WTF is this thing I keep seeing?
It's simple, if nerdy: MailKimp is an inside joke among listeners of the Serial podcast.
If you’ve been on Twitter over the past few weeks, it’s likely you’ve caught people raving about Serial, the excellent new podcast from This American Life producers Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder. The show plays out a single true-crime story over the course of a season. If you’re into both TAL and prestige TV like True Detective, this podcast is likely for you.
More recently, though—like within the last week—you may have seen playful references to something called "MailKimp" in your timeline. If you’ve been listening to Serial, you got the joke right away. If not, you were probably like “Why are people on Twitter always so annoying?”
So, what’s the deal with it?
Serial is sponsored by MailChimp, the email marketing service that many companies (including WIRED) use to send out newsletters. MailChimp’s support message, which comes at the beginning of each episode of the podcast, has an array of people saying the company’s name in sequence. The third person has trouble pronouncing the company’s exceedingly pronouncable name. “Mail … Kimp? … Chimp?,” she asks. Hmm.
How long has this been going on?
The first usage of the hashtag happened just over a week ago:
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By now, MailChimp itself has gotten in on the fun. Yesterday, company CEO Ben Chestnut updated his Twitter profile bio to read: “Co-founder and CEO of @mailchimp (mail—kimp?).” And earlier this week, somebody in New Zealand bought the domain name mailkimp.com, which now redirects to mailchimp.com.
But…why?
A fine question. It’s a tiny thing, but the oddness of it—the idea that MailChimp’s brand name is so weird and quirky that you won’t be able to believe that an actual company uses it—is juuust lamely funny enough that it sticks with you. (And makes you want to tweet about it, so everyone knows that there is an inside joke that you totally understand.)
