• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, November 9, 2017

Are your digital ads not getting through because of ad blockers -- the kind used by 198 million Internet viewers? Buy ads in emails.

And if you’re an email publisher in need of revenue, sell ads in your emails.

However unlikely this may sound, both of those solutions are offered by Jeff Kupietzky, CEO of PowerInbox, an email ad platform firm that connects advertisers and email publishers.

Take the Fatherly newsletter for dads. It has stories like “Can Dads Counteract the Downsides of Maternal Depression” and “I Drink Beer For the Sake of My Kids (Kinda).”

Toward the bottom of that issue, there’s an ad for New York Life: “Be good at life.” It says it is recommended by Powerinbox.

And an edition of Time’s InStyle Fashion carries an ad for Garmin watches. Like the ads mentioned above, it is appropriate for the audience.

Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it? First, let’s look at the advertiser perspective.

“Email is an up-and-coming channel, and an undiscovered source of where people should put their ad dollars,” Kupietzky says.

One benefit for advertisers is that email is out of the reach of ad blockers. “Ad blockers don’t block ads inside an email,” Kupietzky says. “Typically, there’s some java script or code that impacts how browsers render a page. If you put your ad in an email nothing can change.”

Even more importantly, such ads are going to “a population open to seeing content that would be interesting to them.” Kupietzky adds.

These opportunities should appeal to companies approaching Cyber Monday, Kupietzky continues.

Now let’s look at it from the publisher’s perspective.

Advertising isn’t a new idea for publications like Time: publishers have been trying for years to monetize their newsletters. But this brings new technology into it. A company like Powerinbox can roll the ads right in.  

Powerinbox does not only serve big publishers like Time -- it also brings in ad revenue for a number of email marketers and merchants, and provides insight into reader interest.

Unlike digital display advertising, email advertising is not based on programmatic buying. “There’s a manual review for every ad that goes into the system,” Kupietzky says. This ensures that publishers can refuse ads with content they don’t want, or insertions by competitors.

Payment is based strictly on performance — cost per click. There’s no circulation-based pricing.

Kupietzky concludes that “anything that harms ad deliverability is bad.” He believes he has a way around that.

Powerinbox is a five year-old company with headquarters in New York and a development arm in Israel.