6 Questions With Luke Bussell of Allegiant Media: Newsletters Have Always Worked. Australia Just Couldn’t Prove It, Until Now.

Passendo: Allegiant Media works across a pretty wide range: influencer marketing, travel, multicultural audiences. What’s the common thread, and how did the company come about?

Luke Bussell: Chris Parker and I both came from long careers in traditional and digital media, running big teams, working inside large organizations. At some point, we decided we wanted to build something more nimble and agile. The gap we saw was straightforward: there’s a lot of brilliant technology coming out of Europe and the US that simply never makes it to Australia. Part of that is timing; if you’re trying to work with someone in Australia from the US East Coast, forget it. And a lot of people in Western Europe aren’t keen to get out of bed early enough either. What ends up happening is that companies try to service this market remotely, or they FIFO someone in from Singapore, and it just doesn’t land. Australia is a very parochial market. You have to have boots on the ground, show up in person, and build real relationships. Otherwise, people won’t work with you.

So our focus has always been on finding the best global technology and bringing it here properly. And the types of tech we’re drawn to tend to have one thing in common: they help brands connect with audiences that are otherwise hard to reach. Whether that’s multicultural communities, niche travel audiences, or, as it turns out, newsletter readers.

P: Speaking of overlooked audiences, how would you describe the state of newsletter advertising in Australia?

LB: Honestly, newsletters have been treated as an afterthought here for a long time. Publishers were giving them away as added value because they had no way to properly measure or manage them. And in agency land, if you can’t measure it and report on it, it effectively didn’t happen. So newsletters got left behind.

What’s changed is the broader environment. With AI impacting search and social platforms becoming increasingly unreliable for driving traffic, publishers are waking up to the fact that their newsletter base is the one audience they actually own. It’s opted-in, it’s loyal, and it’s theirs. There are brands that’ve been buying newsletter placements directly for years, not through their agencies, because they knew, anecdotally, it drove results. They’d put an ad in a newsletter and see bookings go up. They couldn’t prove the connection, but they knew it worked. The problem was always the measurement and the buying model. That’s what’s been missing.

P: That’s exactly the gap Passendo was built to close. How did you find us, and what convinced you Passendo and Allegiant Media were the right fit?

LB: We were introduced to Passendo about 18 months ago through First Party Capital, a European investment firm that took us through their portfolio and asked which technologies they thought would make sense for Australia. There are a lot of impressive companies in their portfolio, some of it honestly over my head, but when we got to Passendo, Chris and I both looked at each other and said: That’s it. That’s the one.

What made it obvious was how well it addressed a problem we already knew existed in this market. And the technology itself is genuinely impressive; it does something Google can’t do, and I don’t say that lightly. Google doesn’t get into newsletters. Passendo does, and does it well, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. We did our due diligence, got very positive feedback from publishers and clients, and went from there.

P: Your partnership with Passendo brings together your local market presence and our technology. What does that mean in practice for an Australian publisher?

LB: The core of what we’re doing is moving newsletter inventory into a buying model that works for the modern media buyer. Think about what a media buyer’s day looks like: they’re managing millions of impressions across multiple channels, with full accountability on every dollar. If you walk in and say, “sponsor the Tuesday sports newsletter, top and bottom banner, but I can’t tell you the reach or the performance metrics,” it’s gone. It doesn’t fit. So it gets deprioritized, or dropped entirely.

What Passendo allows us to do is make newsletter inventory accessible on standard digital terms: measurable, scalable, and reportable. And crucially, it does that without compromising the editorial integrity publishers care so much about. You only have to look at how protective editors are of their newsletters to understand how valuable that inventory is. They’ll let you do almost anything to their website, but touch their newsletter and they’re very particular, because it’s a genuine expression of their brand and their relationship with their readers. What we’re doing protects that while unlocking it commercially for advertisers. That’s the opportunity.

P: Getting real advertiser demand into newsletter inventory is often cited as one of the harder problems to solve. What’s your experience been so far?

LB: We’re being honest about where we are: it’s early days. We had our first look at the demand-side platform in March, and we’ve only been in the market talking to clients since the beginning of June. So we’re a few weeks in. We’ve got two publishers with inventory live in the exchange, four or five proposals out to advertisers, and we’re working toward our first test campaigns.

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation; you need publishers to attract clients, and proof of client results to attract more publishers. But we’ve got a clear path. We’re working with PubMatic as an SSP locally, and they’re keen to start pushing demand through to our publishers. We’re also in conversations with a major retail shopping center network about how to bring their newsletter inventory into their retail media offering. Retail media in Australia is growing at 25 to 30 percent a year, and there are big retailers here sitting on significant newsletter audiences that they aren’t doing anything with yet.

Once we have those first proof points, real numbers, fill rates moving, ROI demonstrated, the conversation changes completely. The sales cycle shrinks. We’ve seen that with every product we’ve brought to market. The first six months are about earning the evidence. After that, it moves faster.

P: You’ve described building what could be the first premium newsletter ad network in Australia. What does that actually look like, and how close are you?

LB: Stage one is Australia and New Zealand. There are probably six to eight significant publisher groups in this market, and we’d want five or six of them on board. We’re already in conversations with nine publishers, so the groundwork is there: it’s about getting them to make their inventory available as we build momentum.

The network really comes alive, though, when we bring in independent publishers alongside the majors. B2B titles, lifestyle publishers, niche verticals. We met with around twenty independent publishers at a conference last year, and newsletters were top of the agenda for all of them. The appetite is there.

In terms of shape, we’re building toward a network that has real breadth: regional news through ACM, women’s lifestyle through Are Media, retail media through shopping center networks. Those three pillars together give advertisers genuine reach across different audience types, all within a brand-safe, premium environment. The pitch to agencies is simple: this is opt-in, high-quality Australian inventory that you can buy on digital terms. And we’ve already had a head of investment at Group M say, “I can think of five clients who should be doing this.” That’s a strong signal. We just need to get into their buying cycle, and the evidence we’re building now is what gets us there.