A colleague of mine recently sent me a link to this: a short video created by the Email Standards Project asking Gmail to adopt better HTML standards.  Seeing as we're in the email business, we have a vested interest in what Gmail does.

Like the designers and marketers featured in the video, we too struggle with the frustrations born from the fact that Gmail doesn't support embedded CSS in the head of the document, which leads to a host of rendering issues.   Essentially, it makes effective marketing more difficult.  

The video's creators know a bit about how to market effectively.  With this video, the Email Standards Project increased the chances that their message would be heard and spread virally.  Rather than ask for folks to sign a petition, issuing a press release or simply writing a blog post about the topic, they added the element of humor--but the right kind and amount of humor--not so funny that their message was completely lost, but clever enough to hold your interest and make you want to share it with a friend.

Science fiction writing great Isaac Asimov once said, "Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments."   And though he didn't mention it, I think his words of wisdom pertain to Internet enlightenment, too.  I'd be willing to bet that this video has a better chance of gaining the attention of the right folks at Gmail more than a 'straightforward' humorless approach ever would.

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