Monkey Business

US – MailChimp demonstrates a creative approach to selling an intangible product by omitting overt mentions of the brand’s identity in its new advertising campaign.

• Created in association with the advertising agency Droga5 and RiffRaff films
• Directed by Ed Kaye and Alex Mavor of The Sacred Egg

The new three-part campaign, Did You Mean...?, consists of puns around the MailChimp name. MailShrimp, JailBlimp and KaleLimp tell the story of a singing shrimp with aspirations of working in a mailroom, miniature prisoners who are broken out of a piñata jail by a girl at a birthday party, and a dog made of kale who sheds its 'fur' to provide salad for a high-end restaurant.

The minute-long films will be screened in cinemas in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta, and are now available online. Each has its own webpage that reflects the film’s narrative. To feed the illusion that these are genuine, each clip is introduced as being by the directors of one of the other films –MailShrimp is billed as ‘from the directors of JailBlimp’ and so on. The only reference to MailChimp is found in the brand's small cap-wearing monkey symbol positioned at the bottom of each video, which links to the brand’s website.