However, in the meantime, the new media strategy is AI-empowered creators as the face of the brand, with relatively few staff building out bundled product offerings. Email moves from the strategy to just another tool. The future is owning relationships with audiences—and serving as many of their media and software needs as possible.

In the runup to Covid, and certainly ever since, you could summarize the meta with one word: email. Email is the one distribution pipeline that isn’t owned by some mega-corporation. It gave publishers a direct method by which to communicate with users.