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Make me crave your next newsletter

imageVitamin T is a talent agency that recruits creative designers and coders. Each week they send out an email newsletter with a few featured candidates, which wouldn’t be all that interesting.

But … they end each email with a genuinely funny, completely out-there story. Which gets everyone to anticipate and open the emails.

Giving great entertainment as a way to deliver an advertising message is a proven strategy — it’s how our entire ad-supported TV/radio/print media works. Are you giving people a great reason to look forward to your emails?

Here’s this week’s Vitamin T story:

THAT BIT AT THE END – “LIKE A WELL-BOILED MACHINE”.

Memo: Entire R&D Department
From: Office of the President

As you find this note on all of your desks (now cleared, as all of your computers have been locked away in a closet on the 4th floor), you may want to take a moment to sit down and read this important memo.

Or, if you notice other members of the Research and Development Department wandering around looking confused, you may want to select a leader among your colleagues to read this memo aloud, as this may save time.

(If, by any chance, you are able to select a leader, please inform my office, as this will be the first productive decision your wing has had in over five years.)

How your department has continued to brainstorm so many imbecilic ideas and still be a part of this company has frankly been a mystery to me for quite some time. And yet for five years, you have managed to persistently churn out wholly valueless projects with a speed that is truly breathtaking.

You may ask to which ideas I am referring.

Take, for instance, your prototype of a Compact Disc that cannot be copied.

Though an excellent concept, using 1.5 million dollars of our company’s money to produce a CD the size of a manhole cover is not my idea of an innovation.

Yes, it cannot be copied. But the sheer fact that an 8-pound, 36-inch CD is unplayable seems totally lost on you.

Your “knock-em-dead” idea of a Permanent Post-It Note is ludicrous. The entire idea behind a Post-It Note is that it can be removed from a document easily. To create one that cannot be removed, even with solvent and a knife, makes as much sense as putting a roller skate on the end of a cane. But we’ll get to that later. (The fact that your Post-It prototype made it to my office and ruined the first page of dozens of important documents didn’t exactly champion your department’s future funding.)

The inspiration of using this extremely strong adhesive to keep an automobile driver’s hands on the wheel so they cannot use a cell phone (which you brilliantly called the “Jabber-Grabber”) is the second most absurd thing I’ve ever heard. The first being that your department managed to secure a NASCAR track for product testing.

Needless to say, we will be paying off lawsuits for a long, long time.

This list of your department’s spectacular failures is endless:

Edible tuna fish cans
Cheese-filtered cigarettes
Whistling stop signs
Visual radio programming (This is called television, geniuses.)
Soy-flavored meat
Honegar
Inflatable dartboards
Soiled diaper alarms
Electromechanical teenager repellent
Air-cooled staplers
Heat-sensitive exploding thermometers
Screaming weather vanes (“East!” “West!”… “Pathetic!”)
Roller canes (for the active elderly)
Self-propelled sofas
Dog Snuggies
Pet fish washers
Pre-sliced bread (no comment)
Combustible playing cards
“Washington Logs”
Biodegradable skyscrapers
Pepto-Bismol flavored ice cream
Automatic dog petter
Combination trash burner & BBQ pit

And last, but not least, your “invention” of the Tubeless Tire. You may wish to know that this product was invented in 1903 and is, in fact, on every car currently in our parking lot.

Speaking of cars, right now you should be gathering up your personal belongings and heading toward yours.

You may, however, wish to stop by the Research & Development Prototype Room and take whatever you wish, as keeping any of these items here is a liability.

Good luck with your future endeavors.

If you can take one piece of advice with you today, let it be this: Please do not accept any position in which you are allowed to combine chemicals.

Now get out.

Thank you.

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