The Marketosaur

Time passes, but not at the same pace for everybody.

A couple of centuries ago (roughly), emails were text only media. The length of their lines was determined by the number of words you had typed in before hitting the "enter" key to start a new line. If you did not want your readers to make all kinds of gymnastics to read the text, you had to cut your lines as it was -and is still- done in books. The recommended width was around 70 characters.

From then, dinosaurs have disappeared, and today, most users do not have the slightest idea of how a black and white text-only screen looks like.

A species of dinosaurs remains: the marketosaur one. Of course, the dinosaur marketer has evolved. Under the influence of Google Adwords, instead of using lines of 70 characters, he writes 35 character wide emails: they are still harder to read than they were in the prehistoric times of the internet. Is evolution not supposed to bring improvement?

The dinosaur marketer knows that a good laying out is useful to put the focus on what is essential. But his shelves look like those of a grocery store in the (dinosaurian) soviet union: he has almost nothing to display. He is reduced to sprinkle his emails with the highly decorative = and + signs to separate paragraphs.

If he is patient enough, within two centuries, amateurs will spend fortunes to own one of his emails.

In the meantime, it may be more productive to take that first great leap out of the caves into the HTML age. Readers are used to read a text whose width changes according to the width of the window that displays it. Yes, it is still new, hardly a handful of years, but it is widely spread.

"How widely?" the dinosaur marketer would ask. Let's say, more than 70 characters.