The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2017
MailChimp's 'Did You Mean MailChimp?' turns name manglings into a Cyber Grand Prix
Droga5 turns every way people butcher MailChimp's name — MailShrimp, JailBlimp, NailChamp — into surreal films and a search hack that owns the mistakes.
MailChimp
What it had to solve
MailChimp was hugely used but had never run a big brand campaign; its name was so often mangled — from a child's 'MailKimp' in a 2014 Serial podcast ad to MailShrimp and JailBlimp — that people searched the wrong spellings.
How it works
MailChimp had spent years as a quiet B2B tool — simple enough that 'even a chimp' could use it — but its name was a running joke. A girl in a 2014 ad on the podcast Serial said 'MailKimp', and people typed MailShrimp, KaleLimp, JailBlimp and a dozen other manglings into search boxes every day.
Droga5's 'Did You Mean MailChimp?' made the mispronunciations the campaign. Three 60-second films screened like trailers for absurd movies that never existed: a singing shrimp in a mailman's sandwich, a dog made of kale served as a dish, a birthday party where a blimp jail breaks open. The films carried no brand name at all — just the wrong word morphing into MailChimp.
Around the films, Droga5 and digital agency Resn built nine invented names — MaleCrimp, FailChips, VeilHymn, SnailPrimp, WhaleSynth, NailChamp and more — across experiences, posters and paid search, so anyone searching a misspelling was asked 'Did you mean MailChimp?'. The launch made a B2B brand feel like pop culture, and Cannes Lions 2017 gave the work one of only three Cyber Grand Prix awarded that year.
Why it lands
- The campaign reversed a weakness: instead of correcting people, MailChimp celebrated how wrong they got it.
- Unbranded films built curiosity before the payoff, so the name reveal landed like a punchline.
- Buying misspellings on search made every wrong query a conversion moment.
- A B2B product used pop-culture format to earn attention its category never gets.
What it did
The campaign won one of only three Cyber Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2017, gave a B2B brand its first cultural moment, and spun off product films that kept the same surreal world.
What you can take
When a brand's weakness is that people say it wrong, publish the mistakes instead of correcting them: the misspellings become the content, and search turns every wrong query into a brand moment.
Since then
Droga5 extended the surreal world into product communications later in 2017 with 'MailChimp vs The Black Hole', which sold marketing automation through the same offbeat lens. The campaign became the template for MailChimp's quirky brand voice and the reference point for its later in-house work.
Sources
- Droga's MailChimp Campaign Wins One of 3 Cyber Grand Prix Awarded at Cannes
- Meet the Black Hole of Uncertainty in Droga5's Latest MailChimp Ads
- 戛纳网络狮全场大奖：史上最奇思妙想的“邮递猿”系列广告
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