Email ad secrets … Top silverscreen entrepreneurs … Robot car on its way … Infomercial alert … The gossip stress-buster

Email advertising secrets

Emails with postcard-type layouts are the most effective format for emails between one business and another, according to a study on what makes for successful email advertising released at the Ad:tech conference. The study, undertaken by Silverpop, analysed 612 email messages from 430 companies, writes AdNews. For email from businesses to consumers, newsletter-type emails were found to be the most effective.

Top celluloid entrepreneurs

Did Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street inspire you into business? Or was it the owner of the record store in High Fidelity? In honour of the Academy Awards, entrepreneur.com has put together a list of great entrepreneurs in the movies, ranging from Charles Foster Kane, the publishing magnate in Citizen Kane (1941) to Chris Gardner, stock broker firm owner in the Will Smith star vehicle, The Pursuit of Happyness (2006).

Robot car just around the corner

A 39-year-old Stanford professor thinks he’s built the Model T of self-driving cars, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Sebastian Thrun and his graduate students built Stanley, the first car to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 210-kilometre robot car race across the desert near Las Vegas organised by the research arm of the Pentagon. The win brought them a $US2 million prize. Thrun has reinvested in a more intelligent Stanley, which will be unveiled at the next iteration of the robot car contest – one that takes place on city streets.

Thrun reckons Stanley is the Model T of self-driving cars – it will drive new car sales and better safety. Thrun thinks self-driving vehicles, equipped with cameras and motion sensors, all networked to each other, could cut driving fatalities in the US by 50%.

Advertising, endorsements and marketing converge

A TV gardening program broadcast on Channel Nine on Saturday afternoons, which combines gardening advice with product placement and promotion of its own-brand goods, is pushing the boundaries between advice and advertising. Not only does the show run product placements, it promotes its own branded products and third party products during ad breaks, writes BRW. The show reflects the disintegration of the boundaries between advertisements, product placements, infomercials and content.

The show, Garden Gurus, is produced by a West Australian TV production company, which had revenue of 5.5 million in 2005-06.

Gossip is a stress buster

Men gossip as much as women, but they spend more time talking about themselves. This is one of the findings from a study about the role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century. The study, “Evolution, Alienation and Gossip” by the Social Issues Research Centre found gossip is not a trivial pastime and the mobile phone has become a vital social lifetime, helping us to recreate the more natural communication patterns of pre-industrial times.

Other key findings include:

• Mobile phones are the new garden fence, and let us to talk often.
• Men gossip as much as women: 33% indulge everyday or almost everyday.
• Women use their phones as a symbolic bodyguard, especially when feeling vulnerable in public space.
• Texting is important in maintaining a bond with a wide social network when we don’t have time to call.
• Texting helps teenagers overcome social awkwardness.
• Entertainment: Women are more skilled at making gossip entertaining with animated tone, lots of details and enthusiastic feedback.