Mailchimp and Vox Creative Take on Classic Movie Genres in New Campaign

Intuit Mailchimp has teamed up with Vox Media’s award-winning brand studio, Vox Creative, to create a multi-part content series to showcase the ways predictive insights can solve problems for marketers and small businesses. The campaign highlights Mailchimp’s email marketing tools which help marketers and small business owners create a more relevant, targeted, and engaging email marketing strategy.

As part of the content series, Vox Creative produced a three-part custom video series, with a fresh take on the classic movie genres. Through short-form videos, made to feel like quintessential plot lines from rom-com, mystery and action movie trailers, we meet fictional small business owners facing a challenge that Mailchimp ultimately helps them solve.

In a nod to the Indie-RomCom genre, we meet Masha, a young inventor who, growing up, had trouble connecting with others. Masha, who runs a small home-brew computer parts company out of her garage, decides to build a human-like robot named Tre-Vor, to make her life, and burgeoning business, more organized and efficient. Tre-Vor starts off by suggesting the implementation of Mailchimp’s predictive segmentation tools. Thinking she doesn’t need anyone else, Masha realizes her delivery guy, not-so-coincidentally named Trevor, is actually The One.

In Mailchimp’s take on the action genre, we watch Frank, a spy-turned-ceramicist, now running his own small business selling his wares, before finding himself being pulled back into his dangerous past when his landlord is kidnapped, right before National Ceramics Day. Hustling to rescue his landlord and running out of time to reach his customers before National Ceramics Day, Frank starts using Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant to draft designed assets for his customer emails with ease.

Leaning into the mystery genre, we see two new transplants to a small Northeastern town who own a small, mail-order juice business finding themselves haunted by a spirit. As it dawns on the main characters that the spirit haunting their house just needs some fruits and vegetables in her (after)life, they turn to Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder to get the ghost what she needs.

“Being a marketer within an organization or a small business owner wearing a marketer’s hat comes with all the action and drama you see in these trailers,” said Jamal Miller, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intuit Mailchimp. “We love getting to see our customers’ marketing struggles and successes come to life with a sense of humor through this partnership with Vox Creative.”

In addition to the three custom videos, Mailchimp also partnered with Vox Creative’s Explainer Studio, to create an Explainer that breaks down what machine learning is, how it works, and how much today’s world is changing with increased access to Big Data.

“We’re excited to be able to not only inform through our explainer content, but also provide some levity through our fake trailers,” said Ralph Hashemi Arend, VP of Video + Audio

at Vox Creative. “Whether you’re a fan of thrillers, action films, or romantic comedies, our deepest hope is that branded content about efficient email marketing will make you want to see a bunch of movies that don’t actually exist.”

About Vox Creative

Vox Creative is Vox Media’s award-winning brand studio. Vox Creative’s team of strategists, writers, storytellers, and analysts create original content and experiences that connect brands with influential audiences across Vox Media’s editorial networks and beyond. Vox Creative’s work spans short and long-form video, podcasts, explainers, experiential, shoppable content and more. They’ve built houses, invented cocktails, produced documentaries, traveled inside companies to uncover untold stories, and, on rare occasions, have gone to the moon.

About the Explainer Studio

Inspired by Vox’s signature storytelling approach, Explainers bond brands and consumers over shared interests and curiosities. Blending research, creativity and humanity, Explainers help our audience understand a brand’s product, its technologies, its worldview, and its cultural impact. Since launching in 2017, the Explainer Studio has created original content with over 100 major brands.

About Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email and marketing automations platform for growing businesses. We empower millions of customers around the world to start and grow their businesses with world-class marketing technology, award-winning customer support, and inspiring content. Mailchimp puts data-backed recommendations at the heart of your marketing, so you can find and engage customers across email, social media, landing pages, and advertising— automatically and with the power of AI. In 2021, Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit.