Situation: Running a small business these days is hard. In fact according to Forbes 20% of businesses fail within the first year, 30% in the second year and 50% by year five. Which means every decision a small business makes is a crucial one. And most small businesses are faced with multiple decisions at any given time, unsure of what levers to pull to keep their business growing in the right direction. This decision paralysis and lack of confidence causes a lot of confusion leaving these small business owners feeling stuck.

Brief: Show these small business owners and marketers that Mailchimp understands their confusion and has data backed and automated tools to help build their confidence so they can guess less when it comes to marketing and sell more when it comes to their products.

Objectives: Create awareness and adoption of Mailchimp's automated and advanced tools while increasing brand favorability.

We set out to create guess-worthy visuals that left small business marketers and owners feeling confused. Showing and proving to them that we understand what it feels like to be a small business marketer these days - trying to figure out and guess the best way to grow their business.

So to empathize with these small business owner's and their confusion we designed absurd characters like Owl Cat Bats, a Rug Dancing on a Rug, Sandal-whiches worn by witches, an infinite cuckoo-clock and other head turning and scratching visuals which stopped marketers in their tracks, leaving them guessing and wanting to learn more.

Through research and interviews with our mid market small business customers we discovered that when it came to growing their business or taking it to the next level of growth they often felt stuck or confused, lacking confidence and unsure of what to do next to get them over the hump, to keep their business momentum moving in the right direction.

So when it came time for Mailchimp to launch our new campaign we set out to do two things: Re-create that feeling of confusion or being stuck, to show our small business customers that we understand them. And two, based on their confidence levels, let's lean into our data backed products and automations and show how they give recommendations and suggestions on what to do next, making it easy for them to guess less and sell more, which become our one, two punch and approach to the campaign.

We created multiple guess-worthy devices to use across the campaign, from TV, social and video, to web, print OOH and audio. We leaned into specific executions for each medium. For example our Dancing Rug showed up in video across Tik-Tok home to multiple dance challenges and places like Spotify where we created a custom takeover and dance playlist. Our Owl-cat-bat was designed to disrupt social feeds by hanging upside down on your screen, and in video we used visual trickery to make a small phone also appear to look like a big phone in the same shot.

The fully integrated campaign ran in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia. It started running September, 2022 and is currently still in market. This is Mailchimp's largest scale campaign to date.

The results were just as absurd as the campaign itself:

A 132% increase in social media impressions.

A 64% increase in unaided awareness post-campaign.

A 42% increase in global demand.

26.7M+ earned media impressions

Campaign led to 50% increase in engaged site visits

Video engagement went up 3.2X YOY with completion going up to 5X YOY

CTRs went up 100% YOY across key channels with video going up 200%

The campaign moved consideration 11 and 12 points in the US & UK, respectively

The campaign surpassed Ipsos Creative Effectiveness norms by 50%