Geeks Who Drink Built Partnerships with Jeopardy! and Sony Using Dynamic Content

More than 30,000 trivia enthusiasts walk into bars across the US each week, order a drink and prepare to prove they know more about '90s sitcoms than the table next to them. 

They're part of the Geeks Who Drink community, the largest pub trivia network in the country, where pop culture knowledge meets local competition at more than 700 venues nationwide.

For 20 years, Geeks Who Drink has built its reputation of being a brand that turns week nights into weekly traditions and casual bar-goers into loyal players. But as the company scaled from a Denver-based operation to a national phenomenon (and landed high-profile partnerships with the likes of Jeopardy!), their email communications weren't keeping up with their distinctive brand vibe.

"We're a cool company," says Jon Pio, Chief Technology Officer at Geeks Who Drink. "We're hip, we're funny, we're artsy, we're all these things, and we used to send out just these plain text emails."

Managing a database of 121,000 active players requires email communications that do more than announce the next trivia night. Geeks Who Drink operates in a unique space where their audience doesn't pay them directly—instead, engaged players show up at bars, generating revenue for venue partners, who then pay Geeks Who Drink. That makes every email a critical touchpoint in keeping the community connected and the business thriving.

Geeks Who Drink switched to Intuit Mailchimp, transforming slipshod and disorganized communications into a system that matches their brand personality. The small marketing team now delivers hyperlocalized content across different metro areas, unlocks sponsorship opportunities with national brands, and manages complex campaigns without the need for cross-team coordination that used to slow them down.

The challenge: Outgrowing a fragmented system at a critical moment

For years, Geeks Who Drink relied on an outdated email service provider. The platform worked well enough when the company was smaller and communications were simpler, but not as the business expanded.

Security became a growing concern. “The invoice would come from [a gmail address]. It was weird,” Jon says. The platform operated so far under the radar that a data breach could go unnoticed. With over 700 venues collecting email addresses weekly, Jon knew they needed a more secure home for that data.

The marketing team managed email lists manually, importing addresses by city and relying on signup sheets passed around at venues. When they wanted to promote a specific event or venue, they had no way to target players by geographic area. The best they could do was filter by city, which meant missing everyone in the surrounding suburbs and neighborhoods who might want to attend.

Most of the time, they sent generic messages to the entire contact list and missed the opportunity to deliver relevant, localized content.

Design limitations created another bottleneck. Previous emails were plain text with minimal formatting—nothing that reflected the creative, design-forward brand Geeks Who Drink had built. “It had a very Windows 95 look to it,” Jon says. When the company began working with major partners such as Sony Pictures Television on the Jeopardy! Bar League, the marketing team found themselves building email designs in Photoshop just to share mockups with sponsors.

Brittney Wittmer, Marketing Manager for Geeks Who Drink, says that process added unnecessary complexity to partnerships that demanded polish and professionalism.

They also struggled with cross-departmental dependencies. Sending a net promoter score (NPS) survey or a regional announcement required coordination among multiple teams using different systems. Brittney had no visibility into those workflows, which meant slower turnarounds and less control over messaging.

As Geeks Who Drink scaled nationally and expanded high-profile sponsorships, they realized their fragmented approach had become a business risk.

The tools: Segmentation, dynamic content, open API, and email builder

Geeks Who Drink switched to Mailchimp and immediately saw the difference in capability and security. The marketing team could now build sophisticated campaigns using tools designed for their exact needs.

“Moving to Mailchimp was like taking our money out of a bag buried in the backyard and putting it into an actual bank,” Jon says. “It transformed our communications from a slipshod process into a professionalized engine that matches our brand's vibe and style.”

The email builder became central to Brittney's workflow. She says the block-based functionality works like WordPress, the CMS that powers the Geeks Who Drink website, making it intuitive to design emails from the ground up. Instead of building designs in Photoshop for partners like Sony, she can create polished, on-brand emails directly in Mailchimp and share them immediately.

