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VML (a WPP company)

vanishing emails

What if a few simple steps were all it took to lessen the environmental impact of promotional emails? Slalom partnered with VML to answer this challenge and create a solution that tags and deletes expired promotional emails to enable less carbon-intensive inboxes.

Woman looking at a mobile device while seated on a couch in a living room of a home.

Impact

The groundbreaking solution won a Bronze Innovation Lion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity 2024 for its ability to lessen the environmental impact of promotional emails and pave the way for a greener digital future.

Industry

Marketing & advertising

Key Services

Experience strategy & design icon
Experience strategy & design
Digital product building
Digital product building
Sustainability icon
Sustainability

Key Technologies/Platforms

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Amazon Bedrock
  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon API Gateway 
  • Next.js
  • APIs (including Gmail)


The Vision

In 2024 alone, it is estimated that over 361 billion emails will be sent. Over 30 percent are promotional.

This leads to increased CO2 emissions due to the demand for storage, including storage of expired promotional emails that remain undeleted in inboxes. It is clear, therefore, that an urgent need exists for innovative resolutions to manage email content more sustainably.

Slalom and VML came together to create a solution to this challenge through Vanishing Emails—a tool that automates the deletion of expired promotional emails from inboxes, thereby lessening the environmental impact of email communications.


Vanishing Emails is such a no-brainer of an idea; people wonder why it hasn’t been done before. In fact, it took a lot of creative brains partnering across sustainability research, experience design, and AI engineering to make it work. With more global brands signing up to join this movement, we can really make a significant difference by reducing the impact of expired promotional emails.

Bas Korsten
Chief Creative Officer, Innovation, VML

A mobile device screen filled with email notifications.


The Solution

An idea four years in the making came to life in a few short months through Slalom’s partnership with VML. 


Coming together to ideate, visualise, prototype, and develop the solution, we focused on ease of engagement for the consumer and ensured mindful technology use that stayed true to the overall vision without exacerbating the problem we aimed to solve. 

Vanishing Emails uses a series of algorithms and AWS cloud infrastructure to manage email content and reduce CO2 emissions efficiently. It identifies and deletes promotional emails based on sender information, subject lines, and content patterns. AWS’s scalable and secure infrastructure enables efficient processing and prioritizes data privacy and security, which is further augmented through both internal Slalom and third-party accredited cybersecurity testing.

Designed for extensibility across brands, the tool’s engaging user interface surfaces key sustainability insights and showcases the positive impact being made through the use of the Vanishing Emails tool. Slalom’s sustainability advisory team performed analysis using published research and articles to to create “carbon equivalencies“—making the environmental benefits of deleting promotional emails tangible to users and thereby illustrating the impact of their contributions through everyday tasks. 


“To bring the concept to life, we quickly undertook a series of sprints through sustainability research, experience strategy and design, and engineering,” says Sonali Fenner, a managing director at Slalom, focused on strategy and innovation. The team was able to move from visioning all the way through independent cybersecurity testing to live within a period of just six weeks.

The tool aligns with sustainability targets and efforts of many large global organisations, enhancing digital sustainability and offering economic benefits through reduced operational costs, and has already piqued the interest of large global brands. Long-term, it fosters a shift towards sustainable digital practices, contributing to a more responsible digital ecosystem.

A person holding a mobile device showing the number of deleted emails.


CUSTOMER IMPACT

VML and WPP can now confidently provide global brands with a tool to help reduce the CO2 impact of CRM campaigns—and more.

Reduced data centre spending
Reduced carbon emissions
+
Increased user understanding of the positive environmental impacts

When the agency approached us with this idea, it was immediately clear that it had enormous positive potential. Not just for exciting technical innovation, but in harnessing this to create better tomorrows for all.

Sonali Fenner
Managing Director, Strategy & Innovation, Slalom






Let’s solve together.