Like anything else, cultural shifts dictate what works and what doesn’t (or what consumers are responding to, and not responding to). As digital life has evolved, we’ve developed a defined set of ideas on digital phenomenon that we were, not too long ago, somewhat naïve to. In the beginning, eDM was so effective, mostly because people could not discriminate between what was a real email and what was an advertisement – they approached an eDM in the same way they opened a friend’s email. Those days are gone!

Now, we understand that the nature of emailing is a division between personal and commercial – how the term "spam" became collectively used to refer to the commercial content. Not too surprisingly, people weren’t too impressed to find their personal emails invaded by advertisers, and the word, "spam", is loaded with negativity for this reason. We hate spam. So, when approaching your email marketing campaign, the fundamental goal to your creative process is to come across as something else. But how do you do that? You’re an ad, aren’t you? How can you seem anything other than an ad?