentially like your Gemini profile. And when you ask it questions or ask it for recommendations, it then knows all that stuff about you. And I really think that, like, okay, Google search, that's definitely good history information, Google photos sort of indirectly, like it can sort of tell like where you've been. Um, and the same thing on on YouTube, it can tell what kinds of things you're interested in. But I think that the Gmail is like that's the hidden gold mine in all of this. Because think of all the things that are in your Gmail account, everything you've ever purchased online. There's a receipt in your Gmail inbox. I know there isn't mine. Everything I've ever bought online, and probably a good chunk of things I've I've purchased offline as well. If I have an e-receipt, all that stuff is in there. So that's like all the brands that you care about the most are in there. Anything that you uh are getting promotional emails about, right? Or probably, you know, the five to ten brands you care about most, right? That you're open to hearing about. Um, that's all in there. You know, emails to friends and family. So you can build like a social graph that's in there. Uh, loyalty program emails are in there. So probably uh loyalty account balances are in there, uh, any rewards you might have, like that kind of information is really critical. If like I'm trying to decide uh between like three products and I have like loyalty points uh in a program for one of those brands that helps me get that product for way less. Man, if I'm doing AI commerce, I have to know that. Or if I uh have a promotional email that is just for me, that's like a unique discount because of something I did or what have you. Oh my gosh, if I'm an AI commerce brand, I have to know that in order to be able to truly recommend the best value for the price, you know, in a particular product area. So that is a that's an example, I think, of a very powerful way in which brands would absolutely or should be absolutely very happy to have their emails ingested by personal intelligence so that Gemini can give their customers good recommendations, right? Like, why wouldn't you want that? That seems to me like a plus. That's a win. But it's not going to the person, right? The person is probably not reading all those emails, but it's constantly educating Gemini on your latest offers and again, like loyalty point balances and things like that. That seems really good. So, you know, I I think I mentioned it before. Like, we have to make sure that we focus on what we're really trying to achieve with marketing and advertising. And I think it's it's influence, right? Like, yes, we'd like to have engagement, but the point of the engagement is to create influence. And so I think we need to like kind of rethink a little bit, like, what are we trying to accomplish? And it's mostly influence in the end. I think the huge challenge is how do we measure that? And that I think will be a major, major challenge for brands over the next five to ten years, is to get a hold of that. You mentioned omnichannel. We don't do a very good job of understanding omnichannel engagement today. We absolutely have to get better at that, and we absolutely have to get better at understanding you know how AI is in the mix, you know, uh, especially when it comes to things like AI commerce, which is definitely going to grow in the years ahead. So don't forget about the travel emails on your flights, hotels.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:34

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:35

Yeah, I mean treasure trove.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:38

Treasure trove. Uh well, Chad, uh ton of insights there. Uh, I think the audience is gonna love it, appreciate it. The conversation is there, would you like to share where people can find you on LinkedIn or whatever? Anything you want to pitch or book?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:55

Yeah, so certainly everyone can find me uh on LinkedIn X and Mastodon at chat s white. You can also find me at uh email at marketingrules.com, and of course you can find everything about zeta global at zataglobal.com.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:09

Awesome. I missed you at the last conference. Maybe I'll catch you one coming up here soon. That'd be great. But appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on, and uh we'll talk soon. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Ad.