Passendo, Europe’s leading platform for in-email advertising commercialising newsletter inventory, has established a new commercial partnership with US-based ad operations specialists OAO.

Since 2003 OAO has been offering ‘white glove’ ad management services for digital publishers and agencies from its four locations across the US.

CEO Andreas Jürgensen says the partnership began after OAO got in touch, looking for programmatic demand technology they could offer within OAO EAC, their proprietary newsletter ad technology.

“We thought joining forces with OAO was a great way to expand our reach in the US, leveraging OAO’s established clientele of large publishers, while quickly increasing the direct demand volume in our network.”

“Ad serving in email is quite different from the web. Before Passendo started in 2016, ads either had to be hard-coded or required an additional ad server for newsletters,” Andreas says.

“But our platform makes that easy, we have built an ad server that enables you to serve ads in email just like you do on the web. And with this capability, we can act as an SSP to companies like OAO, providing their programmatic demand while helping our direct clients with both direct demand and exchange features,” he says.

Craig Leshen, president of OAO says finding the right programmatic solution that could deliver ads in email and provide the ‘pipes’ for advertisers to easily purchase them was no small task.

“Newsletters have become a crucial part of publishers’ identity strategy, and a highly valuable way for them to increase revenue, through both direct and programmatic advertising sales,” Craig says.

“The targeted, first-party data-driven approach of email is a lucrative channel that more and more publishers are seeking to capitalise on, and the technology for that is now available in OAO EAC via Passendo.”

“Newsletter inventory can now be part of the total ad package we offer to our clients,” says Craig. “Our partnership with Passendo has smoothed the friction in the sales process, with a programmatic safety net that brings more revenue from their in-email advertising inventory. We are very excited about the revenue opportunity this creates for our clients.”