"It's so easy for me to just do it in the interface," Brittney says. "It allows us to design assets that work with that functionality and tailor different emails to different goals."

Geographic targeting modernized how Geeks Who Drink communicates with players. Mailchimp offers built-in geolocation features for segmentation, but Jon took it further by building a custom plugin using Mailchimp's API. The plugin tags contacts with their metropolitan statistical area, a classification system from the US Census Bureau that groups cities with their surrounding suburbs into unified regions.

This means that when Geeks Who Drink wants to promote a venue in Austin, they can reach everyone in the greater metro area—including Round Rock, Leander, and Pflugerville—without manually selecting dozens of individual cities. Jon tags contacts himself using ZIP codes collected at signup, then imports that data as custom properties in Mailchimp. The team layers in Mailchimp's native geolocation as a backup, creating a comprehensive targeting system.

"That allows us a lot more flexibility on hitting entire metropolitan regions," Jon says.

Brittney uses dynamic content to take that geographic precision even further. A single email can display different content blocks based on where a player lives. Someone in Chicago might see a message about a new Jeopardy! Bar League night starting in Evanston, while a player in Denver sees information about a one-night themed event. Brittney estimates that 50%-60% of each weekly newsletter is now dynamic content, delivering relevant information without flooding inboxes with multiple emails.

The team also uses the Zapier integration to automate audience management. When a new bar signs a contract, Zapier automatically adds that contact to the client audience in Mailchimp. What was once a manual task that happened sporadically now runs in the background, ensuring the team can communicate with new partners immediately.

Jon notes that the integration created a 100% increase in that particular audience segment simply because it went from zero automation to fully automated.

The results: Streamlined operations and new revenue opportunities

Geeks Who Drink achieved a 40% year-over-year increase in click-through rates as they refined their email strategy throughout 2025. Brittney tracks campaign performance closely, testing different content blocks and newsletter layouts to understand what resonates with their player base.

She moved their fan-favorite Question of the Day to various positions, featured news articles more prominently, and experimented with how to drive traffic to their Facebook page and website by using the data to continually optimize engagement.

The team cut go-to-market speed for email campaigns by 75%. Projects that once required days of cross-team coordination now happen in hours. When Geeks Who Drink needs to send an NPS survey to venue partners, Brittney handles the entire process—design, targeting, and deployment—in a single day.

Previously, that same task required handing off survey content to another team, waiting for them to input it into a separate system, and having no visibility into execution.

The email builder and dynamic content delivered a 3x increase in monetizable ad units, creating new sponsorship revenue streams. Before Mailchimp, the only sponsored email opportunity Geeks Who Drink offered was a general message to their entire player base. 

National campaigns, such as the partnership with Warner Music Group for Broadway musical Hamilton's 10-year anniversary, reach the full 121,000-player audience. Regional campaigns target specific metro areas. Dynamic placements allow sponsors to appear in localized content blocks, like featuring a Texas venue's custom Jeopardy! hard seltzer exclusively to players in that market.

The expanded options strengthen Geeks Who Drink's value proposition to partners and generate additional revenue without increasing email volume to subscribers.

"As social media algorithms change, Mailchimp gives us a malleable, long-form platform to own our story and reach our 121,000 players directly," Brittney says. "It's allowed us to open up new revenue avenues and hit a flow state with our communication that we never had before."

The improvements position Geeks Who Drink to scale their newest venture. As the official distributor of the Jeopardy! Bar League, the company is applying everything they've learned from years of refining their Geeks Who Drink communications.

Early Jeopardy! Bar League emails show higher open and click-through rates than their main newsletter, even with simpler designs. Brittney says the brand power of Jeopardy! creates a captive audience, and the team is ready to leverage their Mailchimp expertise to maximize that opportunity.

"We can use all of these tools and all of these things that we're learning from Geeks," Brittney says, "so that when we start doing regular newsletters for Jeopardy! Bar League, we already know how to implement all of these things that work really well."