Intuit Mailchimp is the #1 email marketing platform in the world. And in 2023, Mailchimp partnered with The Design Museum in London to launch the Email is Dead exhibition. This was a free, interactive exhibition that lead visitors through an engaging journey of the history of email from its embryonic beginnings to what the email experience might look like in 2070. The activation and experience was designed to prove to the public and marketers alike that email alive and well and more relevant than ever. The activation allowed people to see email's impact on culture first-hand.

Every year writers, media and tech aficionados alike predict the death of email, using the phrase “Email is Dead.” This phrase has become a bit of a mantra among a certain segment of the tech world. So this year, to prove that Email is NOT Dead, we created an ironic exhibition entitled Email Is Dead.

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

Culture at large was telling everyone that email is dead. So we played into the idea and decided to take back the “email is dead” narrative by throwing email a funeral and reshaping the conversation to celebrate the power, longevity, versatility, and effectiveness of humble email.

Our funeral was brought to life in the form of an Exhibition called "Email is Dead", at the Design Museum in London. We did this through 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 (bespoke sounds of synthesized compositions and actual email data waves), and even through smell, we developed an Eau du Email scent and infused it into the exhibition space. Email is Dead comprehensively laid out email’s past while looking forward to how it will inevitably shape our future.

Culture at large was telling everyone especially our B2B marketing audience that email is dead. “Gen Z is going to kill it” they’d say. From Business Insider to the Wall Street Journal, thought-leaders were telling marketers that email marketing was dead. Our own research showed that email is one of nearly two dozen tactics used by marketers to drive traffic 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 decided to take back the “email is dead” narrative by throwing email a funeral and reshaping the conversation to celebrate the power, longevity, versatility, and effectiveness of the humble email.

Research showed us that the marketers we were trying to reach index high on the arts and visiting museums which lead us to executing our idea at the Design Museum in London.

Article after article, our research showed us that the world was pondering the demise of email. Yet, over 50 years after its inception, it remains more relevant than ever. It's outlived prime ministers, presidents, and countless technological trends. Remaining the world's most trusted and reliable source of communication throughout multiple decades, impacting not only our professional correspondences but also our personal lives and cultural norms.

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 with over 16,000 email leads and 5.7 million social media impressions with news coverage leading to 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.