Behind Obama campaign's quirky e-mails Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from President Obama with subject lines such as "Join me for dinner?" "It's officially over," "It doesn't have to be this way," or just "Wow." The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines - often as many as 18 variations - before picking a winner to blast out to tens of millions of subscribers. "When we saw something that really moved the dial, we would adopt it," says Toby Fallsgraff, the campaign's e-mail director, who oversaw a staff of 20 writers. According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million. Eventually we got to thinking, 'How could we make things even less attractive?' That's how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people's eyes to. Fortunately for Obama and all political campaigns that will follow, the tests did yield one major counterintuitive insight: