Situation:

Culture at large was telling everyone that email is dead. “Gen Z is going to kill it” they’d say. From Business Insider to the Wall Street Journal, even thought-leaders like Scott Galloway were telling marketers that email marketing was dead. Our own research showed that email marketing is one of nearly two dozen tactics used by marketers to drive traffic to their websites and acquire or retain customers – making it an easy thing to drop in favor of more modern channels.

With pressure to divest in email mounting, Mailchimp needed to take a stance.

Brief:

Create a public statement and take back the “email is dead” narrative.

Objectives:

Shift perception of email and Mailchimp with b2b marketers

Increase Mailchimp's brand awareness with b2b marketers

Generate Earned PR and help end the debate on if email is dead once and for all

Since culture at large was telling our B2B Marketing audience that email is dead, we decided to play into the idea and take back the “email is dead” narrative by throwing email a funeral, reshaping the conversation to celebrate the power, longevity and effectiveness of the medium.

The funeral came to life in the form of an Exhibition called "Email is Dead", at the Design Museum in London. Visitors experienced colorful, interactive displays, a wall of emotional and impactful emails sent, an email personality test, a typeface inspired by the first email ever sent, a custom music track made of synthesized compositions and actual email data, and even an Eau du Email scent we infused into the exhibition space. Email is Dead touched everyone's senses while laying out email’s past and showing how it will inevitably shape our future. Proving to our B2B marketers that it's more alive than ever.

Since culture at large was telling our B2B Marketing audience that email is dead, we sent invitations out to key marketing publications and news media outlets inviting them to our Email is Dead funeral at the Design Museum to come celebrate with us and to see if email was really dead for themselves.

Press was then treated to an exclusive walkthrough before the official opening of the exhibit, allowing them to experience the space before anyone else.

From this insight, Email is Dead was born, an exhibition that went far beyond the topic of email marketing, exploring the cultural power of email, its origins, and continued relevance as an essential part of our everyday lives, both personally and professionally.

So over the course of 6 months, we designed, built and fabricated everything for our brand owned experience "Email is Dead" and installed it on the 27th of September, 2023 at the Design Museum in London. It lived in residency for 30 days.

The patrons of the Design Museum in London? Well, they loved it. More than 25,000 people visited Email is Dead during our 30-day exhibition, leading to over 16,000 email leads and 5.7 million social media impressions with news coverage garnering over 84 million in earned media impressions. The experience even helped increase brand awareness by 92% in the UK market.

Every year, people debate the death of email and question its relevance as new forms of communication are developed. But more than 50 years after its inception, it’s still being used by more than four billion people. Email is more important than ever. And if there’s anything we learned creating this exhibit, it’s that email is inspiring, and its own creative art form that's more alive than ever.

Email is Dead? Not even close.