Weekly local discovery, city by city
Parade is a local discovery email read by people who asked to hear where to eat, shop and book near them. Subscribe and your business gets a set number of placements every month — photo, offer, tracked link — assembled and scheduled for you.
Marlow: what’s worth your time, Thursday
Three new things this week, one of which involves a queue. As ever, everything below is somewhere we’d actually go.
Wren & Rye · The Causeway
Two courses and a glass of something for £22, Tuesday through Thursday. The menu changes with whatever the kitchen got t…
Book a tableHair
New chair, introductory rate
20% off your first cut with Nadia through March
Independent shops
Late opening, first Thursday of the month
Wine, 10% off everything, until 9pm
Also this week
What you’re buying
Not “brand awareness”. A number of placements, a listing, and a report you can check against your own tills.
01
A set number every billing month, depending on your plan. Each one is a real position in the email that goes out on Thursday morning — the lead Spotlight slot, a dedicated card with your photo and offer, or a named mention in the roundup.
You can see exactly which slots exist and how many are left in each city before you pay.
02
A permanent page for your business in the Parade directory: photos, description, hours, map, socials and a tracked link. Paid listings sort above free ones in their category, and Spotlight sits at the top.
It stays live between placements and is indexed by search engines.
03
How many readers the editions you appeared in were sent to, how many opened them, and how many clicked through to you. Measured by us, on our platform, not estimated.
We’ll also tell you plainly what we can’t measure — see the limits below.
The formats
Every edition has one Spotlight, six featured cards and twelve roundup mentions. That inventory is fixed, which is why a city can sell out.
The lead slot at the top of the edition, with a written introduction from us rather than copy lifted from your website. One per edition, which is why it is on the Spotlight plan only.
Wren & Rye · Restaurants · The Causeway
Two courses and a glass of something for £22, Tuesday through Thursday. The menu changes with whatever the kitchen got that morning, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on how you feel about surprises.
Two courses and a glass, Tuesday to Thursday
How it works
After that the only thing that needs you is deciding what offer to run.
Pick the number of placements you want each month and pay by card. Monthly or annual — annual is two months cheaper. Your account is created the moment the payment clears.
A guided form: what you do, where you are, photos, your link, and the offer you want to run. Ten minutes on a phone. On Featured and Spotlight we draft the promotional copy from what you give us and send it to you to approve.
Submissions are checked against our editorial standards automatically. Most clear straight away. Anything unusual — a regulated claim, a broken link — goes to a person, and we tell you within 24 hours either way.
The obvious question
| Aspect | Running your own Meta ads | Parade |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Business Manager, a pixel, a payment method, creative, audience setup, a learning phase. | One form, once. We assemble and schedule the placements. |
| What it costs | An auction. Your cost per result rises when bigger advertisers move into your area. | £39–£199 a month, fixed. It doesn’t move because someone outbid you. |
| How people see you | An interruption in a feed. You’re competing with everything else scrolling past. | A recommendation inside a guide someone chose to subscribe to. |
| Reach | Effectively unlimited, if you keep paying for it. | Capped by our reader count in your city. We publish that number. |
| Targeting | Granular — interests, behaviours, lookalikes, retargeting. | One dimension: the city edition someone subscribed to. |
| Measurement | Detailed, and increasingly modelled rather than observed. | Sends, opens and clicks, counted directly. No conversion modelling. |
Pricing
Live availability for Marlow is shown below. Switch city on the pricing page.
Month to month. Cancel any time from your dashboard.
One placement a month, plus a proper directory entry.
Billed monthly, no contract
1 placement every month
No Listed slots left in Marlow this month.
Three placements a month, each with its own card and offer.
Billed monthly, no contract
3 placements every month
No Featured slots left in Marlow this month.
Five placements a month, one of them the lead story.
Billed monthly, no contract
5 placements every month
No Spotlight slots left in Marlow this month.
Reader listing — £0
A claimed entry in the directory. Free, forever. No placements, no card. Useful if you want to be findable before you spend anything. Claim a listing.
Founding rate
The first 40 paying businesses in each city keep the price they signed up at for 12 months, even when we raise prices as the readership grows.
If we don’t run your placements, you don’t pay for that month.
Every plan includes a set number of placements per billing month. If we publish fewer than you paid for — for any reason on our side — we refund that month in full, automatically. You can cancel from your dashboard at any time and your placements run to the end of the period you’ve already paid for.
Your dashboard
Every figure is counted by our own platform: how many people an edition was sent to, how many opened it, how many clicked through to you.
We don’t model conversions and we don’t report attributed revenue, because we can’t see your tills. What we can count, we count exactly.
