The attendees at the San Francisco Ad:tech have been treated to two days of sunny skies and packed booths. And, per the trend at the last few shows, search dominates the discussion and the percentage of vendors.

Last week I discussed the importance of simplicity and how marketers often make things too complex in e-mail marketing. Another thought, along the same lines of that topic, speaks to the often asked and rarely answered question, "How do I improve e-mail creative?"

I love new toys. We just added a new feature in our E-mail Analyst software that allows me to search the subject line or body text of the quarter million unique e-mail messages in our database for any key word or phrase. I thought it would be interesting to type in a few to see the frequency of various common keywords and phrases. Below are the numbers of occurrences of certain words in the e-mail messages we have collected over the past two years. It is based on our current coverage of e-mail marketing sectors.

For today, I'm here to help simplify your life. (Well, at least your e-mail program.) And most importantly, by doing this, I'm here to help you achieve something much more significant: making your customers' lives simpler. As consumers in an increasingly interactive world, we're all faced with the challenge of wading through a rising flood of messages from a growing number of marketers across a range of both digital as well as physical channels. E-mail is just one.

Marketers usually get it wrong when they talk about the power of one-to-one e-mail and behavioral marketing. What they usually mean is one-to-many e-mail marketing and automation. There was a wonderful old movie staring Judy Holliday called "The Solid Gold Cadillac," where Judy's character is hired by a large corrupt company to communicate with the smaller stockholders. She develops a personal relationship with all the small players who end up assigning her as their proxy. In the climax, she is able to thwart a corrupt takeover because it turns out that she now controls a majority of the stock. …

When a new e-mail marketing trends report or click-to-purchase conversion rate chart comes out from the likes of Doubleclick, Jupiter, or eMarketer, people flock to these stats convinced that they are an exclusive tool to help improve their program, or at least some perception of their program. Like most of you, I've spent some time and money on e-mail benchmarking. And also like most of you, I've come to realize its not always the best way to measure your success. While charts and reports are unfortunately a necessary part of this business, they may not be the best guide …

I was taken in by an April Fool's article this year. It seems like every year I get caught by one. One year it was the NPR story about back-to-earth naturalists proclaiming the beneficial properties of compost, including a drink called ComPostum. My wife still reminds me of that.