When Volkswagen’s advertising agency, the wonderful Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), produced the genre-confounding Think Small series of adverts for the VW Beetle, it was as much due to a change in the way their teams were organised as the actual graphic design. Their system has since been accepted as the norm across the industry, and you probably follow it when designing your email marketing campaigns. 

The benefits of the DDB system are well known and well-advertised; you’d be silly to do anything different. The influence of Think Small is still apparent in modern graphic advertising, not only in imagery but in the form and format of its production. It’s in the design of some of the free email marketing templates you have. It’s almost an eternal truth. Almost, but not quite. We should be challenging these norms. 

Every percent of a percentage counts in our craft, and if you can steal, not so much a march on your competitors, as a step, you should go for it. Having your graphics and copy teams in the same room, probably side-by-side, makes such obvious good sense that trying something different might give you an advantage. Just like DDB did some 62 years ago.

Back in the day, well before email marketing, the procedure of producing graphic adverts, used in periodicals, newspapers and as the basis of posters, was that the image came first and the copywriters filled the gaps left. Copy was seen as secondary, presumably because the scribes were cheaper. It was ever thus. Conformity in organisation gave rise, naturally, to conformity in appearance and content. They were all using the same methods. The DDB changes produced the unusual, the noticeable, which eventually led to the revolution.

Now’s the time to try something different for your next email marketing campaign. Split your teams and see what they produce without the restrictions implicit in the system. It’s unlikely to lead to a revolution, but it might give an advantage. What you could get out of it is an increase in conversions. There’s not much risk as, if it doesn’t work, you can return to your norm.