Times shown
4,120
Opens
1,684
Clicks to you
213
Placements run
3 of 3
Clicks, last 12 weeks
First-party, counted by us
Before you buy
We would rather lose the sale than have you cancel in month two.
We guarantee placements — a specific number, in specific editions. What those placements produce depends on your offer, your photos and your prices. If we don’t run the placements you paid for, we refund that month.
We can tell you how many people were sent an edition, opened it, and clicked through to you. We can’t tell you who walked in. If that matters, put a code in your offer line — several customers do.
Every city page shows the current number of readers. If that number is too small to justify the price for you, don’t subscribe yet — join the waitlist and we’ll tell you when it grows.
Regulated claims, unverifiable superlatives and anything we can’t stand behind editorially get turned down. Our editorial standards are published in full, and you’re refunded if we reject your submission and you don’t want to change it.
Scheduling, sending, tracking, reporting and billing are. Editorial judgement isn’t. Some submissions are read by a person, and the Spotlight write-up is written by one.
Questions
A set number of placements in your city’s weekly edition each billing month — one on Listed, three on Featured, five on Spotlight — plus a permanent directory listing and a monthly performance report. The placements are positions in an email that actually sends; you can read past editions before you buy.
As many as are subscribed to that city’s edition, minus the ones who don’t open it. We publish the live subscriber count for every city on the pricing page and on each city page, and your monthly report shows the actual send and open numbers for the editions you appeared in.
By a published rule, not by who asks loudest. Each edition has one Spotlight, six featured cards and twelve roundup mentions. Slots are filled in that order, and within each tier the business who has waited longest goes first, with anyone behind on their contracted placements caught up first. The full rule is on the how it works page.
Then it sells out and we stop taking subscriptions there until we’ve grown the readership or a customer leaves. Overselling the inventory would make the product worthless for everyone already paying. You can join the waitlist for that city and we’ll email you when a slot opens.
On Listed, you write a short description and we publish it. On Featured and Spotlight we draft the headline and body from the details you give us, and send it to you to approve or edit before anything runs.
Yes, from your dashboard, as often as you like. Featured plans can have one offer live at a time and Spotlight can have three. Changes go through the same standards check as a new submission, which usually clears in minutes.
Two clicks in your billing settings. No phone call, no retention queue. Your placements run to the end of the period you’ve paid for and your listing drops back to a free directory entry. We’ll ask why you’re leaving, and you can ignore the question.
Yes — up to three months. Your listing stays live, your placements stop, and you’re not billed. It’s designed for seasonal businesses and anyone at capacity for a while.
Read a recent edition, check the reader count for your city, and see how many slots are left. If it stacks up, the whole thing takes about ten minutes to set up.
No setup fee. No contract. Cancel in two clicks from your dashboard.
The scheduler allocates your placements across the coming editions using a published rotation rule. Your listing goes live in the directory immediately. Your report arrives at the start of each month.
| Ongoing work | Creative refresh, budget management, fatigue, rejections. | Change your offer when you want to. Otherwise, nothing. |
|---|
Getting started
Running your own Meta ads
Business Manager, a pixel, a payment method, creative, audience setup, a learning phase.
Parade
One form, once. We assemble and schedule the placements.
What it costs
Running your own Meta ads
An auction. Your cost per result rises when bigger advertisers move into your area.
Parade
£39–£199 a month, fixed. It doesn’t move because someone outbid you.
How people see you
Running your own Meta ads
An interruption in a feed. You’re competing with everything else scrolling past.
Parade
A recommendation inside a guide someone chose to subscribe to.
Reach
Running your own Meta ads
Effectively unlimited, if you keep paying for it.
Parade
Capped by our reader count in your city. We publish that number.
Targeting
Running your own Meta ads
Granular — interests, behaviours, lookalikes, retargeting.
Parade
One dimension: the city edition someone subscribed to.
Measurement
Running your own Meta ads
Detailed, and increasingly modelled rather than observed.
Parade
Sends, opens and clicks, counted directly. No conversion modelling.
Ongoing work
Running your own Meta ads
Creative refresh, budget management, fatigue, rejections.
Parade
Change your offer when you want to. Otherwise, nothing.
If you already have someone running paid social well, Parade is a complement, not a replacement. If you don’t, this is the version that doesn’t need one.
| Promotion | Status | Clicks |
|---|---|---|
| The £22 midweek set menu is back | Live | 87 |
| Sunday roast, now taking bookings | Scheduled | — |
| New spring menu | Completed | 126 |
Something else? Ask us — a person replies, usually the same working day.