👋 Today, we're pulling apart a $45k sponsorship that started life as a single cold email.

"Cold email is dead" jokes aside, let's dive in! 🚀

Ad Sales & Media Spend

🥑 Passionfroot raises $15M to scale B2B creator ads

To me, this is a crazy bullish signal. Smart financial institutions are betting on creator economy ad spend going up and to the right. And I agree.

📈 beehiiv doubles its ad sales team as monetisation heats up 

✍️ Substack launches a program pairing brands with authors

Newsletters

🐝 beehiiv makes its biggest expansion yet, beyond newsletters

🤑 How this newsletter went from tiny to multi-million $ business

📉 Publishers rebuild newsletters as AI guts referral traffic

🎯 Which publishers actually get acquired, like The Hustle

Creators

🤝 YouTube launches a Brand Deal Desk for creator sponsorships

💸 The H1 2026 creator boom: where the money's flowing

🎙️ What brands want before sponsoring a podcast creator

Media

📉 Media firms cut more jobs, blaming a brutal ad market

🏌️ Comcast spinoff Versant buys Full Swing for $530M

✂️ Bauer Media slashes publishing headcount in company-wide restructure

ICYMI

🕵🏻‍♂️ How we generate 500+ leads per month

Also, if you want me to send you a spreadsheet of the top 200 B2B SaaS brands that are sponsoring newsletters now, just comment on my most recent LinkedIn post.

How One Cold Email Became a $45k Deal

📖 "Cold email is dead"

I hear it every week. Usually from someone who sent 12 emails, got no replies, and declared the channel deceased.

Reality tells a different story. I like to go with what our data tells us rather than what other people say online.

So I'm sharing some of that data with you today, from first cold email to executed contract, roughly a two-month timeline.

Here's the whole thing, start to finish, names metaphorically & literally blurred out.

(Cold email has got harder, but it's definitely not dead.)

🎯 The first email

The target was an AI SaaS targeting engineers/technical leaders, that crucialy was already sponsoring a similar newsletter.

The email was four lines:

• A specific observation ("noticed you're running with [dev newsletter], great copy")

• Who we are, via names they'd recognise ("we keep [Brand], [Brand] and [Brand] in front of (their target audience)")

• One line (the host, the audience)

• A soft ask ("want me to send the media kit over?")

Then a P.S. that did more work than the entire body: "[A comparable brand] has sponsored 147 podcasts." Translation: companies like you go big here. You're the odd one out if you don't.

No deck. No links. One question-based CTA.

🔑 The founder replied. Then handed us the buyer.

The cold email landed with the founder. He replied the same day with "Adding [Name] from the team."

That is the move you're praying for. You don't need the founder to buy. You need them to forward you to whoever owns the budget. Ours turned out to be a Director of Developer Marketing, i.e. someone who lives in podcast and newsletter placements all day.

We sent the media kit and more info about how we work and why this is a great fit and followed up a few times.

Then... silence. For nearly a month.

🔧 The follow-up (and the upsell nobody asks for)

We'd noted down to not give up on follow-ups. This is a great-fit brand ,with a good early signal (founders' introduction).

So a month later, a simple and arguably suboptimal email we sent got a response saying: "Would love to book slots for (timeline)."

When a prospect says yes, don't just take the yes imeediately and run with it. We’d mentioned a package previously at $45k, then offered two more at $10k each ($65k for five). We also dropped one honest line of scarcity: "We're already 50%+ booked for Q1, so worth locking now."

They took the three. But you miss 100% of the upsells you never pitch.

📈 Close, creative, campaign

IO out & signed within a couple of days. Then the frustratingly often underresourced part, the creative.

The pub didn't leave them staring at a blank page. We sent four prompts to the brand to encourage them to submit as much useful guidance as possible (What's the billboard version? Best features? Social proof? The CTA?) plus an example ad from another sponsor.

The brand came back with a tight 120-word ad, a sharp hook, two big proof stats, a promo code, and a free-month offer. Only minor edits were made, but that's not always the case.

🎯 The actual lesson

It's tempting to say ‘cold email works’, which is true, but not the crux of this story.

Cold email didn't close the $45k deal. It opened the door. Everything after the door is where the work is done. The key elements to a successful deal like this are:

• Sales trigger - reaching out to companies spending now

• Great fit - be strict with your ICP

• Personas - focus on decision makers, dependent on company size

• Great cold emails - copy and technical deliverability side

• Genuinely understand the brand and what they're trying to achieve, and convey that in all your communications

• Consistent follow-ups (duh!)

• Smooth processes when someone is on the hook

• Invest time and money into a prompt and effective creative process
  

Reminder, if you want me to send you a spreadsheet of the top 200 B2B SaaS brands that are sponsoring newsletters now. Just comment on my most recent LinkedIn post.

Sorry not sorry. Reach is super helpful for our business.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps new media companies do just that.