As I was eating my spaghetti leftovers yesterday for lunch at my desk (sad, I know), I came across news that Arby’s is merging with Wendy’s.

Suddenly a vision came to me and I thought I’d begin the process of voicing what awesome combinations of lunch could come forth from such a melding of quick service restaurant chains  (this would make Arbys + Wendy’s into #3 behind the other two - you know who they are).

Combo #1 - Beef ‘n Cheddar + Vanilla Frosty

And for the marketing spin, how’s this for a new tagline:  “I’m thinking this is WAAAAY better than McD and BK”  (it’s awful, I know, but it’s all I could conjure up on leftover lunch).

Happy Lunch Hour to all - would love to hear other visions of combos.

Maybe it’s just me (I doubt it), but as concerned as I might be about the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election, I don’t think I have the mental, emotional or intestinal fortitude to sit through hours upon hours of televised speeches and media coverage to keep on top of what the candidates are saying. I would love to see a ‘CliffsNotes‘ version of all the speeches.

Soon after President George W. Bush’s final State of the Union speech, our VP of Client Services, Shannon Delaney, shared a link to a tag cloud that was based upon the transcript:

At a glance, you would conceivably be able to see what the gist of the speech was. If you believe that the most important issue in any given speech gets the most play, you would expect to see words associated with that issue stand out in the tag cloud.

After seeing this tag cloud, I wondered whether a tag cloud could help track each candidate’s position statements on a variety of issues across multiple speeches over the course of the campaign.

Better yet, wouldn’t it be impossibly too simple and cool if we could slap all the transcripts of all the speeches made by one candidate, run it through a tag cloud utility and … PRESTO … see what each candidate is consistently saying at a glance.

I realize that a tag cloud doesn’t do everything for you in preparation for an election, but I would hope, even in this wondrous age of information and technology, to take a candidate at their word.

The holidays are upon us and it looks like some folks are getting into the spirit of all things bright and twinkly by adding some of their own twinkle to their emails.

November 19 - AT&T recently sent me an email with a row of phones they were hawking as part of a holiday promotion. Low and behold, an animated .gif for all to see. Twinkle. Suddenly, visions of dancing cell phones in my head.

November 20 - Apple sends me an email announcing their ‘Black Friday’ sale event. For email clients like Outlook that don’t support animated .gifs, the email looked like this. However, in web mail clients like gmail, the animated .gif worked just fine and twinkled like this. (Santa - send me my iPhone)

November 23 - REI sends me this email that speaks to both skiers and snowboarders equally (because really, you’re either one or the other). Double twinkle.

So what does this mean? I’m not sure and would love some feedback on whether the animated .gif is a seasonal special like Starbucks Christmas Blend (my fave) or a new email trend.

If we’re honest about human nature, we gravitate towards ‘blingy’ and ‘blinky’ things, and my eye automatically went after the twinkly things in these emails.

You are a marketer. You send a promotional email - time-sensitive, special deal - only to find that the click-through rate was abyssmal. As you begin the witch-hunt for why the message performed so poorly, you discover that Your ESP and their email server are found to be innocent. 

What if your creative piece is responsible? In this age of image-blocking, the importance of email usability is magnified. To illustrate my point, I submit these three samples:

Exhibit A:  The worst case scenario and truly the default view in Outlook 2007 (and the way this email first appeared in my inbox).

Exhibit B: What happens to the email when it is delivered to Outlook 2007 with a common preview pane size and images turned on (today’s lowest common denominator for email software due to it’s MS Word-based rendering engine)

You see who it’s from, but you’ve probably seen other stuff from them.  You’re probably still left thinking, “So what?”

Exhibit C: The designer’s intended creative execution of a promotional email.

Bottom Line:  Send emails designed like this one back to the kitchen every time. Your emails will perform better and you’ll know that you’ve optimized for usability.