This week, Comedy Central adds some old-school creative flavor to their promotional messages for Important Things With Demetri Martin, a new hipster comedy show slated to precede The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Wednesday nights. I make no apologies for being a huge Comedy Central fan, and this email pretty much embodies that spirit.

Simply put, this could be perhaps the greatest call-to-action in the history of email marketing. After all, who needs graphic arrows, underlined text, or colorful buttons when you could have an actual human being gesturing towards a clickable area with a classroom pointer? Jackpot! Even better, it takes you to a streaming video landing page just as the image leads you to believe.

In addition to the ironic brand of comedy applied here, there are a few other technical points worth mentioning.

The biggest success of this email from my perspective is how good it looks in the preview pane of an email client. This is due in large part to the imagery used above-the-fold, which consists of giant yellow font clearly stating the time and date of the event, the top half of Demitri himself, and a clickable circled area labeled “Spread the Word.” Even if you could only see the top 200 pixels of the email, you’d still get all of the information you’d need to know. 

Secondly, the interactive components work quite nicely here. The “Spread the Word” link does just as it says, bringing the user to a hosted refer-a-friend landing page that can help grow the list using word of mouth marketing. And as I already mentioned, the video link with the play button gives a clear indication of what is on the other side of the clickthrough.

Well played, Comedy Central. Well played.

Tags: above-the-fold, comedy central, creative, demetri martin, refer-a-friend, video

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