Students don’t read marketers’ emails—maybe because they’re boring (the emails, not the students)

Here is an interesting report that highlights the fact that only 16% of college and high school students read marketing email. At Attention Shoppers!,  we don’t find that fact surprising at all.  Kids today grew up using email and IM. And, ignoring marketing messages online is really easy.

So will these kids grow into adults who also ignore email? If marketers don’t change the way the write and design email, most certainly. The great, iconoclastic ad man, Howard Gossage, put it very well when he said, “People don’t read advertising, they read things that interest them. Some happen to be ads.” So if you want people to read your ads, or your emails, make them interesting—valuable in some way—to the intended reader. Now that sounds simple and just common sense. But very, very few marketers understand it. Which is why email marketing is not nearly as effective as it might be.

Leroy Merlin Makes Home Improvement Beautiful

You have probably seen the fantastic online work done for Swedish home furnishings giant, Ikea (if not, here’s an example of their latest mind-bending masterpiece). Now French home improvement and gardening retailer Leroy Merlin shows us that they, too, can make online retail work beautiful. Check out the animation and user interface on this site. Oh, it sells hard. But you want to spend time with it—you want to explore and discover. Fantastique!

Visit M&M’s Street in France, But Leave the Kids at Home

Take gander at this interesting, well-produced site for some of the world’s favorite candies. There’s lots to see and do on M&Ms Street, and the experience is a great combination of sound design, video and flash animation.

However, it’s one of those executions that probably won’t see the light of day on the US M&Ms site anytime soon. That’s because one of the “activities” that you can partake in on M&Ms Street happens to be in “Sexy Sweet”, a….umm.. “dance” club.

There, your favorite M&Ms do a striptease to show off their chocolate goodness. Both male and female M&Ms get into the act. It’s all quite humorous, and obviously they are going after an older, French crowd with this. But given the fact that it’s on the Web, where anyone, anywhere can see it, we’re a bit surprised that the Mars company would want that kind of an association with their brand.  

Consumer Generated Content? In Japan, Acecook Opts for Consumer Generated Products

 

Yum!

As you know, at Attention Shoppers! we spare no expense or effort as we scour the world for interesting examples of how marketers are using the internet to reach customers in new, more powerful ways. Today, our search takes us to Japan, where Acecook, fine purvayors of ramen noodles, is using social networking to help their chefs/chemists come up with new product flavors.

 

Mixi is the Facebook of Japan

 

 

 

They have joined forces with Mixi—the leading social networking site in Japan—to create a community where members can suggest new product ideas, vote on the ones that sound the best and even suggest new ad slogans. You can read more about the effort here.

All this talk about ramen noodles has made us nostalgic for our college years, when, thanks to advanced pasta technology, we could eat for weeks with a five dollar bill and a hot plate.